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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration — under Democratic presidents — were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.

The air disaster occurred as an American Airlines passenger jet approaching Reagan Washington National Airport collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training flight.

“I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room, referring to the policies, even as the investigation into what happened is just getting underway.

This is the first major commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009, when 50 people died after a plane crashed while landing near Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he said, citing what he called a story about a group within the FAA that had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”

Trump then signed an executive order later Thursday that appointed Christopher Rocheleau, a 22-year veteran of the FAA, as acting commissioner of the agency, which he had said he would do in the briefing. And he signed a second executive order “aimed at undoing all of that damage” caused by the “Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”

When asked in the earlier briefing by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”

Even as he made unfounded claims about the FAA’s diversity initiatives being a factor in the disaster, he said the Army helicopter crew could be at fault — and claimed he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.

When asked how he could come to the conclusion that FAA diversity policies had something to do with the disaster, he said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”

DEI and any similar programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring, though — no one is given preferential treatment for race, sex, ethnicity or sexual orientation, a former FAA official told ABC News.

Applicants must pass a medical exam, an aptitude test and a psychological test that is more stringent than that required of a pilot, said Chris Wilbanks, FAA deputy vice president of safety and technical training.

In 2022, 57,000 people applied for an ATC position, Wilbanks said, and 2,400 qualified to attend the academy. Of that 2,400, only 1,000 made it to the first day of training.

Wilbanks said 72% make it through the academy and roughly 60% of those will finish training.

According to the FAA, the training process lasts about three to four years from the hire date. Applicants must be younger than 31 and must retire by age 55.

Anyone who has taken Ritalin or Adderall in the last three years doesn’t qualify, the former FAA official said.

No determination of fault in the crash has been made, and the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation.

However, the NTSB declined to say whether DEI initiatives were a factor in the crash when asked by reporters later Thursday.

“As part of any investigation, we look at the human, the machine and the environment,” NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said. “So we will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident. Again, we will look at the aircraft. We will look at the helicopter. We will look at the environment in which they were operating in. That is part of that is standard in any part of our investigation.”

In the White House briefing, several Cabinet officials spoke after Trump to address the crash, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy saying, “What happened yesterday shouldn’t have happened.”

“And when Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination,” he added. “That didn’t happen yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and so we will not accept excuses. We will not accept passing the buck. We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again.”

However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while noting that a “mistake was made” in the crash, said the Department of Defense must be “colorblind and merit-based … whether it’s flying Black Hawks, and flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government.”

“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals, or whether it’s throughout government,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, too, alluded to DEI having a part in the crash, saying, “We want the best people at air traffic control.”

“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance said. “That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”

But when a reporter pressed Trump, saying that similar language on DEI policies existed on the FAA’s website under Trump’s entire first term, Trump shot back, “I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy and then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I said, a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”

Trump said Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, “just got a good line of bulls—” and said he had “run [the Department of Transportation] right into the ground with his diversity.”

“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg responded in a statement on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”

Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly called Trump’s comments “dangerous, racist, and ignorant.”

“President Trump twisted a terrible tragedy — while families are mourning their loved ones — to insert his own political agenda and sow division,” Kelly said in a statement. “This is not leadership. We need to investigate how this plane crash happened to give a sense of closure to grieving families and prevent future crashes.

“Trump would rather point fingers than look in the mirror and face the fact that he just cut a committee responsible for aviation security,” she added. “The issue with our country is not its diversity. It’s the lack of leadership in the White House and unqualified Cabinet. Trump’s actions and words are dangerous, racist, and ignorant — simply un-American.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The three soldiers of the Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that collided with a jetliner on Wednesday night just off of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were all very experienced and not only had thousands of hours of flight time between them but were very familiar with the flight patterns above the Potomac River.

The Army has confirmed that all three soldiers were from Bravo Company, 12th Combat Aviation Battalion, based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. The unit primarily transports senior U.S. military officials around the Washington area and beyond.

