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‘This Could Be a Coverup’: Dem Senator Says Trump ‘Very Vulnerable’ Over Mid-Air Collision
As the nation grieves the 67 lives lost in Wednesday night’s tragic mid-air collision just outside of Reagan Washington National Airport, new details are emerging about the factors that may have contributed to the first major commercial airline disaster since 2009. A Democratic senator has suggested that President Donald Trump’s actions may have played a role in the catastrophe, accusing him of fostering “deliberate chaos” and implying that his swift attempt to blame minorities could be signaling a “cover-up.”
“What he is saying is that the only people who are competent to run anything in this country are white men,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) claimed of President Trump in a CNN interview on Friday (video below). “That’s what he’s saying.”
“He’s saying that because the FAA has hired women and Black people, that our nation’s safety is at risk. It’s kind of incredible that a president of the United States can say that. But let’s examine why he’s saying it. Why did he come out so quickly to try to attack women and Black people for ruining the FAA?” the Connecticut Democrat asked, referring to the Federal Aviation Administration.
“He did that because he is very vulnerable. He has some big questions to answer because the FAA has been in chaos, in crisis since he took over. Elon Musk, his co-president, forced out the FAA administrator, so for the last week, we have been leaderless at the FAA. We have had no one in charge of the FAA.”
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“Trump fired upon taking office the entire FAA Safety Advisory Board,” Murphy explained. “He spent the last week trying to push federal employees out the door, including people at the FAA, trying to bully them into accepting offers to resign. And so we got reports that the control tower was not normal on the night of the crash.”
“Well, that stands to reason, because the FAA has been in meltdown since Trump took over. He knows that he would have to answer for that, so instead of actually explaining why he left the FAA leaderless and without any direction, in chaos, he’s blaming Black people and blaming women who work at the FAA, without any evidence,” Murphy stated.
“Of course, he has no evidence that that’s true, because it’s not true, and, you know, who knows, let’s see what the real reason is here, but this could be a cover up,” Senator Murphy charged.
He went on to say that “what I know is not true, is that DEI and efforts to hire women or Black people or Latinos at the FAA had anything to do with that crash.”
“So, I just want the president to be held accountable for the fact that all of our federal agencies right now are a mess. Every day we are receiving calls from employees at our federal agencies, including the agencies that protect us, saying that everybody is in crisis, that they are looking over their shoulder, wondering whether they are going to be fired, wondering whether the programs that they are running are going to be cut off, and at some point he has to be held to account for the deliberate chaos that he is creating in a federal agencies.”
Citing information from a government report, The Washington Post on Thursday reported that “two people were handling the jobs of four among other colleagues inside National’s control tower at the time of the collision. The control tower staffing levels, the report concludes, were ‘not normal’ for the time of day or the amount of air traffic over D.C., where an average of more than 100 helicopters a day zip around and underneath arriving and departing airline flights.”
Trump fired the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA,) and, gutted the entire Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which was formed “in 1989 after a terrorist attack on Pan Am flight 103.” It “provides advice to the TSA administrator on aviation security matters, including the development, refinement, and implementation of policies, programs, rulemaking, and security directives pertaining to aviation security,” according to its website.
RELATED: New Trump Memo Claims DEI, Obama, and Biden ‘Decisions’ Linked to Fatal Aviation Disaster
The Daily Beast reported that the head of the Federal Aviation Administration “stepped down on Jan. 20, months after Elon Musk demanded that he quit.”
Meanwhile, many across the nation have been shocked and aghast over Trump’s responses to the deadly collision of a regional commercial aircraft and an Army helicopter. While the White House issued a boilerplate statement two hours after the incident on Wednesday evening, Trump’s first personal remarks came via a social media post in which he appeared to blame the helicopter and the control tower for the crash.
But the shock continued Thursday, when, during a 35-minute press briefing, President Trump baselessly blamed the hiring practices of his two Democratic predecessors, suggesting FAA controllers might been minorities and not competent, to which Senator Murphy alluded. Trump also falsely suggested the Biden administration hired people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities to be air traffic control operators—the people responsible for ensuring collisions do not happen.
Trump doubled down Thursday afternoon, signing a presidential memo again strongly suggesting diversity hiring practices were linked to the tragic collision.
Watch the video below or at this link.
Chris Murphy: “What he is saying is that the only people who are competent to run anything in this country are white men … why did he come out so quickly to attack women and Black people for ruining the FAA? He did that bc he is very vulnerable. He has some big questions to… pic.twitter.com/YhBSh0zjGp
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 31, 2025
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Image via Reuters
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President Donald Trump is reportedly suing Rupert Murdoch and Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, over the publication of a story alleging he sent a “bawdy” birthday letter in 2003 to Jeffrey Epstein, the now-notorious convicted sex offender who died in 2019.
