Trump tells Fox News FAA outage does not seem like a cyber-attack since 'there’s nobody taking credit'
While Donald Trump has spent hours out of sight during the crisis that paralyzed America’s airports on Friday, Fox News reports that the president told its White House correspondent, Peter Doocy, that the vast telecommunications outage does not seem like a cyber-attack.
“I did just talk to President Trump on the phone, and this is going to be the first information that we have directly from the president that you’re about to hear,” Doocy told Laura Ingraham, a pro-Trump opinion host. “He says it does not seem like this is a cyber attack or I or anything like that.
“He said there’s nobody taking credit, which would be common if somebody did execute a huge cyber attack like this on critical infrastructure,” the Fox correspondent added, “but that he would let us know and the team would let us know if that is something that happened”.
According to Doocy, Trump “said instead, this seems to be a situation where there’s a bunch of old broken stuff in the infrastructure that the FAA relies on to keep planes in the sky”.
Ingraham, who is normally a booster of Trump, expressed some indignation that his White House had not yet briefed the public on the crisis. Although Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, is Ingraham’s former Fox News colleague, she as openly critical of his absence.
“Is there any sense, Peter, that there will be a press conference to keep the public aware and reassured?” Ingraham asked. “I know we have this, a few comments here and there, and it’s nice to see that people are returning to the White House, but it seems to me that with so many people flying on a daily basis and still 400-plus flights in the air, that the American people want answers and they want them, they want them soon. Because this is not only a huge inconvenience, it frightens people.”