Los Angeles Fire Dept. Warned New Budget Could Make Fires Worse

Los Angeles authorities placed roughly 179,000 people on evacuation orders as flames tore through the region. Five people were killed as a result of the blaze, which destroyed at least 1,300 structures and threatened 60,000 more. But even though the fires are literally in their own backyard, Los Angeles doesn’t appear to have prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.

The city’s 2024-2025 budget nixed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.

The change in fire department funding from 2023-24 stemmed from a one-time purchase of breathing equipment and fire suits that had expired, according to a budget memo from the Los Angeles Fire Department.

But the 2024-25 budget also saw a notable change in how the fire department approached paying its employees, shifting $20 million from hiring additional firefighters to staffing overtime. The LAFD has spent significant sums on overtime since the pandemic, backfilling the shifts of employees who fell ill or were required to quarantine, according to the Los Angeles Times.

In a December memo, though, Fire Chief Kristin Crowley warned that the budget reduction had “severely limited the department’s capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfires.”

“Without this funding, pilot compliance and readiness are jeopardized, and aerial firefighting capabilities are diminished,” Crowley wrote. “Changes to the Air Operations Section impact the Department’s ability to adhere to current automatic and mutual aid agreements, provide air ambulance service, and quickly respond to woodland fires with water dropping helicopters.”

The shortage came to a head on Wednesday, when L.A. County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone acknowledged on emergency radios that the department was ill-equipped and understaffed to handle the raging flames.

“We tried to get them the help they needed,” Marrone said. “We’re doing the very best we can. But no, we don’t have enough fire personnel in L.A. County between all the departments to handle this.”

Staffing concerns have plagued the department for years, even though the city’s total fire budget was up by more than $50 million in year-over-year spending compared to the 2023-24 cycle, Los Angeles Councilmember Bob Blumenfield told Politico.

While the fire department’s budget change was deemed normal at city hall, considering the new equipment was a one-time purchase, the decision unfortunately comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing serious heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The LAPD, meanwhile, received millions in the city’s latest budget for salary increases in an apparent bid to prop up recruitment. The starting salary for new recruits jumped from $74,000 a year to more than $86,000, though even that base salary will rise to $94,000 a year by 2027, reported ABC News.

“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction against the “existential” threat.

“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.

But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move that some nonpartisan budget groups predict could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion. Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

This story has been updated to include more details on the Los Angeles Fire Department budget.

Donald Trump is strongly considering classifying Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, CNN reported Wednesday. This designation would make it easier to use military force against them.  

The president-elect first floated this idea in 2019, but backed off after receiving backlash from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his own Justice Department officials. 

“Basically, you take the gloves off, meaning it can be anywhere from having joint operations where you’re physically doing things or where you’re actively targeting, maybe once again through finances, you’re turning loose [the] DOJ and FBI,” Republican Representative Tony Gonzales said of the reintroduced idea. 

Gonzalez is right to a degree: Treating cartels as terrorist organizations would increase the angles of attack for the federal government, potentially creating a larger pool of defendants. But the brunt of this change would fall unjustly on immigrants. 

The designation would make it much harder for immigrants and asylum-seekers to gain access to the U.S. given the proximity they often have to exploitative cartel activity. Many immigrants travel through cartel territory on their way to the southern border, and often have to pay them a toll to do so. This would cause immigrants to violate a statute surrounding providing funds to terrorist organizations. 

If this comes to fruition, Trump and border czar Tom Homan would be making an already hostile situation even more contentious.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is so excited for Donald Trump to keep chasing the Panama Canal that he’s now imagining his own fantastical version of events where the U.S. uses the waterway to wage war on China.

During an interview on Fox Business Tuesday, Tuberville got a little creative when cheerleading Trump’s outlandish push to take control of the trade route.

“We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back, we’ve got to do something because if we’re gonna happen to go to war with China over Taiwan, and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten thousand miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China,” Tuberville said.

While Trump was once friendly with Taiwan, he criticized it on the campaign trail. The president-elect argued that the island should have to pay the U.S. for protection, and accused it of stealing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Trump also promised several times on the campaign trail that his administration would be a peaceful one, so his dumbest admiral airing his ideas about going to war seems at odds with that phony foreign policy.

