CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale argued there was “zero evidence” for President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Biden administration diversity initiatives at the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) “could have” caused Wednesday’s deadly aircraft crash in Washington, D.C.

Trump pushed the idea during a press conference late Thursday while giving a briefing on the deadly in-flight collision between an American Airlines flight and a military helicopter which happened near Reagan National Airport, killing 67 people.

The president then claimed former President Joe Biden had ended “very powerful tests” for air traffic controllers and that standards were higher under his presidency. When pressed on linking DEI to the crash, he simply said, “It just could have been.”

On Friday CNN host Pamela Brown asked Dale whether Trump’s claim was “backed by any facts.” The resident fact-checker pushed back on the president’s claims:

It is not. I think we have to say first and foremost that there is zero evidence whatsoever that anything to do with the FAA’s efforts to hire people of diverse backgrounds, people with disabilities had anything to do with this tragedy. So I think this is one of these fact checks where it’s like, wait, why are we even talking about this? But we’re talking about it because the president started a national conversation about FAA hiring practices so I think it’s important for people to know a couple of things.

First of all, at that press conference, President Trump read out a sentence from the Biden-era FAA website about the FAA’s desire to hire people with so-called targeted disabilities – those are significant disabilities like psychiatric and intellectual issues, paralysis, missing extremities, and so on. What he did not mention, Pamela, was that that exact language was on the FAA website under President Trump the entirety of his own administration. We grabbed a screenshot from December 2020 late in his first term. So this was not something Biden invented. In fact, it’s been on that website at least since 2013.

Number two, this was not just language on a Trump-era website. In fact, in 2019, under President Trump, the FAA launched a pilot program specifically to hire people with these so-called targeted disabilities: intellectual, psychiatric, etcetera, in air traffic control roles. So they emphasized at the time, these people would have to meet all criteria in terms of medical criteria, qualifications, security criteria. But regardless, this was not something the Biden administration invented, as he suggested.

The host then asked about the evidence produced by Trump, dated to the week before he took office on January 14th. She asked whether it was the “truth” that Biden made a last minute push for diversity initiatives. Dale responded:

That’s what he said. He’s like ‘January 14th. So right before I came back, they were trying to get all these people in.’ I looked at where these articles he was reading out were actually from. It’s January 14th, 2024 – a year ago. So there is no evidence of some frantic last minute Biden push to hire people with disabilities, hire people of diverse backgrounds at the FAA.

Watch above via CNN.

The post CNN’s Daniel Dale Fact-Checks Trump’s Biden DEI Claims Following Aircraft Crash: ‘Zero Evidence!’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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