Trump puts gov agency on notice for letting Americans down in time of crisis
President Donald Trump warned late Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is set to face a reckoning following four years under the Biden administration, arguing the emergency agency has “not done their job.”
“FEMA has not done their job for the last four years. You know, I had FEMA working really well. We had hurricanes in Florida. We had Alabama tornadoes. But unless you have certain types of leadership, it’s really, it gets in the way. And FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” Trump said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, his first White House interview since his inauguration.
Trump then turned his attention to the state of Oklahoma, touting that he won all 77 of the state’s counties in the 2024 election, and arguing that if the Sooner State is hit by a tornado, state leaders should take the lead on emergency response before the federal government steps in for additional assistance.
“I love Oklahoma, but you know what? If they get hit with a tornado or something, let Oklahoma fix it. … And then the federal government can help them out with the money. FEMA is getting in the way of everything, and the Democrats actually use FEMA not to help North Carolina,” Trump continued.
TRUMP, GOP LEADERS MEET AT WHITE HOUSE AS PRESIDENT PLANS VISIT TO NC, DEFENDS EXECUTIVE ORDERS
FEMA came under the nation’s microscope last year when Hurricane Helene ripped through North Carolina, devastating residents as it wiped out homes and businesses and killed more than 100 people. FEMA and the Biden administration faced fierce backlash for its handling of the emergency, while Trump accused the agency of obstructing relief efforts in Republican areas.
“The Democrats don’t care about North Carolina. What they’ve done with FEMA is so bad. FEMA is a whole ‘nother discussion, because all it does is complicate everything,” he said.
TRUMP SAYS NEWSOM IS TO ‘BLAME’ FOR ‘APOCALYPTIC’ WILDFIRES
“So I’m stopping on Friday. I’m stopping in North Carolina, first stop, because those people were treated very badly by Democrats. And I’m stopping there. We’re going to get that thing straightened out because they’re still suffering from a hurricane from months ago,” Trump said.
Trump will visit North Carolina on Friday, his first trip as president, where he is expected to tour and meet with residents who were left devastated by the hurricane in September. He will also visit California that same day, where wildfires have ripped through the Los Angeles area this month.
The trip is set to highlight what Trump has described as emergency response failures at the hands of Democratic leaders.
FAST-MOVING HUGHES FIRE ERUPTS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY AS CALIFORNIA OFFICIALS ORDER EVACUATIONS
“And then I’m going to then I’m going to go to California,” he said, before criticizing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handling of wildfire prevention and response. Trump has long criticized the Democratic governor for prioritizing environmental policies, such as protecting the dwindling smelt and Chinook salmon populations, and not tapping water sources in the northern part of the state that he argued would allow better fire response.
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“There is massive amounts of water, rain water and mountain water, that comes to with the snow, comes down, as it melts, there’s so much water they’re releasing it into the Pacific Ocean,” he said.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order revoking President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 from September of 1965 (and many other similar orders and memoranda from over the decades since). Trump’s new order is true to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 14th Amendment. Trump’s order can be read here.
The horrible turn taken by Johnson towards “counting by race,” was a deep one, a turn extended by the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in the 1978 Bakke decision and only finally and fully repudiated by SCOTUS in recent years is now federal policy that can be enforced by the Civil Rights Division at DOJ and the Office of Civil Rights at Department of Education.
This is neither a “liberal” nor a “conservative” action. It is the Constitution speaking, as the Constitution was amended to eradicate the great stain of slavery after the long and bloody Civil War.
TRUMP TARGETS CULTURE WAR LIGHTNING RODS IN EARLY SLATE OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The path to the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment has taken from 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, until Tuesday to complete: Citizens of the United States may not have penalties inflicted upon them or awards given them based on any immutable characteristic or religious belief. No institution, from Harvard College, founded long before the Constitution was ratified, or the local convenience store, may lawfully violate this first principle of the 14th Amendment.
Do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity or religious belief. Period.
The 19th century SCOTUS took a horrible turn in the Slaughterhouse Cases which mangled the interpretation of the 14th Amendment and then the Plessy decision and the Supreme Court righted itself in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Congress enshrined the core principle above in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Johnson did not understand what he launched, but in the past 20 years, “counting by race, gender, sexual orientation,” along with hardships and discrimination against people of faith have taken deep root in government and elite institutions.
