A longtime White House official has deemed Sean Duffy’s car crash of a press briefing “perhaps the worst” he has ever seen.
The Transportation Secretary is facing calls to resign after his bizarre response to a four-hour ground stop that is expected to cause travel disruptions for days—a response that has left former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke baffled.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave a bizarre, contradictory news conference from the White House on Friday evening.
In an interview with CNN’s Michael Smerconish, Clarke insisted that the news conference featuring Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin “did not inspire confidence.”
“It was perhaps the worst crisis communications press conference I have ever seen,” he said. “That includes a lot of county sheriffs that have been given press conferences on active shooter situations.”
Clarke served for a decade on the National Security Council and supported several presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama, meaning he has been around for a fair few pressers.
Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded Friday as all domestic U.S. flights were grounded for four hours.
He further called for a “much more complete explanation” as tens of thousands of passengers are still suffering the brunt of the cancellations and delays.
Duffy blamed the “incredibly” old air traffic control system after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued the nationwide stoppage for all flights on Friday.
“This is analog telecom. Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” he explained.
Contradicting Mullin, he then denied that a new tech rollout was behind the gargantuan failure.
Both appeared to rule out a cyber-attack and confirmed that everybody was safe, but Clarke insisted that it was too early to rule out cyber at this stage.
International travelers at Benito Juarez International Airport in Mexico City were stranded as their flights to the United States were severely delayed or cancelled.
“First of all, you should never rule out cyber until you’ve done a forensic analysis or root cause analysis, and they haven’t had time to do that,” the expert said. “So saying we don’t know what it is, but it wasn’t cyber, or we think it was this, but it wasn’t cyber. It’s too early to say that. The American people need an explanation.”
This comes as Duffy held a second press conference today—again arguing that an AI scheduling tool or a malicious attack is not to blame.
He said that L3Harris—an FAA contractor which operates the systems—was working on telecommunications maintenance at the time.
“We are working to determine whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error or installer error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router?” the secretary said.
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