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A federal grand jury subpoena has been served on the Los Angeles Fire Department for firefighters’ text messages and other communications about smoke or hot spots in the area of the Jan. 1 Lachman brushfire, which reignited six days later into the massive Palisades fire, according to an internal department memo.

The Times reported last week that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to pack up their hoses and leave the burn area the day after the Lachman fire, even though they complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks were hot to the touch. In the memo, the department notified its employees of the subpoena, which it said was issued by the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

“The subpoena seeks any and all communications, including text messages, related to reports of fire, smoke, or hotspots received between” 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and 10 a.m. on Jan. 7, said the memo, which was dated Tuesday.

A spokesperson with the U.S. attorney’s office declined to confirm that a subpoena was issued and otherwise did not comment. The memo did not include a copy of the subpoena.

The memo said the subpoena was issued in connection with an “ongoing criminal investigation” conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Last month, an ATF investigation led to the arrest of former Pacific Palisades resident Jonathan Rinderknecht, who was charged with deliberately setting the Jan. 1 fire shortly after midnight near a trailhead.

It is unclear from the memo whether the subpoena is directly related to the case against Rinderknecht, who has pleaded not guilty.

During the Rinderknecht investigation, ATF agents concluded that the fire smoldered and burned for days underground “within the root structure of dense vegetation,” until heavy winds caused it to spark the Palisades inferno, according to an affidavit attached to the criminal complaint against Rinderknecht.

The Palisades fire, the most destructive in the city’s history, killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes, businesses and other structures.

Last week, The Times cited text messages among firefighters in reporting that crews mopping up the Lachman fire had warned the battalion chief that remnants of the blaze were still smoldering.

The battalion chief listed as being on duty the day firefighters were ordered to leave the Lachman fire, Mario Garcia, has not responded to requests for comment.

In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene on Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a “bad idea” to leave because of the visible signs of smoking terrain, which crews feared could start a new fire if left unprotected.

“And the rest is history,” the firefighter wrote in recent weeks.

A second firefighter was told that tree stumps were still hot at the location when the crew packed up and left, according to the texts. And a third firefighter said this month that crew members were upset when told to pack up and leave but that they could not ignore orders, according to the texts. The third firefighter also wrote that he and his colleagues knew immediately that the Palisades fire was a rekindle of the Jan. 1 blaze.

The Fire Department has not answered questions about the firefighter accounts in the text messages but has previously said that officials did everything they could to ensure that the Lachman fire was fully extinguished. The department has not provided dispatch records of all firefighting and mop-up activity before Jan. 7.

After The Times published the story, Mayor Karen Bass directed interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva to launch an investigation into the matter, while critics of her administration have asked for an independent inquiry.

The Los Angeles Police Department has released a report that identifies several shortcomings in its response to the devastating Palisades fire, including communication breakdowns, inconsistent record-keeping and poor coordination at times with other agencies — most notably the city’s Fire Department.

The after-action report called the January blaze a “once in a lifetime cataclysmic event” and praised the heroic actions of many officers, but said the LAPD’s missteps presented a “valuable learning opportunity” with more climate-related disasters likely looming in the future.

LAPD leaders released the 92-page report and presented the findings to the Police Commission at the civilian oversight panel’s public meeting Tuesday.

The report found that while the Fire Department was the lead agency, coordination with the LAPD was “poor” on Jan. 7, the first day of the fire. Though personnel from both agencies were working out of the same command post, they failed to “collectively establish a unified command structure or identify shared objectives, missions, or strategies,” the report said.

Uncertainty about who was in charge was another persistent issue, with more confusion sown by National Guard troops that were deployed to the area. Department leaders were given no clear guidelines on what the guard’s role would be when they arrived, the report said.

The mix-ups were the result of responding to a wildfire of unprecedented scale, officials said. At times the flames were advancing at 300 yards a minute, LAPD assistant chief Michael Rimkunas told the commission.

“Hopefully we don’t have to experience another natural disaster, but you never know,” Rimkunas said, adding that the endeavor was “one of the largest and most complex traffic control operations in its history.”

Between Jan. 11 and Jan. 16, when the LAPD’s operation was at its peak, more than 700 officers a day were assigned to the fire, the report said.

The report found that officials failed to maintain a chronological log about the comings and goings of LAPD personnel at the fire zone.

“While it is understandable that the life-threatening situation at hand took precedence over the completion of administrative documentation,” the report said, “confusion at the command post about how many officers were in the field “resulted in diminished situational awareness.”

