Fox’s Peter Doocy Calls Out Trump Air Crash Rants With Carefully Loaded Questions at Briefing

Fox News senior White House correspondent Peter Doocy called out President Donald Trump’s wild remarks about the D.C. air crash with cleverly-constructed questions to Trump White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday.

In a recent interview with Mediaite’s Colby Hall, Doocy promised to be just as tough on Trump as he was on President Joe Biden and his administration — at whom he would often lob provocative and loaded questions.

During Friday’s White House press briefing, Doocy showed signs of making good on that promise with a series of questions that served to illustrate contradictions in Trump’s messaging about air travel, and the recklessness of commenting about an incident that’s barely begun to be investigated:

KAROLINE LEAVITT: Peter.

PETER DOOCY: If President Trump is telling us that air traffic control towers are staffed with unqualified controllers, these DEI hires who never should have been brought on, it’s not safe to fly commercially, is it?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: The president was asked to answer this yesterday and he believes that it is still indeed safe and Americans should feel safe traveling our skies.

With that said, two things can be true at the same time. And we certainly have seen the deterioration of federal hiring standards at the Federal Aviation Administration.

And the president wants to increase those standards. He wants pilots in this country who have the great responsibility of flying American citizens by the tens of millions every single day to be chosen for that position based on their merit and their skills. And so the administration will continue to prioritize this.

PETER DOOCY: Was the air traffic controller in the DCA tower on Wednesday night hired or not fired at some point because of his or her race?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: That investigation is ongoing. And so when we have updates on the exact individuals who were involved in the collision, including the air traffic controller, also the pilots of the helicopter and others, we will confirm those.

I don’t want to confirm names from this podium today. We’re not in a position to do that.

But I will say the president has still rightfully pointed out that there has been problems with the aviation industry over the past several years, and this started under Barack Obama in 2014.

PETER DOOCY: And when the president says on Truth Social “The Black Hawk helicopter was flying too high by a lot, it was far above the 200 foot limit. That’s not really too complicated to understand, is it?”

Is he suggesting a helicopter malfunction or a crew error, or a crew doing this intentionally?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: No. The president is simply stating what he said in that Truth Social post, which is that the helicopter was flying higher than it should have been, which is one of the reasons that led to this collision and the other reasons for that are still being investigated. And I will let that investigation play out.

Watch above via The White House.