Trump’s threat to claim the Panama Canal comes as he has upped the ante on several expansionist musings, including using economic forces to turn Canada into the fifty-first state and buying Greenland from Denmark.

France is warning Donald Trump against attempting to annex Greenland, saying that the European Union would not “let other nations in the world—whoever they might be—attack its sovereign borders.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the statement to public radio broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday, adding that he doesn’t expect Trump to invade the autonomous Danish territory. However, Barrot added that the world is witnessing a “return of the law of the strongest.”

Barrot’s words came after Trump refused to rule out using military force to retake Greenland and the Panama Canal in a rambling press conference on Tuesday. His son Donald Jr. also visited Greenland Tuesday in what appeared to be an attempt to legitimize the president-elect’s plans. The leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have said the territory is not for sale.

Antagonizing allies is a crazy, if typical, way for Trump to start his second term, especially a NATO member like Denmark that has boosted its defense spending, as Trump has demanded. Drawing the ire of France and the European Union doesn’t bode well for the future, especially with Trump planning to institute tariffs as soon as he is sworn in.

Trump is also threatening Canada with making it the “51st state” and angered Panama’s president with his desire to retake the canal. If he’s serious about any of his territorial ambitions, Trump might face serious opposition, with countries taking action against the United States.

A Fox News employee gave Trump’s team a set of questions in advance of an Iowa Town Hall in January, according to an upcoming book from Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. If true, this is a blatant violation of  basic journalistic ethics—and yet another blatant example of Trump’s hypocrisy, given that he has accused Democrats of doing “cheating” at debates for years.  That town hall, moreover, occurred at a crucial moment in the race: It took place as Trump’s Republican rivals for the party’s nomination were debating for the final time.

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. ‘Holy [shit],’ the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” writes Isenstadt.

Trump’s team proceeded to “workshop” their answers to the questions, which touched on political violence, his business activity, and his indictments. 

“While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a spokesperson for Fox News said. 

Revenge, Isenstadt’s book, comes out in March.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday that he will release some of the details from special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s criminal cases, but not all of them.

In a filing, Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the final memo on Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report, while handing the controversial details of Trump’s classified documents case to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

The decision immediately flouts an order from Judge Aileen Cannon, who caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants Tuesday. She ruled that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect. But the joint request to block the release of the 2020 election report, which names neither of the co-defendants, is little more than a reach, according to Garland.

“Defendants [Walt] Nauta and [Carlos] De Oliveira have no cognizable interest in that volume of the Final Report, however, nor any plausible theory of Article III standing that would justify their asking this Court to grant relief with respect to it,” Garland wrote in Wednesday’s filing. “Nor would there be any legal basis for any other interested party to seek to block release of Volume One.”

Garland’s notes on Trump’s classified documents case are doubly strategic. By restricting the release of volume two of Smith’s report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Garland undermined the “essential premise” of Nauta and De Oliveira’s emergency motion, which claimed that the immediate public release of the report would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

Garland “determined that he will not make a public release of Volume Two while defendants’ cases remain pending,” the filing reads. “That should be the end of the matter.”

Cannon’s Tuesday ruling stated that Garland, the DOJ, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.

This story has been updated.

Even Donald Trump’s former allies don’t understand Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to block forthcoming details of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against the president-elect.

On Tuesday, Cannon caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants, ruling that the Justice Department is not allowed to release Smith’s final report on two of the president-elect’s federal criminal investigations.

In an interview that night with CNN, former Trump attorney Ty Cobb said he believed that Cannon’s continued involvement in cloaking the details of the case made her one of Trump’s favorite tools.

“Why do you think, Ty, Cannon blocked the report?” asked OutFront host Erin Burnett.

“The only reason she’s shining is, she’s his tool and he polishes her religiously,” Cobb said. “He gets the results he needs from her. The Eleventh Circuit has already, as we know, over two years ago, had to admonish her extensively.”

Cannon was legally scolded by the Eleventh Circuit in 2022, when the appeals court unanimously vacated her decision to appoint a special master to oversee the documents obtained by the FBI after their raid of Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the court wrote that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in the case and that the judicial system could not “write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant.

“Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” the appeals court added.

