(Many Norteamericanos will recall the 1979 ORD DC-10 crash in which an NTSB official, a day after the accident, infamously held up a broken bolt to announce he had found the "cause" of the disaster.)
It wasn't an NTSB official
and it really isn't that much different from what is going on today in Brazil regarding concentrating on blaming a turned off transponder for the crash. Lack of a working transponder don't causes crashes they simply fail to prevent them once other causal factors have occured