California Governor Gavin Newsom attacked Ambassador Ric Grenell on Monday during a press conference on the sixth anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton Fires, slamming him for the “audacity” of his criticism of the state’s recovery effort.
As Breitbart News reported, Grenell said Sunday that he had advised the president not to send California fire relief until underlying problems with the state’s water and forest management are fixed.
Newsom is currently seeking $40 billion in federal aid — but also attacking President Donald Trump’s policies, including on federal immigration law enforcement.
Recently, the governor claimed — wrongly, as it turned out — that Trump had no authority to federalize the California National Guard to suppress riots in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Newsom has also signed $50 million in spending to fight Trump’s policies in court, despite the state’s budget deficits.
Since then, there has been no progress on Newsom’s aid request; federal funding for fire relief is being paid out from money allocated during the closing days of the Biden administration and renewed by Congress in a continuing resolution that expires at the end of the fiscal year — i.e. at the end of September.
There was no funding for California fire aid in the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed on the Fourth of July.
Grenell, the president’s envoy for special missions, who has provided federal leadership on the ground in California during the wildfire recovery effort, posted on X the day before that “Sacramento Democrats” were still opposing common sense initiatives, and that he had advised the president not to spend more on California until the state showed it was serious about reform.
In California…
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) July 6, 2025
We live on the ocean but our Governor can’t figure out how to get more water - so he spends millions of tax dollars telling people to not water their lawns and to take faster showers.
We have 33 million acres of forest land but our Governor can’t figure out how…
At the anniversary event, at which elected officials largely congratulated themselves for their work thus far, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was notably absent, as she had gone to MacArthur Park to protest an ICE raid.
Officials noted the rapid progress of hazardous waste and debris removal — both of which are primarily handled by the federal government — but admitted the slow progress of local permitting for rebuilding.
Newsom responded to Grenell when he was asked by a journalist about the link between the fire recovery effort and federal immigration enforcement; the question implied that illegal migrants are central to construction and rebuilding.
The governor claimed that the illegal labor force represented 41% of the local workforce in construction, and was therefore “foundational” to the recovery effort. He went on to attack Trump, and Grenell, for their stance:
They know what they’re doing, and then again, they have no idea what they’re doing, and their ignorance is legendary, and the impacts of this will be felt in the recovery. And that’s on them. Donald Trump owns that. He owns the cruelty. He owns the arrogance, not just the ignorance. It’s by definition weakness. Only a weak person puts on a show like that with horses and bringing the National Guard that should be out there raking his forests. Ric Grinell, the so-called czar, had the audacity today [sic] to attack this state on this anniversary for not raking its forest when we have a federal forest fire over 80,000 acres on Donald Trump’s forest that these folks behind me are managing. California is an incident command leader on that, that has provided 30% of that fire to now be contained.
Newsom did not explain why American contractors and workers could not handle the rebuilding effort.
He also described his imminent trip to rural South Carolina — the first Democratic Party presidential primary state — an hour after the anniversary event as an altruistic effort “to highlight and reinforce that message, that we’re all in this together.” The governor is widely believed to be exploring a presidential run in 2028.
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 Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. 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: file
