A former counterterrorism official is not happy with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and President Donald Trump administration’s response to the FAA multi-hour travel halt. Following Duffy’s Friday night news conference at the White House, he eviscerated Duffy’s performance, calling it “perhaps the worst” he’d ever seen in his career.
Richard Clarke supported several presidential administrations, including Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Clarke gave Duffy’s press conference a thumbs down during his appearance on CNN’s Smerconish and told anchor Michael Smerconish Americans were left with more questions than answers.
“I think we need a much more complete explanation,” he said. Duffy claimed that the nationwide FAA ground stop was caused by a router overload triggered during a routine telecommunications upgrade. However, statements made by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared to contradict Duffy.
“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. 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,” Clarke said. “And saying simply that, it got overloaded for no particular reason, on a Friday afternoon when there was nothing special happening — maybe that’s true. But we need trust in the system,” he argued.
Clarke then said Duffy and Mullin appeared ill-prepared, questioning their leadership abilities. “That press conference yesterday with Duffy and Mullin did not inspire confidence. It was perhaps the worst crisis communications press conference I’ve ever seen — and that includes a lot of county sheriffs that have been given press conferences on active shooter situations,” he said.
Clarke explained that due to the severity of the situation, which left hundreds of thousands stranded in their travels, Americans deserved a better response. “We need a very robust cyber version of the NTSB, the National Transportation Safety Board. Experts, not politicians, that go into these crises, try to figure out what happened, and tell us in a voice that we can trust. We don’t have that today. We need a voice that we can trust. We need experts looking at this thing. And yeah, sure, coincidences happen, but so does cyber attacks,” Clarke said.
Clarke said that Americans should be worried. Many are worried that the FAA halt was due to a cyber attack. It came on the heels of the Microsoft system shutdown, leaving millions, including government workers, without access to email.