Recovery efforts for two of the soldiers in the Black Hawk in the frigid waters of the Potomac River continued Thursday, as did the search for the missing among the 64 aboard American Airlines Flight 5342. Also being sought are the plane’s data and cockpit voice recorder and the helicopter’s integrated data and voice recorder.

The helicopter flight along the Potomac was a routine nighttime qualification flight in which an instructor pilot tests a pilot’s skills at navigating the various routes through the Washington area that are key parts of his or her mission.

“It was a very experienced group,” said Jonathan Koziol, a retired Army chief warrant officer with more than 30 years experience in flying Army helicopters. Koziol has been attached to the Unified Command Post created at Reagan National Airport to coordinate efforts following the deadly collision.

Koziol confirmed to reporters on a conference call that the male instructor pilot had more than 1,000 hours of flight time, the female pilot who was commanding the flight at the time had more than 500 hours of flight time, and the crew chief was also said to have hundreds of hours of flight time.

Koziol said that given the short duration of most helicopter flights, the number of hours they had flown showed how experienced they were.

As part of their annual qualifications, all Army aviators are tested on their skills during daylight and nighttime, as well as instrument flying.

An Army flight safety investigative team from the Army’s Combat Readiness Center at Fort Novosel in Alabama has arrived in Washington to support the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation.

The evaluated pilot was in command of the flight, but if an emergency was to occur, the instructor would have taken control of the helicopter.

“Both pilots had flown this specific route before at night — this wasn’t something new to either one of them,” he said. “These are our top pilots doing this National Capital Region.”

The airspace around the nation’s capital is one of the busiest in the nation, but Koziol described the helicopter flight corridor above the Potomac as “a relatively easy corridor to fly because you’re flying down the center of the river, and it’s very easily identifiable, especially at night” because there aren’t a lot of lights.

Night vision goggles are available for Army aviators during nighttime missions, but they are not always necessary, said Koziol, who noted that he did not know if the pilots were wearing the goggles during Wednesday night’s flight.

“They are helpful at night, obviously, and in an urban environment, they’re still useful,” but he discounted the notion that the Washington’s bright lights may have affected the pilots, saying they were flying over the Potomac River, where “there are no lights, so that wouldn’t impact them.”

“They would have the peripheral vision of the lights on both sides of the shore, which actually helps them align and know which direction they’re going,” he added. “And it would help them see other aircraft.”

Furthermore, Army aviators are required to test their ability to fly “night unaided” without night vision goggles.

Koziol said the pilots’ situational awareness would have been aided by a moving tracking screen in the cockpit pinpointing their exact location, along with visual aids within their lines of sight.

“You have the lights on either side of you and, obviously, the rotating beacon on Reagan National to point out the airfield and all the traffic on it for them to know exactly where they’re at,” he said.

Army statistics show that last year saw the biggest spike in aviation mishaps in more than a decade following years of a downward trend.

There were 15 Class A mishaps in the Army in fiscal year 2024, the highest number since fiscal year 2014, when there were 16 mishaps. Last year’s increase came after a period of time when the number of mishaps had trended downward. For example, there were seven mishaps in fiscal year 2021, four in fiscal year 2022, nine in fiscal year 2023 and then the 15 in fiscal year 2024.

Last April, the Army held what’s called a “stand-up” where it reinforced safety training but continued flight operations — this followed a series of Apache helicopter incidents the previous month.

There had previously been a stand-down of Army aviation that followed the March 2023 collision of two Black Hawk helicopters at Fort Campbell that killed nine soldiers.

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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration — under Democratic presidents — were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.

The air disaster occurred as an American Airlines passenger jet approaching Reagan Washington National Airport collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on a routine training flight.

“I put safety first, Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen,” Trump told reporters in the White House briefing room, referring to the policies, even as the investigation into what happened is just getting underway.

This is the first major commercial airline crash in the United States since 2009, when 50 people died after a plane crashed while landing near Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

“I had to say that it’s terrible,” he said, citing what he called a story about a group within the FAA that had “determined that the [FAA] workforce was too white, that they had concerted efforts to get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration, just prior to my getting there, and we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans.”

