Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Friday, September 14th. In today's news, Andrew Cuomo crushes Cynthia Nixon.

Congress averts a government shutdown over a border wall.

And Democrats turn over a letter about Brett Kavanaugh to the FBI.

But first, the big idea.

As Hurricane Florence continues sweeping across the southeastern United States,

two stories broke on Thursday that underscore the dysfunction plaguing the Trump administration.

The latest scandals come as the storm brings powerful winds along with warnings of a life-threatening storm surge in heavy rainfall.

Though the storm has been downgraded to a category 1. Reports of collapsed roofs and other structures are already being reported in Morehead City and Newburn in North Carolina. Newburn was particularly hard hit with reports that more than 100 people are stranded in their

homes and need to be rescued.

But instead of focusing on this new storm, President Trump's attention on Thursday was devoted

to airing personal grievances related to last year's

hurricane, Maria.

In a storm of tweets, Trump falsely claimed a vast Democratic conspiracy to inflate the death toll in Puerto Rico in order to make him look bad.

He denied a sweeping study, which was accepted by Puerto Rican authorities and conducted

by nonpartisan academics that estimated

there were almost 3,000 excess deaths on the island during the six months after Maria

than there would have been otherwise. With his statements, Trump sought to minimize the deaths

of thousands of American citizens

while appearing to shirk responsibility

for the government's performance

in responding to natural disasters.

...