“Court records show that Trump filed a lawsuit alleging libel against Murdoch, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, and the reporters who wrote the article in federal court for the Southern District of Florida,” CNBC reported late Friday afternoon.
Trump vehemently denied the Journal’s report and publicly threatened to sue after it was published. The Journal had reported in its story that Trump had warned he would take legal action if the story ran.
“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Thursday night. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his a– off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT”
READ MORE: FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi
Image via Reuters
One thousand employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation sifting through thousands of pages of the Epstein files were instructed to flag any mentions of President Donald Trump, according to Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee.
“According to information my office received,” Senator Durbin wrote in a letter (below) to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Friday, “you…pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel…on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” Durbin charged.
The files are from the criminal investigation into the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted of child sex offenses.
RELATED: ‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
In his letter, Senator Durbin also posed a series of more than a dozen questions to Bondi. Among them:
“Have you personally reviewed all files in DOJ’s possession related to Jeffrey Epstein?”
“The records DOJ released on February 27 did not include a client list. Why did you
publicly claim on February 21 that the client list was ‘sitting on my desk right now to review’?”
“Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?”
“Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
“What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?”
CNBC reported that “Durbin asked the Justice Department and FBI to explain what his office called ‘apparent discrepancies’ regarding handling of the Epstein files and findings from a Justice Department memo.”
In his four-page letter, Durbin also wrote, “in 2002, Mr. Trump said of Mr. Epstein, ‘I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy, He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.’ Just yesterday, it was reported that the Department previously reviewed a ‘leather-bound album’ comprised of dozens of letters from Mr. Epstein’s friends in celebration of his 50th birthday in 2003.”
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“The letters were collected by Mr. Epstein’s partner Ghislaine Maxwell and included one from President Trump that allegedly ‘contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker … and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist.'”
“Despite tens of thousands of personnel hours reviewing and re-reviewing these Epstein- related records over the course of two weeks in March, it took DOJ more than three additional months to officially find there is ‘no incriminating ‘client list,’ and the memorandum with this finding includes no mention of the whistleblower or additional documents, the existence of which you publicly claimed on February 27.”
Read a copy of Senator Durbin’s letter below or at this link.
Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino have made a mess of the Epstein files.
It’s time to clear it up once and for all for the American people. pic.twitter.com/WQw13gmf1F
— Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryDems) July 18, 2025
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Image via Reuters
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, after cutting 1,300 employees last week, is now ordering diplomats to not comment on foreign elections and internal affairs—limiting official communications to congratulating the declared winner.
“Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats not to comment on the legitimacy or fairness of foreign elections, breaking with decades of American diplomatic practice,” The Daily Beast reports. In a memo, the Secretary stated that U.S. missions will no longer issue election-related statements unless there is a “clear and compelling” foreign policy reason for doing so.
“Diplomatic personnel writing official messages are instead instructed to ask themselves: ‘Would the President say this?'”
The memo, seen by Reuters, says the messages “should be brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”
READ MORE: ‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
The memo makes clear, based on President Trump’s remarks, that the U.S. will “pursue partnerships with countries wherever our strategic interests align,” regardless of democratic values.
U.S. promotion of human rights, democracy, and press freedoms has traditionally been a “core foreign policy objective,” Reuters reported.
“Under Trump, the administration has increasingly moved away from the promotion of democracy and human rights, largely seeing it as interference in another country’s affairs.”
The Washington Post adds that for “decades, the United States has offered judgments on whether elections were conducted in a free or fair matter [sic], a judgment that can have significant impact in countries.”
“Scholars have accused the United States of democratic backsliding since Trump, who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, returned to office this year.
President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended right-wing and far-right political groups, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which reportedly has ties to right-wing extremists.
Secretary Rubio in May ignited a “spat” with Germany’s foreign ministry when it “hit back…after he criticized the decision to classify the Alternative for Germany party as a ‘right-wing extremist’ organization,” the Associated Press reported at the time.
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Image via Reuters
Trump Sues Murdoch Over WSJ’s Epstein Birthday Letter Story
FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Says in Scathing Letter to Bondi
‘Would the President Say This?’: Rubio Demands Diplomats Echo Trump
‘He’s So Frustrated’: Johnson Defends Trump Over Explosive Epstein Birthday Letter
‘War Is Peace’: White House’s Navarro Mocked Over Claim Tariffs Are ‘Tax Cuts’
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