Cobb argued that Cannon’s heavy hand in Trump’s case had “created remedies” for the president-elect “out of whole cloth.”

“I suspect they will do so again quickly,” Cobb said, envisioning more reprimands for Cannon by the Eleventh Circuit. “They may be prepared to mitigate the stain that she is and the stain that she’s created again for the judiciary quickly on this.”

Cannon’s ruling stated that Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is considering running for office again, just weeks after getting chased out of the last one. 

Gaetz, the Florida Republican who allegedly paid several women and an underage girl for sexual encounters, is “starting to think about running for governor” in 2026, he told The Tampa Bay Times Tuesday.

“I have a compelling vision for the state,” Gaetz said. “I understand how to fix the insurance problem, and it’s not to hand the keys to the state over to the insurance industry. If I run, I would be the most pro-consumer candidate on the Republican side.”

Last month, the House Ethics Committee published a long-awaited report on Gaetz’s alleged misconduct, and concluded that the MAGA acolyte “took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity.” In total, he paid out more than $63,000 to more than a dozen women and one 17-year-old girl.  

Gaetz left Congress last year after he was nominated to serve as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Unfortunately for him, his candidacy was so unpopular he was forced to withdraw his nomination and was replaced by Pam Bondi, who is set to be confirmed next week. When he didn’t return for the start of the 119th Congress last week, his former colleagues clapped. 

Gaetz said the revelations about his behavior wouldn’t have any impact on a potential run for governor. “Those lies have been told about me for years,” Gaetz said. “They’ve never affected my ability to win elections.”

Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to intervene in his New York hush-money case.

The president-elect requested an administrative stay Wednesday on the sentencing for his sole criminal conviction, claiming that the high court’s July immunity ruling should prevent him from having to face consequences. Trump’s sentencing is currently scheduled for Friday.

A jury of his peers unanimously decided in May that Trump was guilty on all 34 counts for falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree.

Trump has skirted sentencing since July, leveraging the nation’s legal system to invoke delay after delay until now, when the clock could realistically run out on the case just 12 days before he is set to retake the White House.

But the stay—which will once again delay Trump’s sentencing—would only nix an already pared-down and toothless conviction.

Last week, Judge Juan Merchan dealt the final blow to any suggestions of serious consequences for the president-elect. Merchan wrote in his Friday order that “unconditional discharge” had become the “the most viable solution” for Trump, indicating that the incoming president would not be hampered down with fines, court-appointed supervision, or incarceration.

In the wake of Merchan’s order, former U.S. District Attorney Joyce Vance argued in her legal column Civil Discourse that there could still be a light at the end of the legal tunnel for Trump’s sentencing. Rather than forcing Trump to face the music before his inauguration, she argued that Merchan’s decision to release Trump with “unconditional discharge” could effectively take the wind out of Trump’s sails should he try to do away with the criminal conviction altogether. It would also help delay Trump’s sentencing until he’s out of office again, in which case, all bets are off.

It’s unclear if the Supreme Court will grant Trump’s request. As reporter Steven Mazie noted on X, “several justices will be so inclined,” but that doesn’t mean a majority will be.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s bid to halt sentencing for his felony conviction in his hush-money case in New York hit a setback Tuesday when a state appeals court denied his request.

The president-elect is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, barring a last-minute appeal in federal court, or even the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, Judge Ellen Gesmer listened to arguments in a brief court hearing before ruling against the president-elect 30 minutes later.

During the hearing, she asked Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche if he had “any support for a notion that presidential immunity extends to president-elects.”

“There has never been a case like this before,” Blanche replied, admitting that he did not have an answer. He tried to claim that sitting presidents had immunity, only for Gesmer to remind him that Trump was not yet president.

If Trump’s sentencing for his 34 felony convictions ultimately goes through, however, he will likely be spared jail time, the judge presiding over his case, Juan Merchan, signaled last week. Trump was accused of using his former fixer Michael Cohen to sweep an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels under the rug ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

But after the Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents have near-total immunity, the prospect of Trump facing any real consequences for his conviction basically evaporated. Trump’s election in November also didn’t help matters, and his other criminal cases never made it to trial before the Supreme Court and the election rendered them moot. Now, with less than two weeks left until Trump is sworn in as president, he might not even get a slap on the wrist.