(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spread disinformation about the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment last week when he falsely suggested that the crash resulted from Trump-era deregulation.
“One thing [Trump] could do is he could express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch,” Buttigieg said on his trip to East Palestine when asked how former President Donald Trump could help with the situation.
“I heard him say he had ‘nothing to do with it’ even though it was in his administration. So, if he had nothing to do with it and they did it in his administration against his will, maybe he could come out and say that he supports us moving in a different direction.”
Buttigieg was referencing Trump’s repeal of an Obama-era rule requiring high-hazard cargo trains to be equipped with electronically controlled pneumatic brakes.
However, repealing the brake rule had nothing to do with the East Palestine derailment—as noted by Buttigieg’s own National Transportation Safety Board. NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy made this clear in a series of tweets on Feb. 16, a week before Buttigieg’s trip.
“The ECP braking rule would’ve applied ONLY to HIGH HAZARD FLAMMABLE TRAINS. The train that derailed in East Palestine was a MIXED FREIGHT TRAIN containing only 3 placarded Class 3 flammable liquids cars,” Homendy explained.
“This means even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes.”
THREAD on East Palestine derailment:
First, a message to the community…then a plea to those spreading misinformation.
— Jennifer Homendy (@JenniferHomendy) February 17, 2023
Homendy further expressed her frustrations at the misinformation surrounding the derailment at a press conference last Thursday.
“Enough with the politics on this,” she said. “There’s a lot of misinformation on what would have prevented this. Everyone is guessing. I saw it all over media, which was driving me nuts. Those solutions, all of the ones I heard of, are not the solutions.”
Despite this, Democrat partisans hailed Buttigieg’s misinformation as an “absolute masterclass.”
Pete Buttigieg with an absolute masterclass on how to handle donald j. trump. 🔥🔥pic.twitter.com/fiWqrIyW4V
— Jo 🌻 (@JoJoFromJerz) February 23, 2023
However, even sites such as the Washington Post have had to admit that Trump’s deregulation didn’t cause the East Palestine debacle—though the Post inserted the caveat “so far” in its article fact-checking the issue.
“So far, Trump’s rollback of regulations can’t be blamed for Ohio train wreck,” the Post article’s headline reads, explaining, “From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