Trump then signed an executive order later Thursday that appointed Christopher Rocheleau, a 22-year veteran of the FAA, as acting commissioner of the agency, which he had said he would do in the briefing. And he signed a second executive order “aimed at undoing all of that damage” caused by the “Biden administration’s DEI and woke policies.”

“We want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are,” the president said. “If they don’t have a great brain, a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do and bad things will happen.”

When asked by ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce whether he was saying the crash was the result of diversity hiring, Trump said, “we don’t know” what caused the crash, adding investigators are still looking into that. “It just could have been. We have a high standard. We’ve had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else.”

Even as he made unfounded claims about the FAA’s diversity initiatives being a factor in the disaster, he then said the Army helicopter crew could be at fault — and claimed he wasn’t blaming the air traffic controller who communicated with the helicopter.

When asked how he could come to the conclusion that FAA diversity policies had something to do with the disaster, he said, “Because I have common sense, OK, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t.”

No determination of fault in the crash has been made, and the National Transportation Safety Board is conducting an investigation.

However, the NTSB declined to say whether DEI initiatives were a factor in the crash when asked by reporters later Thursday.

“As part of any investigation, we look at the human, the machine and the environment,” NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said. “So we will look at all the humans that were involved in this accident. Again, we will look at the aircraft. We will look at the helicopter. We will look at the environment in which they were operating in. That is part of that is standard in any part of our investigation.”

In the White House briefing, several Cabinet officials spoke after Trump to address the crash, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy saying, “What happened yesterday shouldn’t have happened.”

“And when Americans take off in airplanes, they should expect to land at their destination,” he added. “That didn’t happen yesterday. That’s not acceptable, and so we will not accept excuses. We will not accept passing the buck. We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms that have been dictated by President Trump in place to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again.”

However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, while noting that a “mistake was made” in the crash, said the Department of Defense must be “colorblind and merit-based … whether it’s flying Black Hawks, and flying airplanes, leading platoons or in government.”

“The era of DEI is gone at the Defense Department, and we need the best and brightest, whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals, or whether it’s throughout government,” he said.

Vice President J.D. Vance, too, alluded to DEI having a part in the crash, saying, “We want the best people at air traffic control.”

“If you go back to just some of the headlines over the past 10 years, you have many hundreds of people suing the government because they would like to be air traffic controllers, but they were turned away because of the color of their skin,” Vance said. 

“That policy ends under Donald Trump’s leadership, because safety is the first priority of our aviation industry.”

But when a reporter pressed Trump, saying that similar language on DEI policies existed on the FAA’s website under Trump’s entire first term, Trump shot back, “I changed the Obama policy, and we had a very good policy and then Biden came in and he changed it. And then when I came in two days, three days ago, I said, a new order, bringing it to the highest level of intelligence.”

Trump said Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary in the Biden administration, “just got a good line of bulls—” and said he had “run [the Department of Transportation] right into the ground with his diversity.”

“Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying,” Buttigieg responded in a statement on X. “We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch. President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again.”

Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly called Trump’s comments “dangerous, racist, and ignorant.”

“President Trump twisted a terrible tragedy — while families are mourning their loved ones — to insert his own political agenda and sow division,” Kelly said in a statement. “This is not leadership. We need to investigate how this plane crash happened to give a sense of closure to grieving families and prevent future crashes.

“Trump would rather point fingers than look in the mirror and face the fact that he just cut a committee responsible for aviation security,” she added. “The issue with our country is not its diversity. It’s the lack of leadership in the White House and unqualified Cabinet. Trump’s actions and words are dangerous, racist, and ignorant — simply un-American.”

Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — Lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee peppered director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard with questions about her controversial rhetoric on Russian aggression, Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and government surveillance programs at her high-stakes confirmation hearing on Thursday.

But it was her statements about Edward Snowden, the prolific leaker of national secrets, that generated the most colorful moments of her three hours of public testimony.

