Trump finds a Rear Admiral willing to take the fall for his incorrect Alabama hurricane projection

President Donald Trump has spent five days trying to justify an incorrect weather forecast projecting Alabama would be hit by Hurricane Dorian. The forecast was changed by Aug. 30, but Trump sent out a tweet Sept. 1 falsely warning Alabama was in the line of fire.

Trump has since tried to save face by saying that his projection was correct, tweeting out several outdated weather maps from the National Weather Service Hurricane Center. It presented a problem because Trump said that he was being briefed on Hurricane Dorian "every hour." If that was true, it would mean he was either lied to by briefers or he wasn't told that the storm had turned north and not west.

Political analysts speculated that Trump was lying about being briefed "every hour," because if he was hearing the updates, he would have gotten one of the 15 other projections from the National Weather Service that said the hurricane wasn't heading west.

By Thursday afternoon, Trump found a scapegoat.

"While Dorian batters SC, the White House just released a statement from Rear Admiral Peter Brown defending the president's comments on Dorian and Alabama. Brown says he briefed the president on Sept. 1 on the 'possibility of tropical storm force winds in southeastern Alabama,'" tweeted Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey.

It's unclear if Rear Admiral Brown was using an old map to brief the president.