Trump earlier said the governor was at fault for the devastation the wildfires have caused in Los Angeles and should resign.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused President-elect Donald Trump of politicizing the ongoing wildfire crisis after the incoming president blamed his leadership for the fires currently raging through the Los Angeles area.
Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Newsom
said: “Kids have lost their schools. Communities have lost their churches. Families have lost their homes. Some have even lost their lives. And the president-elect’s response is to politicize it.”The governor praised President Joe Biden’s response to the wildfires.
“I stood next to a president of the United States of America today, and I was proud to be with Joe Biden, and he had the backs of every single person in this community, he didn’t play politics,” Newsom said.
Biden visited Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he met with Newsom and federal, state, and local officials at a fire station and was briefed on the situation.
Following the briefing, Biden
approved a major disaster declaration for California, allowing federal funding to be made available for emergency response costs.
The White House announced later on Wednesday that Biden had also
canceled a planned trip to Italy to focus on directing the full federal response to the California fires.
Newsom’s comments were made in reply to Trump’s
comments on Wednesday that Newsom had refused to sign a water restoration plan “that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the north” to flow into other parts of the Golden State, including those currently impacted by the fires.
Trump criticized what he
described as “gross incompetence and mismanagement” by the state and federal government in a series of posts on Truth Social.
He said the fires in Los Angeles may go down as the worst in U.S. history and that there are doubts some insurance companies will have “enough to pay for this catastrophe.”
There has been an
ongoing debate about whether California should divert some water to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay to protect smelt and other fish or instead send it to Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities.
Trump, who has championed diverting the water to farmers and residents in those areas, has repeatedly clashed with Newsom over the issue.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!),” Trump said, referring to Newsom. “Now the ultimate price is being paid. ... On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, [no] firefighting planes. A true disaster!”
In a separate
post later on Wednesday, Trump said Newsom should resign.
Shortly after Trump’s remarks, Newsom’s office said in a
statement that no water restoration declaration document exists, and called Trump’s claims “pure fiction.”
Newsom “is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” his office said.
On Feb. 19, 2020, President Trump met with officials in Bakersfield, California, to sign a presidential memorandum aimed at increasing water flow to the state. The memorandum sought to achieve this by loosening restrictions that protect species such as the delta smelt.
California Attorney General Becerra sued over the Trump administration’s rules the following day. The
lawsuit claimed that the Trump administration’s actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
“The lawsuit challenges the actions of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency which adopted the biological opinions. The lawsuit also challenges the biological decisions issued in October 2019 by the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which lack sufficient protections for endangered and threatened fish,” a Feb 20, 2020,
statement from Becerra’s office said.
In May 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California
granted a preliminary injunction halting the Trump administration’s plans. The federal government then initiated a review of the contested biological opinions.
The Epoch Times contacted a Trump spokesperson for comment but received no reply by publication time.
