NTSB questions flight training procedures during congressional hearings over January plane crash
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(WASHINGTON) — The National Transportation Safety Board on Thursday continued to grill officials from the Army, air traffic controllers and members from the Federal Aviation Administration over protocols following the January deadly air collision between a Black Hawk helicopter and a passenger jet approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA.)
The hearing, the second of three days, is focused on the training guidance of the parties involved in the Jan. 29 incident that resulted in the deaths of 67 people. NTSB started the daylong hearing examining the responsibilities and readiness of DCA’s air traffic controllers.
Clark Allen, the former operations manager of the control tower at DCA, was asked Thursday about the training for the air traffic controllers. Allen said they have been trained to flag a supervisor and ask for additional help if they are being overwhelmed, but said there is no training for supervisors to proactively look out for that pile up of duties.
On Wednesday, the NTSB revealed that the pilots of a Black Hawk helicopter likely didn’t know how high they were flying or how close they were to an airliner before the deadly crash — potentially because of faulty altimeters inside the series of Black Hawk helicopters like the one they were flying.
Nick Fuller, the FAA’s acting deputy chief operating officer of operations, testified Thursday that it is up to the pilot to maintain visual separation while in the air.
“It is the pilot’s responsibility, but air traffic controllers will go the extra mile to make sure we are providing extra information as necessary,” he said.
Later asked if DCA was safe for flights, Fuller said it was.
“The controllers at DCA are responsible, well trained and I would have no problem leaving on a flight in or out of that airport,” he said.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy alleged on Wednesday that some FAA tower employees knew there “was a problem” with U.S. Army helicopters flying in close proximity to passenger aircraft near the airport.
The agency also revealed that the warnings to the helicopter from air traffic control were “stepped on” as a microphone button was being pushed at the same time as the controller.
Homendy, however, said it’s possible that the midair collision was not due to pilot error.
“So it’s always easy for people to focus on there was a pilot error here. We don’t know. We’re going to look but it’s possible there was zero pilot error here,” she told reporters Wednesday.
(LOS ANGELES, Calif. ) — A large immigration enforcement operation is underway in Los Angeles with U.S. troops on the ground.
According to a post on X by the Defense Department, U.S. military personnel were on the ground to ensure the safety of federal agents.
“We will protect federal law enforcement and assist by establishing a security perimeter,” DOD wrote.
Defense officials said that 90 armed troops were involved in the operation in support of immigration authorities.
It was not immediately clear who or what was targeted, as the local Fox News Channel affiliate aired video of agents in a mostly empty park.
Defense officials had said the troops were deployed to set up a security perimeter to protect federal law enforcement officials against potentially hostile crowds.
All of the troops involved in the operation were activated members of the California National Guard.
The operation included some 17 Humvees, four military cargo trucks and two military ambulances, officials said.
The armed troops were told in advance of the raid that they could defend themselves and federal employees if needed. If a person was a threat, the troops could detain the individual briefly before handing them off to law enforcement, officials said.
Earlier this summer, Trump deployed some 4,700 troops to California under a law known as Title 10, which allows the use of military forces to protect federal personnel and federal property.
(WASHINGTON) — Some Trump supporters living in rural areas say they have concerns about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tax and policy megabill, which he signed into law on Friday. The bill’s potential health care impacts, both personally and on their communities, were top of mind for some, while others anticipated a positive impact on business but were wary of the bill’s price tag.
ABC News spoke with these people after the Senate passed the bill on July 1 but before the House did two days later.
Provisions in the bill enacting stricter eligibility requirements for Medicaid could impact finances for rural hospitals, which tend to rely more on Medicaid funding than urban hospitals and often already operate on tight margins.
The American Hospital Association called the potential impact on rural hospitals and patients “devastating.” In the leadup to the bill’s passage, Democratic senators working with researchers from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill compiled a list of 338 rural hospitals that could be at risk of “financial distress,” “service reductions” or closure.
Some Republican senators, including Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, had expressedconcerns about the bill impacting health care providers in their states.
In response to these worries, Senate Republicans included a measure setting aside $50 billion over five years in the bill to support these rural hospitals, but advocates and experts say it may not be enough to prevent hospital shutdowns and loss of care. The National Rural Health Association said in a statement that the fund would “fall short of” offsetting the impact of other provisions.
James, a 62-year-old man who lives in a semi-rural area in North Carolina, is on Medicaid and gets Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. He said the bill would cut around $300 worth of those benefits for him per month.
“It’s going to be hard to pay the rent and everything else,” he said. He added that he didn’t have family that could help support him, now that his brother has died and his mother was in a nursing home.
Identifying as an independent, James said he did not vote in 2024 but had liked Trump as a candidate more than Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.
“I thought Trump was the lesser of two evils,” he said. “But I was wrong … If you want to make the poor people poorer, he’s doing real good.”
Insurance agent Bryan Shaver, who lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, voted for Trump in 2024.
Shaver, 62, said he was not worried about the Medicaid provisions in the bill affecting his clients. “Because they’re elderly and they make very little money,” he was confident they would meet the new criteria.
However, Shaver said he was “absolutely worried” that the Medicaid cuts could affect rural hospitals in Mississippi, some of which he had worked with in the past.
“It was extremely difficult for them to take care of who they needed to take care of … it’s very difficult for them to survive in Mississippi,” Shaver said.
He said hospitals’ financial struggles sometimes reduced access to care for the people living around them.
