The Final 5: November 13, 2026

Most importantly, you, you, and you watching at home to the best, baddest, and biggest high school sports show in all of the DMV and beyond. That's going to do it for Fox Files at Friday Night Live. And now we are kicking it over for the final five with my girl, Sydney Persing. Well, good to see you guys again. And welcome to Friday the 13th, right? Tonight on this Friday the 13th, planes might be taking off again, but tens of thousands are still stranded. Retired Navy Captain Armin Kurian is standing by to talk about that ground stop. Plus, the Daily Mail's Alina Shirazi joins me to talk about some big changes over at the White House and a tweet about flying that did not age very well. And I think you can probably guess why. This is The Final Five. Let's do this. Oh Welcome into the Final Five on this Friday night. I am Sydney Persing. Jim is off. We start, of course, with today's historic nationwide ground stop. After four hours of unusually clear skies, the FAA lifted that stop just after 8 o'clock. But the path forward from it has barely begun. The FAA blamed safety concerns from a massive telecommunications outage, the details of which are still being sorted out. The Trump administration has not officially ruled out some sort of cyber attack, but did say currently they don't have evidence of that being the case. Just after that stop was lifted, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen spoke about it from the White House. This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like by the organization and the team he's put together. We're built to handle crises like this, and that's exactly what we're doing. We're moving at an unprecedented pace as a whole of government to make sure that we are doing the public justice by making sure everybody is safe, which everybody is. During that press briefing, their secretaries, Mullen and Duffy, outlined equipment failures that happened at major air traffic hubs today. Duffy said aging technology that's been in use since the 80s overloaded, prompting the agency to call for that ground stop for safety. This is an emergency. This is an emergency. I want Congress to give us emergency funding. This is bipartisan. This is American. I want $50 billion. President Trump is a builder. He's going to build this network and deliver for the American people. Remember just last week, the FAA announced a timeline for phasing out certain pieces of that aging technology, floppy disks. No company has mass produced them since at least 2011, but they are still used throughout the airline industry in the U.S. on a daily basis. Last week, the FAA promised they would stop using them by the end of 2028. And if you go from floppy disks to imagining AI, you're missing a few steps along the way, right? It's like bolting a rocket ship to a horse and buggy. That's not going to go well for the horse. So this is a scenario where you have to move so delicately. The thing about the floppy disks, though, is they've actually been working all this time. Secretary Mullen admitted today that the aging technology did not run into problems until installation of newer technology began. What it appears to be right now is as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches into the system. They were putting new equipment and new technology. And that new equipment, new technology, it was overwhelming the older system. Which is why Secretary Duffy made it very clear, the patchwork doesn't work. All the while, widespread cancellations and delays, they continue tonight with more than 7,000 flights being canceled so far today. And that number is ticking up by the minute. That has left tens of thousands of passengers all across the country stranded at airports. Among them, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. I'll begin with a public service announcement. I will be available in the hotel bar following the concert for anybody who needs to rebook their flights or get a refund per your rights. Now, once everyone gets their flights rebooked, assuming they don't just decide to walk wherever it is they were flying to, Congress is already planning to look into what exactly happened today. Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, are calling for legislation to oblige the administration's request for more funding, and some Democrats, including California Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu, are calling for investigations into what exactly went wrong. Something like this is really significant and quite concerning. Besides oversight, I sit on the Aviation Subcommittee of the Congress, and so I'm very familiar with issues about the FAA and this in general. This is quite disturbing and pretty extraordinary of an action taken. So whatever it is, I think deserves as much transparency as possible. All right, let's talk more about this historic ground stop with my first guest tonight. Armin Kurdian is a retired Navy captain and aviation expert up late with me tonight on the Final Five. Sir, thank you so much for joining us on what is certainly a busy Friday. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Of course. Let's start here. You heard the administration there say during that news conference in the White House that we have the safest system in the country, but also that it is in dire need of this this update of maybe even 50 billion dollars worth of updates. How do you explain that to folks at home? How do those two statements exist in truth at the same time? Sure, absolutely. I'll try to make it as simple as possible. For a very long time, the air traffic control system, air traffic management throughout the entire country was neglected. It wasn't updated. A few decades of work. And back about 10, 15 years ago, they realized this was a problem. They started the planning to actually start doing the upgrades. But as the Secretary Mullen described it, you know, you put new technologies, old technology, you have to forcibly slow down. The new technology, so as it does, can throw too much information into a system that simply can't handle it. Otherwise, it gets overwhelmed and it shuts down. It has overflows, simply stops working. And then that information has to go through other old equipment. And as you can see, at some point, there aren't enough buckets to hold all the water. And things actually end up slowing down and stopping. In your estimation, is there a timeline for how urgent it is for those systems to be updated? Absolutely. It's very urgent. But here's the other problem they didn't really talk about very much. It is very, very hard for the government to move quickly with a project of this scale when technology is like this. You know, we're not talking about the old days where it was, you know, you could spit out 10,000 aircraft in a year. This is very heavily software-driven. It is very intricate, very delicate, and it has to be architected properly. So it takes a while to actually put this stuff in. And with the rules of how the government actually goes out and buys things, how it actually feels this kind of equipment, how it has to purchase, and a lot of the laws that are there, which frankly don't really add value to the process of acquisition, that slows things down even more. It's so bad. That you can actually be implementing upgrades that are obsolete by the time you actually put them into service. That is how slow things actually go sometimes. Well, that's a good segue into my next question for you, sir, because you heard Secretaries Mullen and Duffy there saying that this is not a political issue, that aviation is not a partisan issue, but at the same time saying we're going to need bipartisan support in Congress for billions of dollars worth of these upgrades we want to make. So in your view, this is a politics show. Is this a political issue? No, I believe that both Republicans and Democrats recognize the importance of this issue. My hope is that there is some powerful senator or representative somewhere who wants to make sure that his district gets a lot of the extra work when it may not necessarily be the best thing or the best value for the actual country. Great. Rest assured, I know for a fact. I work with some of these people, some of these upgrades that are actually being put into place in a system and the system needs to be such that it is more modular and it can be upgraded a little bit at a time here and there on a continuing basis instead of having to do this massive update that we're doing. I mean, as recently as a couple of decades ago, we were using vacuum tubes. So that tells you how long it's been since this stuff has been upgraded. I want to ask you, because when we first learned of this ground stop earlier this evening, there was a lot of panic, I think, for some Americans and certainly some passengers either at airports or in the sky who think about the rarity of a full nationwide ground stop. Obviously, we had one on 9-11. The administration came out very quickly tonight and said, you know, please don't think that this is anything like that because they understood the fear associated when you hear nationwide ground stop. I wonder, in your view, what this might have been like For pilots who were in the air at the time, you know, we know that they obviously have training how to deal with ground stops, but you also saw clips circulate of pilots telling passengers, I just don't know what's happening. I just know that there's a ground stop. What might this have been like for pilots in the air today? Well, speaking as somebody who flew naval aircraft, you're trained for contingencies like this. If you lose communications with the ground, if you don't have a certain amount of information, you start taking over literally with your eyes. And you have still communications equipment and navigation equipment in your aircraft. You can communicate with other aircraft at the same time. So basically what's happening is if they lose their flight following, they lose their control from center and the approach controls, and they're actually going out there, they're looking around. And basically communicating where they are. They still have the capability. GPS is still there. They have a technology called ADS-B, A-D-S-B. In and out, which basically means they're transmitting and receiving their precise position, their identity, their altitude, their course, their airspeed to other aircraft, which actually builds kind of a picture. So that built situational awareness for the pilots as well. They're trained for it. I'm sure none of them panicked. And then they just landed their aircraft as soon as possible. The only issues where it might have been a problem is if, say, maybe, you know, an aircraft was flying through clouds at the time when contact was actually lost, in which case, you know, they have to quickly. get themselves out of those clouds so they can actually see what's going on. But other than that, as you can see, there were no accidents and the pilots performed. They did exactly what they were trained to do. And thank God for that, sir. We appreciate you sharing your insights with