On the December 5 edition of Fox News' Special Report, host and Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume claimed that President Bush “refused to criticize” Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) for her response to Hurricane Katrina. Hume's assertion is highly misleading at best. In making it, Hume suggested that Blanco's aides had no basis for their belief -- revealed in a series of recently released state documents -- that “the [Bush] administration was trying to scapegoat them.” In fact, the White House's strategy to shift blame to Louisiana officials for the poor response to Katrina has been well documented and included a senior administration official's false accusation -- widely repeated by the media -- that days after the August 29 hurricane made landfall in her state, Blanco had yet to declare a state of emergency.

The administration's offensive against Blanco began soon after it became apparent that the overall response to the disaster had been ineffective. On September 4, The Washington Post uncritically quoted a “senior Bush official” who falsely claimed that as of September 3, Blanco had not yet declared a state of emergency. In fact, Blanco declared a state of emergency on August 26 -- well before the hurricane made landfall. Blanco's aides' concern of being “scapegoat[ed]” was further borne out a month later, when former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown falsely asserted on September 27 that Bush's August 27 declaration of emergency for Louisiana did not include Orleans, Jefferson, and Plaquemines parishes -- encompassing the city of New Orleans and vicinity -- because Blanco had omitted those parishes from her request earlier that day. In fact, Blanco requested a federal declaration of emergency “in all southeastern parishes,” which clearly included the three parishes in question, as the weblog Think Progress has noted.

Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, documented the White House's public relations strategy to deflect blame onto Louisiana officials. The Times reported in a September 5 article that the Bush administration “sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.” Similarly, a September 5 Post article reported the administration's attempt to “undo what many Republicans described as considerable damage to the White House inflicted by Bush's crisis management”:

In public statements and even more bluntly behind the scenes, Bush administration officials have questioned local efforts to rescue thousands of people who were stranded for days without food, water and shelter, resulting in death of an unknown number of Americans.

From the December 4 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:

HUME: Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco apparently refused to allow the state National Guard to be placed under federal control in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because she and her staff didn't understand the state's role in commanding the troops. More than 100,000 pages of documents released by the Democratic governor show that her team was not familiar with National Guard procedures, and one aide told The Washington Post that staffers didn't even know what the term “unified command” meant. Though the president refused to criticize Blanco at the time, the documents show that Blanco's team believed the administration was trying to scapegoat them.