The Supreme Court has flailed for almost 50 years to finally, and I hope irreversibly, settle on what Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King and most recently Chief Justice John Roberts has concisely and eloquently stated in the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 when he wrote, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
The chief justice lacked sufficient originalist allies on the highest court to infuse this bedrock principal of sound constitutional law into every fiber of government at every level of government until President Trump nominated and the United States Senate confirmed three new justices during Trump’s first term. Now the originalist majority is a solid six votes.
Trump’s executive order may be challenged. I hope it is.
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The Supreme Court, built in part by President Trump, has already affirmed the original meaning of the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in recent years. Let any institution challenge this new EO and they will discover it is on the firmest of constitutional grounds.
Bravo to the many hands that crafted it and especially to President Trump who signed it.
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Ex-CIA director speaks out after Trump revokes his security clearance
Ex-CIA Director John Brennan claimed President Donald Trump had “misrepresented the facts” on the Hunter Biden laptop story after his security clearance was revoked Tuesday.
By executive order, Trump revoked the security clearances of the 51 former intel officials who signed the 2020 letter claiming that the release of emails from the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Many of them were open supporters at the time of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign against Trump.
The signatories said in the letter they did not know if the emails “are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Brennan, who was among the signers, called the executive order “bizarre” and claimed Trump distorted the letter.
JOHN BRENNAN’S CLOSED-DOOR HEARING ‘CONFIRMED’ HUNTER LAPTOP LETTER WAS ‘ALL POLITICAL’: JIM JORDAN
“Signatories of the letter falsely suggested that the news story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign,” Trump’s executive order said of “the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign.”
“He misrepresented the facts in that executive order because it said that we had suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation,” Brennan said on MSNBC Tuesday. “No, we said it was all the hallmarks of Russian information operations, including the dumping of accurate information, which is what we said in that letter.”
“So, again, this was just, you know, his effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately,” he said.
Other officials named in the EO include former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr., former CIA director Michael Hayden, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
BIDEN CAMPAIGN, BLINKEN ORCHESTRATED INTEL LETTER TO DISCREDIT HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY, EX-CIA OFFICIAL SAYS
Three days after the letter was made public, Biden used it as a talking point in the final 2020 presidential debate to rebut criticisms made by Trump.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this, he’s accusing me of, is a Russian plan,” Biden said during the debate.
In 2023, it was reported that the Department of Justice had known since December 2019 that Hunter Biden’s laptop contained “reliable evidence” and was “not manipulated in any way.”
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Brennan said that Trump had previously announced he would revoke his security clearance in 2018, but his clearance was not taken away.
“The only reason why I still had a security clearance, as I have for the past number of years since I left government service, was for the benefit of the government, so that if the CIA or another government agency wanted to call me in to discuss a classified matter, they could do that,” Brennan said.
He added, “And so it was really for the government’s benefit. It was to facilitate those classified discussions with myself, as well as with former directors, as well as other former members of the intelligence community that had those clearances.”
Brennan has appeared regularly on MSNBC as a senior national security analyst and is one of Trump’s harshest critics.
In a Feb. 2024 appearance on the network, Brennan claimed that Russia is using Republican politicians “as tools.”
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President signs first DOGE request to slash wasteful government spending
As promised on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring federal employees to return to in-person work.
The order comes after Trump indicated that he planned to push back on former President Joe Biden’s move allowing federal workers to remain in a hybrid work arrangement through 2029.
“Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary,” the order reads.
Agencies must begin the move to fully in-person work by 5 p.m. on Friday, the order stated.
TRUMP WILL FIGHT BIDEN REMOTE WORK DEAL; UNION VOWS TO FIGHT BACK
Elon Musk leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and is tasked with finding ways to cut government spending and improve the efficiency of federal initiatives.
One of those initiatives was ending remote work and viewing the requirement that federal workers return to the office as a way of spurring voluntary layoffs.
THOUSANDS OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES LAND DEAL TO CONTINUE TELEWORK WITH BIDEN ADMIN APPOINTEE: REPORT
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home,” Musk wrote in an op-ed published with Vivek Ramaswamy, former DOGE co-leader, in The Wall Street Journal last month.
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In addition to the return-to-work order, Trump also signed an order freezing the hiring of federal civilian employees, to be applied throughout the executive branch.
