Ohio State Senator Michael Rulli (R) told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday that U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg “needs to resign right now” over the train derailment in East Palestine.
“Buttigieg needs to resign right now. He is an embarrassment. He is incompetent, and he is actually getting people hurt by holding that position,” Rulli told Breitbart News Washington Political Editor Matthew Boyle. “The people in Congress, we need to impeach him. And it needs to happen right now.”
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Rulli added that Buttigieg “had the gall to tell my people that he has 1,000 train accidents, and that this isn’t that bad. It is that bad.”
This past week, Buttigieg appeared to try to minimize the train disaster in East Palestine by noting that there are 1,000 train derailments each year.
“While this horrible situation has gotten a particularly high amount of attention, there are roughly 1,000 cases a year of a train derailing,” the Transportation Secretary said.
During his interview with Breitbart News, Rulli also lamented the Biden administration being prioritizing Ukraine while there are significant problems that need to be addressed in the United States.
“And then, today, he’s all worried about Ukraine,” the state senator said. “But we got problems right here in Ohio.”
“[Buttigieg] doesn’t even understand, in that town, it’s half and half. You got half Democrats, you got half Republicans,” Rulli added. “They’re going to punish my people because they just think that we’re all Trump, and that’s it. That’s what they’re doing here.”
To add insult to injury, Buttigieg had also tried to blame the East Palestine train disaster on former President Donald Trump by falsely claiming that he is “constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation,” citing a “braking rule” that was withdrawn in 2018, under the Trump administration.
But this claim is false, because even if that particular rule would have gone into effect, it wouldn’t have affected the train that derailed in East Palestine on February 3. Even a member of Biden’s own administration called Buttigieg’s assertion “misinformation.”
On Thursday, it was revealed that President Trump plans to visit East Palestine next week. After that information came to light, it was announced that FEMA (which had previously considered the Ohio town ineligible for federal assistance) will now be deployed to East Palestine.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.