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Wednesday, January 15, 2025
LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report Monday, January 13, 2025;Mel Gibson Condemns Abortion: “It’s Human Sacrifice”;Woman Arrested After Attempting to Flush Her Baby Down the Toilet
January 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson ‘Would Accept’ a Preemptive Pardon from Joe Biden
January 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson ‘Would Accept’ a Preemptive Pardon from Joe Biden
Partisan January 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) spoke with White House counsel and “would accept” a preemptive pardon from President Joe Biden, he told Punchbowl News in a Monday interview.
Receiving a preemptive pardon would indicate an admission of guilt, although some Democrats claim a preemptive pardon would only be intended to block President-elect Donald Trump from cleaning up Washington.
Thompson is on the list of names that some Democrats believe should receive a preemptive pardon. Others include his comrades Mark Milley, Christopher Wray, Justice Department lawyers, Joe Biden himself, the whole Biden family, Liz Cheney, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Adam Kinzinger, among others.
“Biden can give them a pardon if he wants to,” Trump told NBC News’s Kristen Welker in December. “And maybe he should.”
Thompson apparently took Trump’s words to heart.
“I believe Donald Trump when he says he’s going to inflict retribution on this,” Thompson claimed. “I believe when he says my name and Liz Cheney and the others. I believe him.”
“A lot of people have said if this guy [Trump] said he’s going to do things, believe him,” Thompson added. “If the president offered a pardon based on the work of the committee, Bennie Thompson would accept it.”
Punchbowl News reported its interview with Thompson:
Breaking news: With President-elect Donald Trump set to take office in less than a week, members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee and White House are privately discussing whether to issue presidential pardons to lawmakers who served on the panel, according to lawmakers and sides.
…
As recently as last week, Biden said he’s considering preemptive pardons for high-profile Trump critics. However, the communication between the White House and some committee members on this topic hasn’t been previously reported. Members who served on the panel haven’t asked Biden for a pardon, though we’re told others have lobbied the White House to grant them.
…
Thompson added that he wanted to see the newly released report from former Special Counsel Jack Smith. Smith asserted that if Trump didn’t win the presidential election, he would’ve been convicted on federal criminal charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election results in order to stay in power.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
Exclusive — Firefighters’ Union President: LAFD Didn’t Report Because It Didn’t Want to Pay Overtime
Exclusive — Firefighters’ Union President: LAFD Didn’t Report Because It Didn’t Want to Pay Overtime
Freddie Escobar, the president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles County (UFLAC), told Breitbart News on Monday that the Palisades Fire was the latest example of the City of Los Angeles being neglected by its leaders.
“I’ve been on the board [of the Los Angeles Fire Department] for 17 years, and for years now, for decades, the LAFD has been neglected by its leaders,” he said. “They have not addressed a woefully understaffed fire department. We need 62 new stations; 100 more firefighters and medics, more engines, trucks, medics. We are woefully understaffed.”
Escobar said the disaster itself was the result of extreme winds and “the man upstairs.” But the sheer scale of the fire — some 24,000 acres burned by the Palisades Fire alone, plus an additional 14,000 acres burned by the Eaton Fire on the eastern side of the city — was the result of a lack of resources, especially personnel, in the hours before the fire.
“Prevented? I don’t know,” he said. “But more could have helped. … If we had the resources that we’ve been asking for, that we need, in a city that’s been neglected by its leaders for decades.”
The scale of the fire has affected the department itself: three firefighters lost their own homes while fighting the Eaton Fire. Moreover, the disaster was compounded by the absence of Mayor Karen Bass, who left to attend a presidential inauguration Ghana despite knowing that extremely high winds, with the potential for spreading fires, were coming.
Firefighters have, privately, been scathing in their condemnation of city leadership, with one telling Breitbart News that firefighters were not “pre-deployed” to handle the Palisades Fire before last Tuesday’s extreme winds because of a lack of personnel resources.