The order stated, “As part of this freeze, no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law.”
The freeze excludes military personnel and positions related to immigration enforcement, national security and public safety.
Conservatives sound off after ACLU lawyer comes up with new term for biological women
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Chase Strangio appeared to employ a new term for an adult human female Tuesday.
The trans rights activist – who is also a transgender man – appeared on the left-wing digital news show “Democracy Now!” to slam President Donald Trump’s executive order on sex and gender.
Strangio complained to show host Amy Goodman that Trump “is targeting trans people by focusing on retrenching this notion of a fixed gender binary at the time of conception.”
While making the case, Strangio referred to biological women as “non-transgender women.”
JK ROWLING TORCHES LEFT FOR GENDER IDEOLOGY ‘CALAMITY’ AFTER TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDER: ‘THEY DIDN’T LISTEN’
Trump’s executive order, titled “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government,” clarifies that it is the U.S. policy to recognize two sexes, male and female, and that men and women are biologically distinct, along with addressing how agencies should handle these directives.
One part of the EO directs the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development to produce a policy that protects women “seeking single-sex rape shelters” and other intimate spaces, which Strangio objected to.
Strangio claimed this would, “in essence, exclude trans people from various forms of shelter system, under the auspices that a trans person is an inherent threat to non-transgender women.”
After refusing to call biological women “women,” Strangio added that this part of the order “just enhances the risk that transgender people face in society, if we are deemed as a threat to others simply by existing.”
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A clip of Strangio calling women “non-transgender women” caught the attention of some on X.
Prominent conservative account “End Wokeness” shared the clip with the caption, “ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio is panicking that Trump banned men from ‘non-trans women’ (women) locker rooms.”
Conservative commentator Paul Szypula blasted Strangio in a lengthy post, stating, “ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, a woman pretending to be a man, is mad that he’s going to be arrested if he uses a men’s bathroom in a federal building. She vents her anger by calling biological women ‘non-transgender women.’”
He continued, “Chase can whine all she wants. That doesn’t change the fact that she has XX chromosomes and is a woman. So either she stays out of men’s bathrooms, or she goes to a women’s jail.”
Co-owner of Trending Politics Collin Rugg wrote, “NEW: Transgender ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio refers to biological women as ‘non-transgender women’ while losing it over Trump’s new executive orders. This voice catches me off guard every time.”
“Life hack: You can save some time by simply referring to them as ‘women.’” Rugg added.
“No, we’re women. Just women, there is no and/or situation here,” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who has championed having single-sex facilities in the Capitol, added.
Former NCAA swimmer and women’s rights activist Riley Gaines commented on Rugg’s post, stating, “’Nontransgender women’ is crazy work lol.”
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One sweeping move could have nearly all evidence tossed in Idaho student murders case
Judge Steven Hippler on Wednesday denied the Idaho murders suspect Bryan Kohberger‘s motion to unseal a briefing and hearing on investigative genetic genealogy the defense disputes in the Idaho student murders case.
“As the State points out, there is no dispute this is a high-profile case, particularly in Idaho,” he wrote in his order. “It was transferred to Ada County from Latah County on Defendant’s motion to change venue. Defendant argued in that motion that the small size of the jury and the extensive, inflammatory media coverage prevented him from receiving a fair trial in Latah County. While Ada County has a larger jury pool to pull from than Latah County, the State is concerned that the risk of exposing that jury pool to evidence – particularly evidence that may not be deemed admissible at trial – remains significant.”
It was among 12 suppression motions filed by Kohberger’s defense to be heard Thursday, marking the first time Kohberger has been back in court in over two months, when his defense team asked a Boise judge to “sanction” prosecutors over “inadequate disclosures” through the discovery process. He did not appear in person at a closed door hearing earlier this week.
His defense team is requesting expert witnesses be excluded from the case as a solution.
BRYAN KOHBERGER DEFENSE WANTS PROSECUTION PUNISHED OVER DELAYS
His team is attempting to have nearly all the evidence collected by police against Kohberger thrown out by challenging the legality of search warrants.
They are arguing the probable cause on which the search warrants were based was established primarily by the police use of investigative genetic genealogy (IGG), which they believe amounts to a violation of Kohberger’s Fourth Amendment rights.