us. Thank you so much for staying with us late tonight. Thanks. Have a great evening. All right. Still to come, the White House called her fake news for predicting the departures of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, but then Wiles left. Now, Alina Shirazi is my guest right when we come back. One of the biggest changes in Washington since the midterms has been to leadership at the White House. Just last week, President Trump replaced longtime Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with her deputy, Stephen Miller. My guest tonight has followed that situation closely in her reporting for the Daily Mail. She joins me now to talk about it. Alina Shirazi, thank you so much for being with us tonight. Good to see you, friend. Good to see you too, Sydney. All right, Alina, so let's start with Susie Wiles because we covered this on the show last week. Five months ago, you reported that she was going to bounce after the midterms and accounts online associated with the administration came after you exceptionally hard. Things they said we can't even say on TV. They called you a wannabe reporter. Susie Wiles herself denied your reporting. What do you make of that denial now and why they came so hard for you? And how does it feel now to be proven right in that reporting? Yeah, I mean, I feel vindicated. Honestly, that's the first word that came to my mind when the news broke that she was stepping down. You know, when I first reported this story back in June, as you mentioned, Sydney, I took a lot of heat online from official accounts from the White House, you know, the Trump war room, rapid response accounts. They use my looks. You know, my race to honestly undermine the report and make me the story. I mean, you read some of those tweets, but I think the reason that they went so hard at me could be summed up by that famous quote from Shakespeare. Thou dost protest too much. I mean, the level of coordination for their denial was unprecedented. It was a full court press of denials from across the administration. You know, Susan Wiles, you mentioned she denied it. She called it a piece of Friday fiction since my report went live on a Friday. They flash forward a few Fridays later, and here we are. Alina, I'm curious, at the time, how confident were you in your sourcing when you first published that to have so many people come out and push back quite as hard as they did against you? The level of sourcing that I had been able to obtain at the time, the number of people that I'd been able to speak with, it was a lot of people and it was a lot of sourcing. And it went through, of course, a lot of verification. This is something that I'd been told for a few months, actually, even before we actually went live with that story. So I think the number of sources that were coming forward, giving me this tip and giving me information about it, You know, talking to our editors and, you know. We were able to verify it through and through. And even though they denied it time and time again, you know, it was just a lesson, I guess, in journalism and reporting to be confident in your sourcing if you verified the facts. Alina, before we move on to Stephen Miller, talk to me a little bit about your reporting as far as what exactly happened between the president and Susie Wiles. You report, I believe, that she had become growingly disheartened and that there was some sort of a big fight that sort of culminated all this. Yeah, exactly. So back in June, you know, my sources confirm that Susie was already putting together an exit plan to leave after the midterms. You know, she was talking to her old employers because she'd grown disheartened with Trump. She felt like he wasn't listening to her and she was quite frankly, just getting tired of it. And she needed a plan B, if you will. She was also going through cancer treatment. It was all just. A lot of people close to her were telling us, and she knew that she would fall on the sword for the election results. And ultimately, I came to a head with the fights between her and President Trump. Sources told me that it started on Thursday afternoon in an Oval Office meeting with other aides, where President Trump turned on Wiles and basically exploded on her over the results. One White House source told us that Trump continued yelling at her until Suzy walked out of the room. And then by Thursday night, she had resigned, handed in her formal resignation, and Stephen Miller was in the wings, ready to take over in a matter of days. And that brings us now to this week, of course, with Stephen Miller. Alina, what do you know about how his first few days on the job have gone for him and how they've been received inside the White House? Yeah, so Stephen Miller, you know, he's already done a few things. He's sent out a memo this week saying that Cabinet secretaries will be able to have essentially more control over their own messaging. This is a totally different tactic from Susie Wiles. I mean, Susie, she was known as the adult in the room. She was someone who regularly stepped in to rein in some of the more outlandish ideas coming from people in the president's orbit, including from his own cabinet. I mean, we had a lot of examples of that, but that clearly isn't the case anymore. Sources who have spoken directly with Trump tell me that he wanted to pick Stephen Miller specifically because he knows that he will do his bidding. But on the flip side, you know, Stephen is a polarizing figure. It's hard to imagine him bridging the gap of Democrats to cut deals. Critics