Escobar agreed, saying that L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had made an “operating funds decision” not to pre-deploy.
“You have to pay overtime,” he explained, noting that the department was reluctant to do so. Indeed, in Bass’s much-criticized budget, which cut expenditures on the fire department by $17.5 million, slashed the overtime budget by over $19 million.
The decision was made on January 6, the day before the fire, “not to staff every single resource which would give you additional manpower with the field on red flag [high wind] days,” Escobar said. He noted that, in contrast, “today, tomorrow, we’ve staffed 42 additional engines [and] all of our pumps” in anticipation of the return of the strong Santa Ana winds through Wednesday.
Escobar also faulted the Department of Water and Power for failing to maintain enough water to fight the fires. He read aloud from messages he had received from firefighters on the line: “We had water issues the entire time. Even on the second day… dry hydrants, or hydrants with little to no pressure.” The fact that the Santa Ynez Reservoir atop Pacific Palisades was nearly empty — and had been so since 2022, through two wet winters — was a factor, he said.
He acknowledged that the system of fire hydrants was “not meant for” a wildfire of the scale of the Palisades Fire, noting that the sudden demand for water caused pressure to drop at each available hydrant. Still, he said, there had to be alternative sources made available for emergencies.
Escobar noted the burden on L.A. firefighters included tens of thousands of calls every year to deal with homeless people, which he estimated at about 100 per day.
“We cannot sustain what is going on, with the calls on the homeless, with the staffing we have today,” Escobar said.
He added that the “shoestring budget” of the fire department had also hampered efforts to clear brush in urban areas, and suggested that decision-making authority on clearing brush from property had been removed from individual stations.
In future planning, he said, firefighters had to be consulted on issues such as water management and urban planning.
Asked about whether the LAFD’s policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) had affected the department’s ability to hire, Escobar demurred, saying that staffing problems in the department were primarily due to budgeting.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
PHOTO — Report: 100 L.A. Fire Trucks Wait for Repair as Deadly Blazes Burn City
PHOTO — Report: 100 L.A. Fire Trucks Wait for Repair as Deadly Blazes Burn City
Approximately 100 Los Angeles firefighting vehicles have reportedly been sitting in a repair lot for quite some time as fires devastate community members, leaving homes and businesses in ashes.
Per the Daily Mail, a local activist took photos of the LA Fire Department’s Bureau of Supply and Maintenance lot at North Avenue 19 that apparently show the red vehicles parked next to each other, the outlet reported on Tuesday.
During a recent interview, LAFD Fire Chief said, “We have over 100 fire apparatus out of service. Having these apparatus and the proper amount of mechanics would have helped.”
The news comes after Crowley confirmed that city officials in Los Angeles failed her and her department, per Breitbart News.
The Mail article continued:
The LAFD has a total of 183 trucks, meaning that more than half of the city’s fire trucks are out of commission as the fires continue to burn through dense urban spaces, killing at least 24, displacing more than 200,000 and destroying over 12,000 buildings.
It comes just three months after the LAFD made a request to the city’s council to replace the entire fleet at the cost of $96.5million.
On Friday, KCAL News reported that there were dozens of LAFD apparatus parked at what is called the “bone yard.”
A reporter for the outlet said there were fire engines, ambulances, and ladder trucks at the site. “This is essentially a maintenance yard,” he said, noting there had been a budget request from Crowley.
She told the fire commission that “The LAFD emergency fleet is in constant state of disrepair attributed to years of deferred maintenance, deferred vehicle replacement, and the lack of resources for adequate staffing and replacement parts”:
Meanwhile, Los Angeles residents are demanding Mayor Karen Bass (D) be recalled via a petition that has as of Tuesday morning reached 135,442 signatures, per Breitbart News.
“We, the undersigned residents of Los Angeles and concerned citizens, urgently call for the immediate recall of Mayor Karen Bass due to her gross mismanagement and failure to effectively respond to the devastating 2025 fires in and around the city of Los Angeles,” the petition reads.
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