Senators from both sides offered Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, countless opportunities to withdraw her past support of Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who fled the country with more than 1 million classified records.

And while she acknowledged on multiple occasions that Snowden broke the law, she stood firm in ways that seemed at times to frustrate even some Republicans on the panel.

Gabbard has in the past called Snowden a “brave” whistleblower who uncovered damning civil liberties violations by the intelligence community. As a lawmaker, she introduced legislation supporting a grant of clemency.

On Thursday, she repeatedly refused to withdraw that characterization of him. And she repeatedly refused to call him a “traitor.”

“This is where the rubber hits the road,” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet boomed inside the hearing room. “This is not a moment for social media, this is not a moment to propagate conspiracy theories … this is when you need to answer the questions of people whose votes you’re asking for to be confirmed as the chief intelligence officer of this nation.”

“Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? This is not a hard question to answer when the stakes are this high,” he continued.

She declined to say. Instead, Gabbard repeated that she felt his acts were illegal and that she disagreed with his methods.

“Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. “I do not agree with or support with all of the information and intelligence that he released, nor the way in which he did it.”

But, she added, he “released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs.”

Gabbard faces perhaps the most difficult route to confirmation of all of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks. She cannot afford to lose any Republican votes in the committee, and at least two members of the panel, Susan Collins and Todd Young, declined to offer their support after the open portion of the hearing concluded.

While she stood firm on Snowden, Gabbard backtracked on other matters, including her suggestion in 2022 that U.S. and NATO forces had provoked Russia into its war with Ukraine. Asked by Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., who bore responsibility for Moscow’s aggression, Gabbard was unequivocal: “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin started the war in Ukraine.”

She also said that she “shed no tears for the fall of the Assad regime,” referring to Bashar al-Assad, the former Syrian dictator who fled Damascus late last year. Gabbard was chastised in 2017 for meeting with Assad in person and later casting doubt on intelligence tying his regime to the use of chemical weapons.

Several senators also raised Gabbard’s past criticism of government surveillance programs, including the FISA 702 authority, which allows the U.S. government to collect electronic communications of non-Americans located outside the country without a warrant.

Gabbard expressed support for FISA 702 and explained her vote as a congresswoman against its reauthorization as a reflection of her stance on defending civil liberties.

“I will just note that my actions in legislation in Congress were done to draw attention to the egregious civil liberties violations that were occurring at that time,” Gabbard said.

But on Snowden, Gabbard refused to back down. Republican Sens. James Lankford and Todd Young presented her with several opportunities to clarify her views on the government leaker. Each time, she equivocated.

“Did [Snowden] betray the trust of the American people?” Young asked.

“Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said, “and he released this information in a way that he should not have.”

Gabbard did at one point back off her support of a presidential pardon for Snowden, who now resides in Moscow, where he is not subject to extradition treaties. In an exchange with Collins, she said the DNI does not have a role in advocating for clemency actions.

“My responsibility would be to ensure the security of our nation’s secrets,” Gabbard said. “And would not take actions to advocate for any actions related to Snowden.”

Collins said after the hearing that she has not made up her mind on whether she will support Gabbard’s nomination and was still reviewing portions of her testimony that she missed while attending a concurrent hearing.

But when asked if the jury was still out on her support, she said, “that’s correct, I want to make a careful decision.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, the committee chairman, said he would move to a vote on Gabbard’s nomination soon. The closed-door portion of the hearing continued on Thursday afternoon.

-ABC News’ Allison Pecorin contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Executive orders signed recently by President Donald Trump state that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs prioritize diversity over merit in hiring, claiming DEI efforts are an “immense public waste and shameful discrimination.”

Some experts in the DEI field disagree, and several tell ABC News that diversity, equity and inclusion programs are aimed at creating a true merit-based system, where hiring, salaries, retention and promotions are decided without bias or discrimination toward employees.

Before the anti-discrimination legislative movement of the 1960s — including the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 — discrimination against certain groups was widespread, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“If you were from a dominant group — generally white people, generally men, straight, cisgender, fully-abled — you had a huge leg up in terms of getting employment recommendations, higher pay promotions,” Erica Foldy, a professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told ABC News.