After the fire first erupted, the department received more than 160 calls for assistance, many of them for elderly or disabled residents who were stuck in their homes — though the report noted that the disruption of cell service contributed to widespread confusion.

The communication challenges continued throughout the day, the report found.

Encroaching flames forced authorities to move their command post several times. An initial staging area, which was in the path of the evacuation route and the fire, was consumed within 30 minutes, authorities said.

But because of communication breakdowns caused by downed radio and cellphone towers, dispatchers sometimes had trouble reaching officers in the field and police were forced to “hand deliver” important paper documents from a command post to its staging area on Zuma Beach, about 20 miles away.

Several commissioners asked about reports of journalists being turned away from fire zones in the weeks that followed the fire’s outbreak.

Assistant Chief Dominic Choi said there was some trepidation about whether to allow journalists into the fire-ravaged area while authorities were still continuing their search for bodies of fire victims.

Commissioner Rasha Gerges Shields said that while she had some concerns about the LAPD’s performance, overall she was impressed and suggested that officers should be commended for their courage. The department has said that dozens of officers lost their homes to the fires.

The report also recommended that the department issue masks and personal protective equipment after there was a shortage for officers on the front lines throughout the first days of the blaze.

The Palisades fire was one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history, engulfing nearly 23,000 acres, leveling more than 6,000 structures and killing 12 people. More than 60,000 people were evacuated. The deaths of five people within L.A. city limits remain under investigation by the LAPD’s Major Crimes Division and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The LAPD reports details how at 11:15 a.m., about 45 minutes after the first 911 calls, the call was made to issue a citywide tactical alert, the report said. The department stayed in a heightened state of alert for 29 days, allowing it to draw resources from other parts of the city, but also meaning that certain calls would not receive a timely police response.

As the flames began to engulf a nearby hillside, more officers began responding to the area, including a contingent that had been providing security at a visit by President Trump.

Initially, LAPD officers operated in largely a rescue- and traffic-control role. But as the fire wore on, police began to conduct crime suppression sweeps in the evacuation zones where opportunistic burglars were breaking into homes they knew were empty.

In all, 90 crimes were reported in the fire zone, including four crimes against people, a robbery and three aggravated assaults, 46 property crimes, and 40 other cases, ranging from a weapons violation to identity theft. The department made 19 arrests.

The new report comes weeks after the city of Los Angeles put out its own assessment of the fire response — and on the heels of federal prosecutors arresting and charging a 29-year-old Uber driver with intentionally setting a fire Jan. 1 that later grew into the Palisades fire.

The LAPD’s Major Crimes and Robbery-Homicide units also worked with the ATF to investigate the fire’s cause.

Oct. 29 (UPI) — Two U.S. attorneys in Washington, D.C., have been suspended after turning in a sentencing memo that described the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” sources said.

The prosecutors were assistant U.S. attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, who were prosecuting a case against Taylor Taranto. Taranto was pardoned by President Donald Trump for his part in the Jan. 6 riots. He was arrested for unrelated threats and firearms charges, and the description of the capitol insurrection was part of a sentencing memo for that case, according to anonymous sources reported by ABC News, Politico and The Washington Post. Taranto is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

White and Valdivia were locked out of their government-issued devices Wednesday and told they will be placed on leave. It happened just hours after they filed the memo, sources told ABC.

The memo asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to sentence Taranto to 27 months in prison for a hoax threat against the National Institute of Standards and Technology and for driving through President Barack Obama‘s neighborhood with a van full of guns and ammunition.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who leads the Washington, D.C., office prosecuting Taranto, declined to comment.

But Pirro released a statement on the case.

“While we don’t comment on personnel decisions, we want to make very clear that we take violence and threats of violence against law enforcement, current or former government officials extremely seriously,” Politico reported Pirro said in a statement. “We have and will continue to vigorously pursue justice against those who commit or threaten violence without regard to the political party of the offender or the target.”

It wasn’t clear whether the two prosecutors were told why they were put on leave or if the suspensions would change Taranto’s sentencing date.

In the memo, White and Valdivia said the following about Jan. 6:

“On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”

WASHINGTON — A man whose convictions for storming the U.S. Capitol were erased by President Trump’s mass pardons has been arrested on a charge that he threatened to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Christopher P. Moynihan is accused of sending a text message on Friday noting that Jeffries, a New York Democrat, would be making a speech in New York City this week.

“I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” Moynihan wrote, according to a report by a state police investigator. Moynihan also wrote that Jeffries “must be eliminated” and texted, “I will kill him for the future,” the police report says.

