Sean Duffy’s emergency press conference was difficult to follow for a White House veteran.
A longtime White House official said Sean Duffy’s car crash during a press briefing was “maybe the worst” he’s ever seen.
The Transportation Secretary is facing calls to resign after his bizarre response to a four-hour ground stop expected to disrupt travel for days – a response that left former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke perplexed.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin gave a bizarre and contradictory press conference Friday evening from the White House.
In an interview with CNNby Michael Smerconish, Clarke insisted 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. “This includes many county sheriffs who have had press conferences regarding active shooter situations.”
Clarke served for a decade on the National Security Council and supported several presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Barack Obama, meaning he’s been around for quite a few journalists.
Tens of thousands of passengers were stranded Friday as all U.S. domestic flights were grounded for four hours.
He further called for a “much fuller explanation” as tens of thousands of passengers are still bearing the brunt of cancellations and delays.
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Duffy blamed the “incredibly” old air traffic control system after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced a nationwide halt to all flights on Friday.
“This is analog telecommunications. Our switches, our routers were overloaded with data and broke down,” he explained.
Contradicting Mullin, he then denied that a new technological deployment was to blame for the gargantuan failure.
Both appeared to rule out a cyber attack and confirmed everyone was safe, but Clarke insisted it was too early to rule out a cyber attack at this stage.
International travelers at Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport found themselves stranded as their flights to the United States were severely delayed or canceled.
“First of all, you should never rule out cybercrime until you’ve done a forensic analysis or a root cause analysis, and they haven’t had time to do that,” the expert said. “So we don’t know what it is, but it wasn’t a cyberattack, or we think it was that, but it wasn’t a cyberattack. It’s too early to tell. The American people need an explanation.”
It comes as Duffy held a second press conference today, once again claiming that an AI planning tool or malicious attack is not to blame.
He said L3Harris, an FAA contractor that operates the systems, was working on telecommunications maintenance at the time.
“We are working to determine if we were incompetent, i.e. was it user error or an L3Harris installation error, or did they install a faulty router? » said the secretary.
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