President Trump said Friday that his remarks on the investigation into the deadly midair collision earlier this week near Reagan National Airport does not stand to impact the probe, expressing confidence that his take on the situation is accurate.
“No,” Trump said from the Oval office when asked if his public observations could interfere in the investigation.
“I think they’ll do an investigation, it will probably come out the way I said it. I like to put it up front. I’m so tired of listening to things happen to our country and then people say ‘we’ll do an investigation’ and three years later they come out with the report that nobody looks at.”
He doubled down on blaming hiring practices from the Biden administration, something he spent much of Thursday lambasting during a press briefing from the White House.
“We have to have the best people, the smartest people, the sharpest people as control tower experts,” he said. “We didn’t have our best. If you read the quote that I read yesterday in the news conference, they talked about people that were psychologically injured were okay and people that had lots of problems were okay.”
Trump has blamed diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for weakening safety, citing efforts by the agency to hire individuals with disabilities, including dwarfism, missing limbs and intellectual disabilities.
“This was all because of weak rules in the Biden administration. And, we’re just not going to let that kind of thing happen again. Again, I could wait and people report in two years like they always do. Sometimes its obvious and in this case its very obvious and I think I’ve proven to be very correct.”
Trump also doubled down on pointing fingers at the helicopter pilots, saying they were flying too high at the time of the crash with the passenger jet, echoing a sentiment he said earlier in the day.
“It shouldn’t have been there. And they were other mistakes made too, I pointed them out too… they’ll still do an investigation, just to check it out,” Trump told reporters.
He also said “no” when questioned on if he’s concerned about speculating about the conduct of the Army pilots when he is the commander-in-chief, again blaming the former president.
“This was all caused by bad rules, regulations and other things by Biden, the Biden administration and when you look at the way they ran things, in fact, if you look, we hired— one of the first things I told them to do is get talented people in those beautiful towers overlooking the runway,” Trump said.
The president added though that he thinks there is “very little risk” about flying in the U.S. again and a repeat incident.
