FEMA CHIEF disputes study of island deaths.

WASHINGTON — FEMA Administrator Brock Long said Sunday that the figures for how many people died in Puerto Rico last year as a result of Hurricane Maria are “all over the place,” echoing President Donald Trump’s doubts about a study that found there were nearly 3,000 excess deaths on the island in the months after the storm.

“It’s hard to tell what’s accurate and what’s not,” Long said in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. He made similar remarks in appearances on NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’ Face the Nation.

Puerto Rican authorities have accepted the results of the study by George Washington University.

Long also did not dispute Trump’s claim that Democrats raised the death toll to make the president “look as bad as possible,” telling NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I don’t know why the studies were done.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator cast doubt on the study, suggesting that researchers took into account deaths from a variety of causes with tenuous links to Hurricane Maria, such as automobile crashes and domestic violence.

“You might see more deaths indirectly occur as time goes on, because people have heart attacks due to stress, they fall off their house trying to fix their roof, they die in car crashes because they went through an intersection where the stoplights weren’t working. … Spousal abuse goes through the roof. You can’t blame spousal abuse after a disaster on anybody,” Long said on Meet the Press.

He contended that the crucial figure is “direct deaths — which is the wind, the water and the waves, buildings collapsing.”

Long’s remarks came after Trump on Thursday denied that there was a high death toll from Hurricane Maria. “3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico,” Trump tweeted. “When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.”

Trump also claimed that “if a person died for any reason, like old age,” the researchers would “just add them onto the list.”

The George Washington University researchers did not, however, attribute any specific individual’s death to Maria. The study examined the number of deaths from September 2017 to February and compared that total with what would have been expected based on historical patterns, making adjustments for variables including the mass departure of residents in the aftermath of the storm.

Democrats as well as some Republicans criticized Trump for appearing to minimize the death toll, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said last week that he has “no reason to dispute” the 2,975 figure that Puerto Rico accepted as its official death toll.

On CNN’s State of the Union, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat who ousted U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley in a congressional district primary in June, strongly criticized the “neglect and government inaction” in the wake of Hurricane Maria, which she described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in modern American history.”

She said her grandfather was in a medical facility in Puerto Rico and “passed away in the middle of the night” after the storm.

“Well, I think what happened in my family is what happened to thousands of Puerto Ricans,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The people who pass away in these storms are the most vulnerable. They are children with illnesses. They are our elderly. And when power is not restored, when infrastructure is not taken seriously, these are the first people who pass away in storms.”

As the fallout from Trump’s comments on Hurricane Maria continues, questions also have swirled around Long after reports that he is under investigation for his use of government vehicles.

On Sunday, Long acknowledged that he is being investigated but denied that Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has asked for his resignation.

“I’ve never been asked to resign,” Long said, maintaining that he speaks with Nielsen “every day” and that the two have a “very professional, functional relationship.”

A Homeland Security Department official familiar with the matter told The Washington Post last week that the agency’s inspector general is investigating Long over allegations that he used a government vehicle to travel between Washington and his home in Hickory, N.C.

Long on Sunday denied any misconduct.

“I would never intentionally violate any rules that I was aware of,” he said.