Moynihan, of Clinton, N.Y., is charged with a felony count of making a terroristic threat. It was unclear if he had an attorney representing him in the case, and efforts to contact him and his parents by email and phone were unsuccessful.

Moynihan, 34, was sentenced to 21 months in prison for joining a mob’s Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In January, he was among hundreds of convicted Capitol rioters who received a pardon from Trump on the Republican president’s first day back in the White House.

Jeffries thanked investigators “for their swift and decisive action to apprehend a dangerous individual who made a credible death threat against me with every intention to carry it out.”

“Unfortunately, our brave men and women in law enforcement are being forced to spend their time keeping our communities safe from these violent individuals who should never have been pardoned,” Jeffries said in a statement.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was asked about the case during a news conference on Tuesday and said he did not know any details of the threat against Jeffries.

“We denounce violence from anybody, anytime. Those people should be arrested and tried,” said Johnson, a Louisiana Republican.

The New York State Police said they were notified of the threat by an FBI task force on Saturday. Moynihan was arraigned on Sunday in a local court in New York’s Dutchess County. He is due back in the Town of Clinton Court on Thursday.

Dutchess County Dist. Atty. Anthony Parisi said his office is reviewing the case “for legal and factual sufficiency.”

“Threats made against elected officials and members of the public will not be tolerated,” Parisi said in a statement on Tuesday.

On Jan. 6, Moynihan breached police barricades before entering the Capitol through the Rotunda door. He entered the Senate chamber, rifled through a notebook on a senator’s desk and joined other rioters in shouting and chanting at the Senate dais, prosecutors said.

“Moynihan did not leave the Senate Chamber until he was forced out by police,” they wrote.

In 2022, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper convicted Moynihan of a felony for obstructing the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress for certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Moynihan also pleaded guilty to five other riot-related counts.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

Oct. 21 (UPI) — A Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by U.S. President Donald Trump was again arrested following an alleged threat to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Christopher P. Moynihan, 34, was arrested over the weekend by New York State Police after he allegedly sent text messages on Friday to an unidentified associate in which he threatened the life of Jeffries, D-N.Y.

“Hakeem Jeffries makes a speech in a few days in NYC I cannot allow this terrorist to live,” Moynihan was quoted in a legal complaint filed by prosecutors in Duchess County.

Jeffries, 55, gave remarks Monday in Manhattan at the Economic Club of New York.

On Sunday, Moynihan was charged with a class D felony of making a terroristic threat.

“Even if I am hated he must be eliminated. I will kill (Jeffries) for the future,” he wrote.

Moynihan was arraigned in Clinton, a Hudson Valley town some 50 miles east of Syracuse, and remanded to a Duchess County facility “in lieu of $10,000 cash bail, a $30,000 bond, or an $80,000 partially secured bond,” according to state police.

He pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor charges and declared guilty in August 2022 of obstructing an official government proceeding on Jan. 6, 2021 after Trump’s false declaration that he won the 2020 election.

The Jan. 6 insurrection injured more than 140 Capitol police officers and caused damage to the historic complex to the tune of millions of dollars and delayed 2020’s electoral college count in Congress.

Moynihan, said to be among the first to breach Capitol police barricades to enter the building, is one in a string of Trump-pardoned convicted criminals to later be re-arrested on newer charges.

According to court records, Moynihan has a long history of drug use and petty crimes.

In February 2022, Moynihan was sentenced 21 months in jail until pardoned by Trump along with nearly 1,600 Capitol rioters almost immediately after Trump reassumed office.

Moynihan’s investigation was initiated via the FBI part of a growing trend of threats against U.S. lawmakers.

Meanwhile, U.S. Capitol Police said last month the number of threat investigations this year rose past 14,000, which was higher than the total number of cases in 2024.

Federal prosecutors sued Southern California Edison, saying its equipment ignited the 2019 Saddle Ridge fire, which burned nearly 9,000 acres and damaged or destroyed more than 100 homes in the San Fernando Valley.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Tuesday claims that Edison was negligent in designing, constructing and maintaining its high-voltage transmission line that runs through Sylmar. Equipment on the line is now suspected of causing both the 2019 fire as well as the Hurst fire on Jan. 7.

Edison has acknowledged that its equipment may have ignited the Jan. 7 fire, but it has been arguing for years in a separate lawsuit brought by Saddle Ridge fire victims that its equipment did not start the 2019 fire.

Lawyers for the victims say they have evidence showing the transmission line is not properly grounded, leading to two wildfires in six years. Edison’s lawyers call those claims an “exotic ignition theory” that is wrong.