also argue that he is a one issue operator, meaning immigration. His cornerstone is going to become likely a central focus of of this administration and sitting, that's an issue that just wasn't very popular with With voters across both sides of the aisle, as we just saw in the midterm election. Alana, just under a minute left, as you have proven, certainly, that you are quite well sourced. What are you expecting as far as any potential future shakeups in the White House now going forward? Well, the new guard, if you will, is sort of cleaning house. It's a new rogue era of MAGA. That's how some of my sources, White House people have used to describe it to me. We're seeing a lot of Wiles, Susie Wiles, loyalists being purged from the White House right now. We've seen Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Walters, a Wiles ally, resigned Megan Bauer. She led Cabinet Affairs, also leaving several people from DOJ. And to your point, President Trump said in a few interviews recently that there are likely There's likely more changes on the way when it comes to his cabinet. President Trump, as far as I have been told, has been making calls, but this was happening as early as last week, asking around to people close to him, do you think Pete Hegseth is doing a good job? Do you think he could have done better? Was I getting the right information? He's making calls about Howard Lutnick. Every day is a surprise in this White House, and President Trump, we know for a fact, sometimes changes his mind based off of who he talks to that day. We know that for a fact. Well, lots more to follow. Alina, I know you will be following it. We will as well. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thanks so much, Sydney. Great to be with you. The Final Five will be right back after this. She ain't got your love anymore. Don't mess with America. Welcome back in, and let's get right to the third block. The Trump administration is pressuring Republicans in Congress to pass new FAA funding before the new year. If they don't, it'll be up to Democrats next year. And right now, the party is gearing up for a new internal battle of their own. Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen said today he will rule out a presidential run in 2028 and is instead planning to focus on challenging Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer for the Senate majority leader. He made that announcement last night, just days after we pressed him in a one-on-one interview about whether he wanted that job. I've made clear that I'm not looking to be the next Democratic leader. I am running for the majority leader in the United States Senate. On the 2028 bid that you've been kicking the tires on? Yes, I'm no longer pursuing that. Newly elected Democrats want new leadership, but Van Hollen faces an uphill battle against Schumer, who has led the Senate Democrats since 2017. Democrats will take control in January with at least 55 seats. It's a comfortable margin for most legislation, but it is not. Filibuster proof. The Senate's unique filibuster rule allows the minority party to block certain legislation if it does not have more than 60 votes. In the past, both parties have passed on opportunities to get rid of that rule out of fear that the change could be used against them when the other party's in power. Van Hollen's rule, though, could signal a change. We need democracy in the United States Senate, and that means allowing, ultimately, a majority of senators to answer the call of the American people. So that means 51 votes. So my personal view has been all along that the filibuster is an anti-democratic small provisions. It's not in our Constitution. Now, in order to actually unseat Schumer, Van Hollen will have to get either 28 or 29 votes, depending on how many seats Democrats control when Democrats hold their closed door ballot. Now, many are keeping their choice quiet, but not everybody. So I did see yesterday that he got in the race. We've had good conversations. I've been open that I'm not voting for Senator Schumer, but I'm glad to see there's more people getting in the race. You've said you'll support Schumer as majority leader. Yes. Do you think there's a risk to that? He worked really hard to get this majority. But I think it matters less about whose name is on the door and more about What do we do with it? Today's massive airport ground stop comes just one day after another major outage. Microsoft is scrambling to get all customers back online after its systems went down all across the globe. Now, the tech giant says it is nearing full recovery now, but there's no exact ETA on when that's going to happen. Many are finding new ways to deal with the outage or perhaps old ways. In fact, workers in Japan went full analog, dusting off old fax machines to send reports instead of PDFs through email. Because, as a journalist at USA Today put it, when modern technology breaks, boomer technology wins. During that Microsoft outage, nobody was predicting an even bigger problem like today's ground stop would happen the very next day, which is probably one reason why the major airline Emirates felt safe, saying, quote, Your email might be down, but the skies are always open, to which you can see the account for Wendy's replied simply, whoops. Up next on The Final Five, who's sleeping soundly and who's tossing and turning tonight. We're unfortunately out of time tonight on this busy news day. That does it for The Final Five. The morning crew is here at 7 a.m. Thank you so much for watching today. Go to bed or don't.