Anything that is done by a public official at that level (not just the President) is well thought out and implemented after much discussion to achieve a particu

Anything that is done by a public official at that level (not just the President) is well thought out and implemented after much discussion to achieve a particular goal. You can reverse engineer it and draw your conclusions as to why they said what they said. In this case my interpretation is that it's to shift the blame a bit and also to appear to be out in front of the issue and let people know that "things are being handled help is on the way and we're on it". An analogy I would use is this. Let's say you are hosted somewhere (say Rackspace or AWS) and you lose connectivity and your site is down. Better for RS or AWS to "appear to be on top of it" (whether they are or not) and to be "doing something" than to have this black box of "hey exactly what is going on and when will it be fixed". The anxiety is what kills you. Once you know that at least (using another example) "a spare airplane is on the way but it is currently delayed by a snow storm that should clear in 2 hours" you are feeling much better than if you don't have any answers at all.