“A lot of the hospitals here can’t afford [to provide care for] maternity,” Shaver said. “For example, a hospital up in Batesville, Mississippi. [Patients] have to drive to Memphis to deliver a baby, and that’s kind of ridiculous.”
Shaver said he would wait to see how the provisions in the bill would affect voters. If there was a negative impact, he said he hoped Republican lawmakers would “correct it” or otherwise “get booted out.”
Stephen Caraway, who also voted for Trump, lives in a rural area around 70 miles east of Cincinnati. He said he anticipated a positive effect for himself and his community from the bill. Caraway was appointed to the state’s Elections Commission by Ohio Governor Mike Dewine in 2023 and will serve until 2027.
“There are service jobs, a lot of restaurant positions in my part of Ohio, and I absolutely think that no tax on tips or overtime would be great for the middle class and for those employees,” Caraway said. He said he would personally benefit from some of the tax cuts the bill extended.
To Caraway, the tightened eligibility requirements for Medicaid seemed reasonable, and he did not buy into worries that the bill would take millions of people off the benefits and potentially hurt rural hospitals like the one he lives near.
Caraway’s one concern is the effect the bill would have on U.S. debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over a decade.
“Regardless of what party was in control, I would tell you that the federal government needs an overhaul, and has needed it for a long time. The only thing that would give me pause is some of those CBO projections,” Caraway said. “But I believe that those projections can just as easily be incorrect as they can be correct. And I’m going to trust my national leaders to do what is right and be fiscally responsible.”
(WASHINGTON) — Former President Joe Biden, in an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday, said that he personally made every clemency and pardon decision during the last few weeks of his presidency — including those made with an autopen.
However, he and aides told the Times that some decisions for large batches of pardons were based on broad categories that various people fell into, not based on reviewing individuals on a case-by-case basis. Biden said he approved the categories and standards for choosing who to pardon.
“I made every single one of those. And — including the categories, when we set this up to begin with,” Biden said of the clemency and pardon decisions.
In December, Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, who was convicted on tax evasion and federal gun charges; commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 people on home confinement; and pardoned 39 people who were convicted of nonviolent crimes.
President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have also focused their ire on Biden’s use of an autopen device to sign pardons and other documents, claiming either that the pardons Biden approved are void because they were signed using an autopen, or that it matters who controlled the autopen when the pardons were signed. Trump has said he has used an autopen for some trivial matters, but criticized its use for pardons.
In June, Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether the Biden administration sought to conspire to cover up his mental state while in office, and to look through Biden’s use of the autopen.
“The autopen is, you know, is legal. As you know, other presidents used it, including Trump. But the point is that, you know, we’re talking about a whole lot of people.”
“They’re liars,” Biden also said of Trump and Republicans. “They know it … they’ve had a pretty good thing going here. They’ve done so badly. They’ve lied so consistently about almost everything they’re doing. The best thing they can do is try to change the focus and focus on something else.”
He called the furor “consistent with Trump’s game plan all along … if I told you three years ago, we’d have a president doing this, I think you’d look at me in the eye and say, ‘What, are you, crazy?'”
Asked about the Times’ report Monday morning, Trump called Biden’s use of autopen a “tremendous scandal.” The president once again claimed without evidence that Biden wasn’t aware of what was being signed.
“I guarantee you he knew nothing about what he was signing, I guarantee you,” Trump said in the Oval Office.
Biden’s latest remarks come as Trump and Republicans continue to argue that Biden was not the one making decisions to grant pardons or clemencies, or in charge of decisions more broadly during his presidency.
In May, Senate Republicans announced their plans to launch the probe into Biden’s mental fitness while in office, including his use of autopen.
The House Oversight Committee is also conducting an investigation into Biden’s health in office. Last week, Biden’s former White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor briefly appeared before the Oversight Committee behind closed doors, where he declined to cooperate, invoking the Fifth Amendment and asserting physician-patient privilege.
The Times said it reviewed emails from the Biden White House that corroborated that it had put in place a process where Biden made decisions before clemency records were signed by an autopen device. ABC News has not obtained or reviewed these emails.
For larger categories of individuals being considered to be pardoned, the Times reported, Biden did not approve every single name, but approved what standards would be used to figure out which people would get their sentences adjusted. Biden himself did discuss pardons for higher-profile figures, such as former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, according to the New York Times’ report.
“Well, first of all, there’s categories. So, you know, they aren’t reading names off for the commutations for those who had been home confinements for, during the pandemic,” Biden told the Times.
“So the only things that really we read off names for were, for example, you know, was I, what was I going to do about, for example, Mark Milley? Mark’s a good guy. We know how vindictive Trump is and I’ve no doubt they would have gone after Mark for no good reason … I told them I wanted to make sure he had a pardon because I knew exactly what Trump would do — without any merit, I might add,” Biden told the Times.
The Times said there were some small changes made to the lists of people set to receive pardons after Biden had approved the category based on new information from the Bureau of Prisons, and that aides did not bother to run the revisions by Biden before putting the pardons through autopen, although the aides saw that as routine.
Biden further defended the decision to pardon his family members because Trump would “go after me through my family,” he told the Times.
“I know how vindictive he is. I mean, everybody knows how vindictive he is,” Biden told the Times. “So we knew that they’d do what they’re doing now. And my family didn’t do anything wrong … and all it would do is, if they, if he went after them, would be, is run up legal bills.”