In the new lawsuit, the federal government is seeking to recover costs for the damage the 2019 fire caused to 800 acres of national forest, including for the destruction of wildlife and habitats. The lawsuit also requests reimbursement for the federal government’s costs of fighting the fire.

“The ignition of the Saddleridge Fire by SCE’s power and transmission lines and equipment is prima facie evidence of SCE’s negligence,” states the complaint, which was filed by acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli.

“The United States has made a demand on SCE for payment of the costs and damages incurred by the United States to suppress the Saddleridge Fire and to undertake emergency rehabilitation efforts,” the complaint said. “SCE has not paid any part of the sum.”

David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesman, said the company was reviewing the federal government’s lawsuit and “will respond through the legal process.”

“Our hearts are with the people and communities that were affected,” he said.

The 2019 wildfire tore through parts of Sylmar, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch, killing at least one person.

The fire ignited under a transmission tower just three minutes after a steel part known as a y-clevis broke on another tower more than two miles away, according to two government investigations into the fire. The equipment failure on that tower caused a fault and surge in power.

In the ongoing lawsuit by victims of the 2019 fire, the plaintiffs argue that the power surge traveled along the transmission lines, causing some of the towers miles away to become so hot that they ignited the dry vegetation underneath one of them. Government investigators also found evidence of burning at the base of a second tower nearby, according to their reports.

The lawyers for the victims say the same problem — that some towers are not properly grounded — caused the Hurst fire on the night of Jan. 7.

“The evidence will show that five separate fires ignited at five separate SCE transmission tower bases in the same exact manner as the fire that started the Saddle Ridge fire,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing this summer.

In that filing, the lawyers included parts of a deposition they took of an L.A. Fire Department captain who said he believed that Edison was “deceptive” for not informing the department that its equipment failed just minutes before the 2019 blaze ignited, and for having an employee offer to buy key surveillance video from that night from a business next to one of its towers.

Edison has denied its employee offered to buy the video. A spokeswoman said the utility did not tell the fire department that its equipment failed because it happened at a tower miles away from where the fire ignited.

Residents who witnessed both fires told The Times they saw fires burning under transmission towers on the evening of the 2019 fire and the night of Jan. 7.

Roberto Delgado and his wife, Ninoschka Perez, can see the towers from their Sylmar home. They told The Times they saw a fire on Jan. 7 under the same tower where investigators say the 2019 fire started.

The family had to quickly flee in the case of each fire.

“We were traumatized,” Delgado said. “If I could move my family away from here I would.”

The Jan. 7 fire burned through 799 acres and required thousands of people to evacuate. Firefighters extinguished the blaze before it destroyed any homes.

Los Angeles firefighters were hampered by a lack of resources for red flag weather conditions in their initial response to the Palisades fire, an internal after-action review report found.

The long-awaited 70-page report, produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department, was released late Wednesday afternoon on the heels of an announcement by federal prosecutors that they had arrested and charged a man with intentionally setting a fire on Jan. 1 that later reignited and became the Palisades fire.

Federal investigators determined that the Jan. 7 fire was a so-called holdover from the Jan. 1 fire, continuing to smolder and burn underground after firefighters thought they had extinguished it. The investigators said that heavy winds six days later caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground in what became one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history.

In its after-action report, the Fire Department listed almost 100 challenges that firefighters faced during the Palisades fire, including an inability to secure the origin of the fire, an ineffective process for recalling firefighters who were off-duty to come back into work, and fire chiefs with little to no experience handling such a major incident. During the initial attack, the report said, most firefighters worked for more than 36 hours without rest.

The report cited a delay in communicating evacuation orders, which resulted in spontaneous evacuations without structured traffic control, causing people to block routes to the fire, the report said. The initial staging area, which was in the path of the evacuation route and the fire, was consumed by flames within 30 minutes, the report said.

The Palisades fire, which started at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 7, was one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history, leveling thousands of homes and killing 12 people.

A Times investigation found that LAFD officials did not pre-deploy any engines to the Palisades ahead of the fire, despite warnings about extreme weather. In preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force.

Those engines could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Federal investigators have determined that the wildfire that leveled much of Pacific Palisades on Jan. 7 was a so-called “holdover” from a smaller fire that was set intentionally on New Year’s Day, about a week earlier.

After Los Angeles firefighters suppressed the Jan. 1 fire known as the Lachman fire, it continued to smolder and burn underground, “unbeknownst to anyone,” according to federal officials. They said heavy winds six days later caused the underground fire to surface and spread above ground in what became one of the costliest and most destructive disasters in city history.