She continued, “So, Trump and his allies are harking back to this time that they say was more merit-based, but that’s not at all how these organizations operated.”

DEI initiatives — like implementing accessibility measures for people with disabilities, addressing gender pay inequity, diversifying recruitment outreach, or holding anti-discrimination trainings — are intended to correct discriminatory organizational practices, experts say.

DEI experts argue that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are “on the path of creating more merit-based companies, more merit-based firms,” Foldy said, aiming to ensure that qualified people of all backgrounds have an “equal chance of being hired; you’re going to be paid the same as employees at comparable levels.”

“Business as usual, without attention to discrimination, is deeply, deeply inequitable,” Foldy said.

Amri Johnson, a DEI expert and author, told ABC News that the ideal of meritocracy operates under the assumption “that opportunities are fair.” Today, studies across industries continue to show that discrimination against a person’s race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, military background, or other factors continues to permeate the job market.

“If organizations truly want the best talent, companies need to be intentional about how they source and engage with talent,” said Johnson.

Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission plays a role in hundreds of legal cases concerning ongoing discrimination against protected classes in the workplace.

The EEOC’s 2023 performance report offers a long list of lawsuits it settled or won that year. One lawsuit noted blatant racist graffiti or comments made by fellow employees, paired with the discriminatory designation of hard physical labor solely for Black employees; others noted the failures of several employers to make reasonable accommodations for pregnant or disabled workers that led to the employee’s termination or job offers rescinded.

One study found that racial and ethnic discrimination in hiring continues to be a problem globally.

“Relative to white applicants, applicants of color from all backgrounds in the study had to submit about 50% more applications per callback on average,” according to research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed 90 studies involving 174,000 total fake job applications tweaked to include racial indicators but with otherwise similar professional credentials.

“Diversity doesn’t go away because DEI goes away. It is an inevitable part of any human community (business or otherwise),” said Johnson. “Not learning how to deal with its tensions and complexity is leaving value on the table.”

Some DEI experts point to research from management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that found that companies with more diversity financially and socially outperform those that are less diverse.

“The most successful companies understand that DEI isn’t just a ‘”nice-to-have,'” said Christie Smith, the former vice president for inclusion and diversity at Apple, in a written statement. “It’s a driver of innovation, talent attraction, and competitive advantage. The question is whether leaders will have the courage to stay the course and hold firm against political headwinds.”

On Thursday, Trump claimed, without citing evidence, that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives for air traffic controllers at the Federal Aviation Administration were partly to blame for the tragic plane and helicopter collision in Washington on Wednesday night.

The accusation comes after Trump signed sweeping orders aiming to terminate “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” programs in or sponsored by the federal government and its contractors.

The White House argues that DEI programs “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

“Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great,” reads Trump’s executive order.

The order revokes several decades-old or years-old executive actions, including the 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity order prohibiting hiring discrimination by federal contractors and its amendments expanding professional development, data collection and retention opportunities.

The order also explicitly revokes a 1994 order to develop environmental justice strategies that address disproportionately high health and environmental impacts faced by low-income or minority communities.

Among the list of orders that are now revoked is a 2011 order requiring federal agencies to develop strategies “to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity.”

Those in favor of axing DEI programs argue that these initiatives could lead to lawsuits claiming discrimination following the Supreme Court’s ruling on SFFA v. Harvard that disallows race to be taken into consideration in college applications.

The National Center for Public Policy Research has been a strong advocate against DEI, submitting shareholder proposals to reverse the DEI policies at major companies like Costco, John Deere, and others. Ethan Peck, deputy director for the NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project, told ABC News that such companies should be “colorblind.”

“We’re saying that companies have an obligation, a legal obligation, and an obligation to their shareholders, and an obligation to their employees to treat everybody the same, regardless of their race and sex, and we’d submit any proposal to keep that that way,” Peck said.

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