When a U.N. agency issued a report in May of this year on the state of poverty in the United States, concluding that 40 million Americans were needy and more than five million lived in “Third World conditions,” the Trump administration ridiculed the findings.

In an unusually harsh statement the following month, the administration labeled the report “inaccurate, inflammatory and irresponsible,” and included its own data in a rebuttal.

But according to internal State Department emails and a document obtained by Foreign Policy and Coda Story, economic officials consulted on a draft of the rebuttal questioned the accuracy of the data the administration was citing.

Their comments, typed into the margins of the draft or included in emails, were either watered down or ignored altogether. As a result, the final statement the administration issued in June included misleading data and painted an overly optimistic picture of the American economy.