The revelations — unveiled in a criminal complaint and attached affidavit Wednesday charging the alleged arsonist, Jonathan Rinderknecht — raise questions about what the Los Angeles Fire Department could have done to prevent the conflagration in the days leading up to the expected windstorm on Jan. 7 and the extraordinary fire risk that would come with it.

“This affidavit puts the responsibility on the fire department,” said Ed Nordskog, former head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s arson unit. “There needs to be a commission examining why this rekindled fire was allowed to reignite.”

He added: “The arsonist set the first fire, but the Fire Department proactively has a duty to do certain things.”

A Times investigation found that LAFD officials did not pre-deploy any engines to the Palisades ahead of the Jan. 7 fire, despite warnings about extreme weather. In preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force.

Those engines could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.

Kenny Cooper, special agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who was involved in the investigation into the Palisades fire’s origin, said the blame for the fire’s re-ignition lies solely with the person who started it.

“That fire burned deep within the ground, in roots and in structure, and remained active for several days,” Cooper said. “No matter how good they are, they can’t see that, right?”

But, he said, wildland firefighters commonly patrol for days or weeks to prevent re-ignitions.

When he worked at a state forestry agency, he said, “we would have a lightning strike, and it would hit a tree, and it would burn for days, sometimes weeks, and then ignite into a forest fire. We would go suppress that, and then every day, for weeks on end, we would patrol those areas to make sure they didn’t reignite,” he said. “If we saw evidence of smoke or heat, then we would provide resources to that. So that, I know that’s a common practice, and it’s just, it’s a very difficult fire burning underground.”

The affidavit provides a window into the firefighting timeline on Jan. 1, when just after midnight, the Lachman fire was ignited near a small clearing near the Temescal Ridge Trail.

12:13 a.m.: An image taken from a UCSD camera, approximately two-tenths of a mile away, shows a bright spot in the upper left — the Lachman fire.

12:20 a.m.: Rinderknecht drives down Palisades Drive, passing fire engines heading up Palisades Drive, responding to the fire.

That night, the LAFD, with help from the Los Angeles County Fire Department, used water drops from aircraft and hose lines, as well as handlines dug by L.A. County crews, to attack the fire, according to the complaint. Firefighters continued suppression efforts during the day on Jan. 1, wetting down areas within the fire perimeter. When the suppression efforts were over, the affidavit said, the fire crews left fire hoses on site, in case they needed to be redeployed.

Jan. 2: LAFD personnel returned to the scene to collect the fire hoses. According to the affidavit, it appeared to them that the fire was fully extinguished.

But investigators determined that during the Lachman fire, a firebrand became seated within the dense vegetation, continuing to smolder and burn within the roots underground. Strong winds brought the embers to the surface, to grow into a deadly conflagration.

WASHINGTON — The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter said.

The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with the Associated Press. The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20.

The photographs at issue showed a group of agents taking the knee during one of the demonstrations after the May 2020 killing of Floyd, a death that led to a national reckoning over policing and racial injustice and sparked widespread anger after millions of people saw video of the arrest. The kneeling had angered some in the FBI but was also understood as a possible deescalation tactic during a period of protests.

The FBI Agents Assn. confirmed in a statement late Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of FBI Director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.

“As Director Patel has repeatedly stated, nobody is above the law,” the agents association said. “But rather than providing these agents with fair treatment and due process, Patel chose to again violate the law by ignoring these agents’ constitutional and legal rights instead of following the requisite process.”

An FBI spokesman declined to comment Friday.

The firings come amid a broader personnel purge at the bureau as Patel works to reshape the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.

Five agents and top-level executives were known to have been summarily fired last month in a wave of ousters that current and former officials say has contributed to declining morale.

One of those, Steve Jensen, helped oversee investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol. Another, Brian Driscoll, served as acting FBI director in the early days of the second Trump administration and resisted Justice Department demands to supply the names of agents who investigated Jan. 6.

A third, Chris Meyer, was incorrectly rumored on social media to have participated in the investigation into President Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A fourth, Walter Giardina, participated in high-profile investigations like the one of Trump advisor Peter Navarro.

A lawsuit filed by Jensen, Driscoll and another fired FBI supervisor, Spencer Evans, alleged that Patel communicated that he understood that it was “likely illegal” to fire agents based on cases they worked but was powerless to stop it because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who investigated Trump.

Patel denied at a congressional hearing last week taking orders from the White House on whom to fire and said anyone who has been fired failed to meet the FBI’s standards.

Trump, who was twice impeached and is the only U.S. president with a felony conviction, was indicted on multiple criminal charges in two felony cases. Both cases were dismissed after he was elected, following long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.