Was ICE following direct orders from the Whitehouse to counter headlines of the Whitehouse Climate Assessment when they gassed children in diapers?

The Trump Administration and the Republican Party do not want the Republican Party base to know about the climate report.  Hiding the news release at 2 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving did not entirely work as the Whitehouse planned. The New York Times made the Fourth National Climate Assessment front page news.

Ordering ICE to attack children with tear gas appeals to the Republican Party base voters and takes headlines away from the Whitehouse climate report. Donald Trumps skill at manipulating the press is on full display here.

I think Trump is holding back his nuke Iran play to counter news of indictments of his family by Bob Mueller.

By now, everyone knows about the Friday news dump — the penchant for sleazy companies or even sleazier government agencies to hold onto a piece of really bad news until late on a Friday afternoon, so that any headlines that are generated come out when everybody's working for the weekend, or in Saturday newspapers that nearly nobody reads. 

So, when the bad news involves mass death and disease, a never-ending bowl of natural disasters, the extinction of species, etc. — and when your boss is on the wrong side of the mass-death issue — that calls for the Mother of All News Dumps. That would be a news release at 2 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when no one works and most Americans are either waiting on a rope line at Walmart or couch-prone in a tryptophan coma. 

"This is, unfortunately, par for the course for this president that he would try to bury this news and deny it," Jake Levine, who'd worked on climate issues during Barack Obama's presidency, said on MSNBC right after the Trump administration realized that Black Friday — while a month ahead of schedule — was their preferred day to drop a congressionally mandated report on climate change that predicted dire consequences if America and the world do not respond quickly. 

Don't let Trumpian government dump on your right to this life-or-death information. 

MORE AT: 

Oil is the poison that burns Paradise, kills Kashshoggi, inflames Paris. When will we quit? | Will Bunch

Since the report is mandated by Congress, not issuing it would have been a violation of the law. While some political appointees within one of the agencies that contributed scientific work to the report did suggest editing the summary of its conclusions to play down the findings, that idea was also seen as too risky politically and legally, these people said. 

Instead, these people said, administration officials hoped to minimize the impact by making the assessment public on the afternoon of Black Friday, the big shopping day after the Thanksgiving holiday, thinking that Americans might be unlikely to be paying attention. 

MORE AT: 

Trump Administration’s Strategy on Climate: Try to Bury Its Own Scientific Report

Nov. 25, 2018