NY Times columnist apologizes for floating conspiracy theory about new job numbers

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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman apologized Friday after he was roasted for floating a "conspiracy theory" that President Trump could have influenced the Bureau of Labor Statistics

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The U.S. unemployment rate unexpectedly dropped to 13.3 percent in May, down from a record high in April, indicating the nation's economy is recovering faster than expected from the coronavirus lockdown -- but Krugman didn't buy it.

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“This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS, but it's much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren't really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic,” Krugman said.

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The Times columnist apologized in a follow-up tweet after he was hit with significant backlash.

“Getting a lot of outraged pushback over even allowing the possibility of something amiss at BLS. I was just covering myself, because so many weird things have happened lately. But I apologize for any suggestion that a highly professional agency might have been corrupted,” Krugman wrote. “And as I look at the data, I'm starting to believe that the modest job gains may well have been real, not an artifact of the models.”

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