Confirmation hearings for controversial nominees
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The Washington Post
4.1 • 4.6K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode, The Washington Post's Libby Casey, Rhonda Colvin and James Hohmann break down President Trump's news conference after the Washington, D.C. plane crash – and how Trump chose to blame his predecessors, Democrats and diversity programs rather than embracing the role of consoler-in-chief.
Plus, three of Trump's most controversial cabinet nominees had Senate confirmation hearings on the same day: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard. The crew breaks down their hearings, and whether all three will end up being confirmed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Look what happened. Is this crazy? We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history. |
| 0:08.5 | Make America great a good. How can you be against it? |
| 0:17.5 | Hello and welcome to Sidebar from the Washington Post. I'm Libby Casey, along with Rhonda Colvin, |
| 0:22.6 | senior political correspondent and James Holman, columnist and editorial writer. Well, it's a somber Friday |
| 0:28.4 | here in Washington as authorities continue the recovery efforts after a crash between a commercial |
| 0:33.5 | airliner and a U.S. Army helicopter left 67 people dead. And today, we're going to do |
| 0:38.8 | what we do every week here on Sidebar. We're going to break down and analyze the big politics |
| 0:43.3 | news stories of the week. And there have been a lot, including the three major Senate confirmation |
| 0:49.1 | efforts that the Trump team is trying to get three nominees through, Robert F. Kennedy Kennedy Jr., Cash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard. |
| 0:56.4 | But we're going to start today with the news that rocked Washington on Wednesday night after that fatal collision over the Potomac River. |
| 1:03.8 | It's just about three miles from the Washington Post Newsroom where we are this afternoon. |
| 1:08.2 | And I think something that's become apparent and we've been reminded of is that D.C. really can be one big, |
| 1:14.0 | small town because there have been so many tentacles of the ways that the lives lost have connected |
| 1:19.3 | with people in this newsroom, as well as all over this city. |
| 1:22.9 | We'll talk about briefly what happened, but then we'll talk about the politics because Donald Trump did choose to politicize it as he briefed the press on Thursday. |
| 1:33.2 | James, let's just start before we get into Trump's response to the crash with what we know right now. |
| 1:38.9 | We don't want to race to conclusions, but what we know is that obviously the helicopter collided with this jet that was |
| 1:49.0 | coming in an American Airlines flight from Wichita. We know the air traffic control tower was |
| 1:54.0 | understaffed that there were essentially two people doing four people's jobs. Normally there would be an air traffic |
| 1:59.8 | controller who talks to helicopters and another who talks to airplanes. There was one person doing that. We also know that |
| 2:06.2 | the helicopter was flying higher than it was supposed to be flying. It was an Army training mission |
| 2:11.8 | and we haven't learned the name of the Army pilot, but the investigation from the NTSB, the |
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