IDAHO MURDERS: BRYAN KOHBERGER INVESTIGATED FOR ANOTHER HOME INVASION PRIOR TO CAMPUS SLAYINGS
IGG is a relatively new approach that allows police to build a family tree of a suspect by comparing DNA found at a crime scene to public databases filled with voluntarily submitted DNA from people trying to learn about their ancestry.
The other point his defense is arguing is that search warrants were overly broad, notably during the searches of electronic devices,like Kohberger’s phone, laptop and online accounts.
IDAHO PROSECUTORS REJECT BRYAN KOHBERGER’S MANY ATTACKS ON SEARCH WARRANTS
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The hearing will also cover a motion to compel discovery, whereby Kohberger’s defense argues it has not been given all the reports, research and data on which expert prosecution witnesses will rely for testimony at trial.
The court has set aside Friday if all the motions are not covered by the close of business Thursday.
Kohberger is facing four charges of first-degree murder and felony burglary in the stabbing deaths of University of Idaho students Madison Mogen, 21, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Ethan Chapin, 20.
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All four students were killed in a 4 a.m. home invasion attack in a six-bedroom home just steps off campus Nov. 13, 2022.
Prosecutors allege he sneaked into the home while some of them were asleep and killed them with a large knife.
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Two housemates survived, including one who told police she saw a masked man with “bushy eyebrows” walk out the back door after overhearing sounds of a struggle.
Police found a Ka-Bar knife sheath under Mogen’s body that prosecutors say contained Kohberger’s DNA. Kohberger drove a white Hyundai Elantra, the same type of car investigators identified as the suspect’s vehicle, and allegedly turned his phone off before heading to and from the crime scene, according to an affidavit.
Police, citing phone records, also alleged he stalked the victims’ home a dozen times before the murders and drove by once more hours after.
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At the time of the murders, Kohberger was studying for a Ph.D. in criminology at nearby Washington State University, about 10 miles across the state line.
A judge entered not guilty pleas on Kohberger’s behalf at his arraignment in May 2023.
Kohberger is being held without bail and could face the death penalty if convicted.
50,000 Americans forced to flee homes as fast-moving fire erupts in Los Angeles area
The Hughes Fire in Los Angeles has now burned over 10,000 acres and remains just 14% contained, fire authorities in the city announced Thursday.
The Hughes Fire, which was first reported on Wednesday morning, was first located in the unincorporated community of Castaic in northwestern Los Angeles County. It quickly spread thanks to aggressive winds that have plagued fire-fighting efforts for weeks.
More than 4,000 fire personnel are assigned to Hughes Fire, authorities say.
“The weather is what is predominantly driving this fire and its spread right now. A red flag warning remains in effect until 10 a.m. Friday,” Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said in a statement. “It remains a difficult fire to contain, although we are getting the upper hand.”
CALIFORNIA FIRES: ESSENTIAL PHONE NUMBERS FOR LOS ANGELES-AREA RESIDENTS AND HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM
The blaze has forced some 50,000 people to evacuate, and it also caused temporary road closures on Interstate 5 on Wednesday.
LA FIRES DESTROYED RYAN O’NEAL’S MALIBU HOME HE ONCE SHARED WITH FARRAH FAWCETT
Earlier in the day, Cal Fire urged residents in several regions near the Hughes Fire to leave immediately, including the vicinity of Castaic Lake, Paradise Ranch and the Ridge Route.
“Immediate threat to life. This is a lawful order to LEAVE NOW,” the Cal Fire alert reads. “The area is lawfully closed to public access.”
There have also been reports of a fire in the Sepulveda Pass near Sherman Oaks. The fire was initially reported as one acre, but the Los Angeles Fire Department has since reported all forward progress stopped with the fire held at approximately 40 acres.
“The Evacuation Warning is LIFTED. There are no structures damaged and no injuries reported. Firefighters will remain on scene through the night conducting mop up operations to ensure no hot spots remain. Traffic on the 405 Freeway will likely remain impacted as crews and apparatus work alongside the freeway,” the notice stated.
Mayor Karen Bass says that although the fire is being addressed, all Angelenos should heed the warnings from public safety officials.
“Air support and other aggressive actions have been deployed to fight a new fire just east of the 405,” she posted to X. “To all Angelenos in the area, follow guidance from public safety officials to stay safe.”
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The new fires come amid a deadly wildfire season in the Golden State, as firefighters have battled destructive Southern California blazes for weeks.