Hawaiian Who Sent False Missile Alert Won’t Cooperate With Investigation

The false alarm of an incoming missile attack that panicked Hawaii for 45 minutes was one of the strangest news stories of recent years. Hawaiian authorities have said that a state employee “accidentally pushed a wrong button,” an explanation that has provoked hilarity in some quarters. But now there is an interesting development: the employee who “pushed a wrong button” is refusing to cooperate with investigators:

The employee who sent the false missile alert in Hawaii, causing widespread panic and confusion, is refusing to cooperate with the investigation, a federal official said Thursday.

Lisa Fowlkes, public safety bureau chief for Federal Communications Commission (FCC), told senators in a hearing that she was generally pleased with the cooperation from officials in Hawaii, but that “one key employee, the person who transmitted the false alert, is refusing to cooperate.”

Well, yeah, he or she would be a key witness. It seems, though, that others might also have played a role:

But Clairmont also suggested that the incident could be more than just a case of someone pressing the wrong button, telling the Star-Advertiser that “it’s not as easy saying it was one person doing this.”

A total of four people were on duty that Saturday morning, he said, and the employee who sent the alert is both a 10-year veteran of the agency and “very well-trained and seasoned.”

The offending employee has not been identified. Here is a wild guess: the employee who “pushed the wrong button” is a fanatical anti-Trump Democrat who believed that causing hysteria over a presumed North Korean missile attack would somehow make the president look bad. If that guess is incorrect, maybe the anonymous employee should start cooperating with the investigation.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses