Department

Days before the Trump administration was supposed to file its response to a California lawsuit challenging its targeting of gender-affirming care providers, attorneys for the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal judge to temporarily halt the proceedings.

Given the federal shutdown, they argued, they just didn’t have the lawyers to do the work.

“Department of Justice attorneys and employees of the federal defendants are prohibited from working, even on a voluntary basis, except in very limited circumstances, including ‘emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property,’” they wrote in their filing Oct. 1, the first day of the shutdown.

The district judge presiding over the case, which California filed in federal court in Massachusetts along with a coalition of other Democrat-led states, agreed, and promptly granted the request.

It was just one example of the now weeks-old federal shutdown grinding to a halt important litigation between California and the Trump administration, in policy battles with major implications for people’s lives.

The same day, in the same Massachusetts court, Justice Department attorneys were granted a pause in a lawsuit in which California and other states are challenging mass firings at the U.S. Department of Education, after noting that department funding had been suspended and it didn’t know “when such funding will be restored by Congress.”

The same day in U.S. District Court in Central California, the Trump administration asked for a similar pause in a lawsuit that it had brought against California, challenging the state’s refusal to provide its voter registration rolls to the administration.

Justice Department attorneys wrote that they “greatly regret any disruption caused to the Court and the other litigants,” but needed to pause the proceedings until they were “permitted to resume their usual civil litigation functions.”

Since then, the court in Central California has advised the parties of alternative dispute resolution options and outside groups — including the NAACP — have filed motions to intervene in the case, but no major developments have occurred.

The pauses in litigation — only a portion of those that have occurred in courts across the country — were an example of sweeping, real-world, high-stakes effects of the federal government shutdown that average Americans may not consider when thinking about the shutdown’s impact on their lives.

Federal employees working in safety and other crucial roles — such as air traffic controllers — have remained on the job, even without pay, but many others have been forced to stay home. The Justice Department did not spell out which of its attorneys had been benched by the shutdown, but made clear that some who had been working on the cases in question were no longer doing so.

Federal litigation often takes years to resolve, and brief pauses in proceedings are not uncommon. However, extended disruptions — such as one that could occur if the shutdown drags on — would take a toll, forestalling legal answers in some of the most important policy battles in the country.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office has sued the Trump administration more than 40 times since January, has not challenged every request for a pause by the Trump administration — especially in cases where the status quo favors the state.

However, it has challenged pauses in other cases, with some success.

For example, in that same Massachusetts federal courthouse Oct. 1, Justice Department attorneys asked a judge to temporarily halt proceedings in a case in which California and other states are suing to block the administration’s targeted defunding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers.

Their arguments were the same as in the other cases: Given the shutdown, they didn’t have the attorneys to do the necessary legal work.

In response, attorneys for California and the other states pushed back, noting that the shutdown had not stopped Department of Health and Human Services officials from moving forward with the measure to defund Planned Parenthood — so the states’ residents remained at imminent risk of losing necessary healthcare.

“The risks of irreparable harms are especially high because it is unclear how long the lapse in appropriations will continue, meaning relief may not be available for months at which point numerous health centers will likely be forced to close due to a lack of funds,” the states argued.

On Oct. 8, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani denied the government’s request for a pause, finding that the states’ interest in proceeding with the case “outweighs” the administration’s interest in pausing it.

Talwani’s argument, in part, was that her order denying a pause would provide Justice Department officials the legal authority to continue litigating the case despite the shutdown.

Bonta said in a statement that “Trump owns this shutdown” and “the devastation it’s causing to hardworking everyday Americans,” adding that his office will not let Trump use it to cause even more harm by delaying relief in court cases.

“We’re not letting his Administration use this shutdown as an excuse to continue implementing his unlawful agenda unchecked. Until we get relief for Californians, we’re not backing down — and neither are the courts,” Bonta said. “We can’t wait for Trump to finally let our government reopen before these cases are heard.”

Trump and Republicans in Congress have blamed the shutdown on Democrats.

Fort Lauderdale, Fla. — Some airports around the country are refusing to play a video with a message from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in which she blames Democrats for the federal government shutdown and its impacts on TSA operations because of its political content.

Airports in Las Vegas, Charlotte, Atlanta, Phoenix, Seattle and more say the video goes against their airport policy or regulations that prohibit political messaging in their facilities.

Various government agencies, in emails to workers and on websites, have adopted language that blames Democrats for the shutdown, with some experts arguing it could be in violation of the 1939 Hatch Act, which restricts certain political activities by federal employees.

The shutdown has halted routine operations and left airports scrambling with flight disruptions. Democrats say any deal to reopen the government has to address their healthcare demands, and Republicans say they won’t negotiate until they agree to fund the government. Insurance premiums would double if Congress fails to renew the subsidy payments that expire Dec. 31.

In the video, Noem says that TSA’s “top priority” is to help make travel pleasant and efficient while keeping passengers safe.

“However, Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this, many of our operations are impacted, and most of our TSA employees are working without pay,” she continues.

The Transportation Security Administration falls under the Department of Homeland Security. Roughly 61,000 of the agency’s 64,130 employees are required to continue working during the shutdown. The Department said Friday that the video is being rolled out to airports across the country.

A DHS spokeswoman responded to a request for comment restating some of the message from Noem’s video.

“It’s unfortunate our workforce has been put in this position due to political gamesmanship. Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government,” spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.

The Harry Reid International Airport, in Las Vegas, said it had to “remain mindful of the Hatch Act’s restrictions.”

“Per airport regulations, the terminals and surrounding areas are not designated public forums, and the airport’s intent is to avoid the use of the facility for political or religious advocacy,” the statement said.

Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins said the county north of New York City won’t play the video at its local airport. In a statement, he called the video “inappropriate, unacceptable, and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials,” and said its tone is “unnecessarily alarmist” as it relates to operations at Westchester County Airport.

“At a time when we should be focused on ensuring stability, collaboration and preparedness, this type of messaging only distracts from the real issues, and undermines public trust,” he said.

Even in red states, airports weren’t showing the video for various reasons. Salt Lake City International Airport wasn’t playing the video because state law prohibits using city-owned property for political purposes, said airport spokesperson Nancy Volmer.

The airport in Billings, Mont., “politely declined” even though it has screens that could show the video with audio, assistant aviation director Paul Khera said Tuesday.

“We don’t want to get in the middle of partisan politics,” Khera said. “We like to stay middle of the road, we didn’t want to play that video.”

Gomez Licon writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Rio Yamat in Las Vegas and Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colo. contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump is making this government shutdown unlike any the country has ever seen, enabling his budget office a rare authority to pick winners and losers — who gets paid or fired — in an unprecedented restructuring across the federal workforce.

As the shutdown enters its third week, the Office and Management and Budget said Tuesday it’s preparing to “batten down the hatches” with more reductions in force to come. The president calls budget chief Russ Vought the “grim reaper” who’s seized on the opportunity to fund Trump’s priorities, paying the military while slashing employees in health, education, the sciences and other areas with actions that have been criticized as illegal and are facing court challenges.

“Pay the troops, pay law enforcement, continue the RIFs, and wait,” OMB said in a social media post.

With Congress at a standstill — the Republican-led House refusing to return to session and the Senate stuck in a loop of failed votes to reopen government as Democrats demand health care funds — the White House’s budget office quickly filled the void.

From Project 2025 to the White House

Vought, a chief architect of the conservative Project 2025 policy book, is reshaping the size and scope of federal government in ways similar to those envisioned in the blueprint. It is exactly what certain lawmakers, particularly Democrats, feared if Congress failed to fund the government.

Trump’s priorities — supporting the military and pursuing his mass deportation agenda — have been kept largely uninterrupted, despite the closures. But employees in health, education, the sciences and other federal departments are among those being laid off. As many as 750,000 workers are being furloughed.

“Donald Trump and Russ Vought and all of their cronies are using this moment to terrorize these patriots,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., standing with federal workers Tuesday outside the White House budget office.

Van Hollen said it’s “a big fat lie” when Trump and his budget director say that the shutdown is making them fire federal workers. “It is also illegal and we will see them in court,” Van Hollen said.

Shutdown grinds into a third week

Now on its 14th day, the federal closure is quickly becoming among the longest government shutdowns. Congress failed to meet the Oct. 1 deadline to pass the annual appropriations bills needed to fund the government as the Democrats demanded a deal to preserve expiring health care funds that provide subsidies for people to purchase insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday said he has nothing to negotiate with the Democrats until they vote to reopen the government.

The Republican speaker welcomed OMB’s latest actions to pay some workers and fire others.

“They have every right to move the funds around,” Johnson said at a press conference at the Capitol. If the Democrats want to challenge the Trump administration in court, Johnson said, “bring it.”

Typically, federal workers are furloughed during a lapse in funding, traditionally with back pay once government funding is restored. But Vought’s budget office announced late last week the reductions in forces had begun. More than 4,000 workers received layoff notices over the weekend.

Military pay, deportations on track

At the same time, Trump instructed the military to find money to ensure service personnel wouldn’t miss paychecks this week. The Pentagon said over the weekend it was able to tap $8 billion in unused research and development funds to make payroll.

On Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said her agency was relying on Trump’s big tax cuts law for funding to make sure members of the Coast Guard, which falls under the department, are also paid.

“We at DHS worked out an innovative solution to make sure that didn’t happen,” Noem said in a statement. Thanks to “the One Big Beautiful Bill,” she said, “the brave men and women of the US Coast Guard will not miss a paycheck this week.”

In past shutdowns, the Office of Management and Budget has overseen agency plans during the lapse in federal fundings, ensuring which workers are essential and remain on the job. Vought, however, has taken his role further by speaking openly about his plans to go after the federal workforce.

As agencies started making their shutdown plans, Vought’s OMB encouraged department heads to consider reductions in force, an unheard of action. The budget office’s general counsel, Mark Paoletta suggested in a draft memo that the workforce may not be automatically eligible for back pay once government reopens.

‘Grim reaper’ replaces Elon Musk’s chainsaw

Trump posted an AI-generated video last week that portrayed Vought dressed with cloak and dagger, against the backdrop of the classic rock staple “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”

“Every authoritarian leader has had his grim reaper. Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer, the senior Democrat from Maryland.

Hoyer compared the budget chief to billionaire Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw earlier this year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s slashing of the workforce “Vought swings his scythe through the federal government as thoughtlessly,” he said.

In many ways, the “Big, Beautiful Bill, Act” as the law is commonly called, gives the White House a vast new allotment of federal funding for its priority projects, separate from the regular appropriations process in Congress.

The package unleashed some $175 billion for the Pentagon, including for the Golden Dome missile shield and other priority projects, and another $175 million to Homeland Security largely for Trump’s mass deportation agenda. It also included extra funds for Vought’s work at OMB.

Trump’s big bill provides billions

Certain funds from the “big bill” are available to be used during the shutdown, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

“The Administration also could decide to use mandatory funding provided in the 2025 reconciliation act or other sources of mandatory funding to continue activities financed by those direct appropriations at various agencies,” according to CBO.

The CBO cited the Department of Defense, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget as among those that received eligible funds under the law..

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Kevin Freking, Stephen Groves and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — A new round of layoffs at the Education Department is depleting an agency that was hit hard in the Trump administration’s previous mass firings, threatening new disruption to the nation’s students and schools in areas including special education, civil rights enforcement and after-school programs.

The Trump administration started laying off 466 Education Department staffers on Friday amid mass firings across the government meant to pressure Democratic lawmakers over the federal shutdown. The layoffs would cut the agency’s workforce by nearly a fifth and leave it reduced by more than half its size when President Trump took office Jan. 20.

The cuts play into Trump’s broader plan to shut down the Education Department and parcel its operations to other agencies. Over the summer, the department started handing off its adult education and workforce programs to the Department of Labor, and it previously said it was negotiating an agreement to pass its $1.6-trillion student loan portfolio to the Treasury Department.

Department officials have not released details on the layoffs and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. AFGE Local 252, a union that represents more than 2,700 department workers, said information from employees indicates cuts will decimate several offices within the agency.

All workers except a small number of top officials are being fired at the office that implements the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a federal law that ensures millions of students with disabilities get support from their schools, the union said. Unknown numbers are being fired at the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates complaints of discrimination at the nation’s schools and universities.

The layoffs would eliminate or heavily deplete teams that oversee the flow of grant funding to schools across the nation, the union said. They affect the office that oversees Title I funding for the country’s low-income schools, along with the team that manages 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the primary federal funding source for after-school and summer learning programs.

It will also hit an office that oversees TRIO, a set of programs that help low-income students pursue college, and another that oversees federal funding for historically Black colleges and universities.

In a statement, union President Rachel Gittleman said the new reductions, on top of previous layoffs, will “double down on the harm to K-12 students, students with disabilities, first generation college students, low-income students, teachers and local education boards.”

The Education Department had about 4,100 employees when Trump took office. After the new layoffs, it would be down to fewer than 2,000. Earlier layoffs in March had roughly halved the department, but some employees were hired back after officials decided they had cut too deep.

The new layoffs drew condemnation from various education organizations.

Although states design their own competitions to distribute federal funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, the small team of federal officials provided guidance and support “that is absolutely essential,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance.

“Firing that team is shocking, devastating, utterly without any basis, and it threatens to cause lasting harm,” Grant said in a statement.

The government’s latest layoffs are being challenged in court by the American Federation of Government Employees and other national labor unions. Their suit, filed in San Francisco, said the government’s budgeting and personnel offices overstepped their authority by ordering agencies to carry out layoffs in response to the shutdown.

In a court filing, the Trump administration said the executive branch has wide discretion to reduce the federal workforce. It said the unions could not prove they were harmed by the layoffs because employees would not actually be separated for an additional 30 to 60 days after receiving notice.

Binkley writes for the Associated Press.

When she was called last year to testify against a top Los Angeles police official, Sgt. Jessica Bell assumed she would be asked about the AirTag.

Bell found the Apple tracking device under her friend’s car while on a weekend getaway in Palm Springs in 2023. The friend suspected her former domestic partner, Alfred “Al” Labrada, who was then an assistant chief in the Los Angeles Police Department, had secretly planted the AirTag to monitor her movements after they broke up. The women contacted San Bernardino County authorities, who opened an investigation.

By the time Bell, 44, testified last year, prosecutors had declined to charge Labrada with any crime, but his ascent through the uppermost ranks of the LAPD had already gone sideways. Once considered a leading candidate to become the city’s next police chief, Labrada faced being fired for allegedly lying to LAPD investigators and trying to cover up his actions.

Disciplinary proceedings against LAPD officers play out like mini-trials, held behind closed doors under state laws that shield the privacy of officers. According to her attorney, Bell figured that her role would be limited to describing the AirTag she found — and that anything she said would remain sealed.

Instead, according to her lawyer, she faced a line of questioning that turned personal, with Labrada’s attorney grilling her about problems in her former marriage.

The disciplinary panel found Labrada guilty of planting the tracking device, and he resigned from the department. In the months since, details of Bell’s testimony spread among colleagues, according to a lawsuit she filed against the city of Los Angeles this year.

The suit is one of dozens filed by LAPD employees in recent years alleging they faced blowback after reporting suspected wrongdoing. Bell and others claim testimony that was supposed to remain confidential at so-called board of rights hearings or in internal affairs interviews was later used against them.

In the months that followed Bell’s testimony against Labrada, according to her lawsuit, she was denied a position in the department’s training division. Bell said through her attorney that she has come under department investigation for at least three separate complaints, including one alleging that she hadn’t been truthful at Labrada’s disciplinary hearing.

Her supposed lie? Testifying that her daughter had been traumatized by the ordeal of finding the hidden tracking device.

Bell — known professionally as Jessica Zamorano, according to her lawsuit — declined to comment. She said through her lawyer that internal affairs investigators told her that Labrada made the complaints.

The accusation that she lied triggered a separate investigation by the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, the law enforcement accreditation board, putting her at risk of losing her police officer license.

Bell also lodged a complaint with the inspector general’s office, writing that she was “initially scared to come forward because I feared retaliation for reporting and cooperating with the investigation against Labrada.”

Bell’s attorney Nicole Castronovo said she was disgusted that the LAPD was allowing Labrada to “weaponize Internal Affairs to continue waging this campaign of terror on my client.”

Al Labrada, a former Los Angeles Police Department assistant chief, holds a news conference in Beverly Hills on Oct. 17, 2023, to address allegations he used an Apple AirTag to secretly monitor the movements of his former romantic partner.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Labrada confirmed to The Times that he had filed several complaints against Bell and Dawn Silva, his former domestic partner, who is also an LAPD officer.

He said he hoped the department would look into the veracity of statements the two women made during his disciplinary hearing. He said the allegations against Bell were based on his conversations with her ex-husband, who made him question her truthfulness. The disciplinary board wouldn’t let him call the ex-husband or others as witnesses, effectively torpedoing his case, Labrada said.

Labrada acknowledges the AirTag was his, but maintains he did not hide it to track his former girlfriend.

“This is all about financial gain for Ms. Silva and Jessica — that’s all this is,” he said. “In my opinion, she made falsified statements not only in the police report but also in the board of rights.”

He has filed his own a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and former Police Chief Michel Moore, alleging Moore conspired to oust a rival for the chief’s job.

Labrada was cleared of wrongdoing in the AirTag affair by the state law enforcement accreditation board, an outcome that allows him to retain his license to carry a badge in the state.

Labrada has been publicly outspoken about what he sees as his mistreatment at the hands of the department, making numerous appearances on law enforcement-friendly podcasts to plug a forthcoming tell-all book about his time as an L.A. cop.

He contends his case was handled differently than those of other senior officials accused of misconduct, who because of their close relationships to past chiefs were allowed to keep their jobs or to retire quietly with their pensions.

Retaliation among officers has been a problem in the LAPD for decades — and past reports have been critical of how the department investigates such cases.

The LAPD has long had a policy that forbids retaliation against officers who report misconduct, and officers who feel they’ve been wronged can report problems to the department’s ombudsman, or file complaints through internal affairs or the inspector general’s office.

Retaliation can take on many forms, including poor job evaluations, harassment, demotions and even termination, according to lawyers and LAPD personnel who have sued.

Fearing consequences, some officers have taken to posting about misconduct anonymously on social media or recruiting surrogates to call in to Police Commission hearings to raise allegations of wrongdoing on their behalf.

Sometimes, witnesses won’t come forward for fear of being disciplined for violating department rules for immediately reporting misconduct.

Others argue that the department’s disciplinary system allows opportunistic officers to take advantage of complaints in order to settle grievances with colleagues, distract from their own problems or earn a big payday.

LAPD Cmdr. Lillian Carranza — who has sued the department for calling out questionably counted crime statistics and misogyny, and also been sued over her supervision of others — declined to discuss Bell’s case, but said that, in general, after 36 years on the job, “I do not see the department doing anything to protect employees who are whistleblowers or report misconduct.”

“What I have seen is that they are shunned to the side, they are [labeled] as problem employees, and pretty soon, they are persona non grata,” Carranza said.

While the department takes all public complaints, supervisors can be selective about what gets investigated, according to Carranza, who alleged the process is often colored by favoritism or fear of being targeted by the police union.

“At the end of the day, the LAPD cannot investigate itself — we cannot investigate ourselves because we have too many competing interests,” she said. “We need an outside agency to investigate us, especially with things that are serious misconduct and they are not caught on body-camera videos.”

Bell alleged that the retaliation against her has stretched on for months.

A 15-year department veteran, Bell has worked in patrol for most of her career, with brief stints in vice and internal affairs. When an opening came up at the training division, where Silva also works, she put in for it and was picked for the spot.

Her former captain at Olympic Division sent out a glowing email just as she was about the leave the station in early 2024, asking her colleagues to join him in congratulating their “beloved” sergeant. Suddenly, her lawsuit said, the offer was rescinded with little explanation.

She alleged in her lawsuit that a close friend of Labrada’s pulled strings to keep her out of the position.

The LAPD higher-up who blocked her transfer, Bell wrote in her claim to the LAPD inspector general, “consistently calls and checks on Labrada and offers his vacation house to him.”

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.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Former FBI Director James Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday to face a criminal case that has thrown a spotlight on the Justice Department’s efforts to target adversaries of President Trump.

The arraignment is expected to be brief, but the moment is nonetheless loaded with significance given that the case has amplified concerns the Justice Department is being weaponized in pursuit of Trump’s political enemies and is operating at the behest of a White House determined to seek retribution for perceived wrongs against the president.

Comey entered a not guilty plea through his lawyer at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., to allegations that he lied to Congress five years go. The plea kick-starts a process of legal wrangling in which defense lawyers will almost certainly move to get the indictment dismissed before trial, possibly by arguing the case amounts to a selective or vindictive prosecution.

The indictment two weeks ago followed an extraordinary chain of events that saw Trump publicly implore Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against Comey and other perceived adversaries. The Republican president also replaced the veteran attorney who had been overseeing the investigation with Lindsey Halligan, a White House aide who had never previously served as a federal prosecutor. Halligan rushed to file charges before a legal deadline lapsed despite warnings from other lawyers in the office that the evidence was insufficient for an indictment.

What the indictment says

The two-count indictment alleges that Comey made a false statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 30, 2020, by denying he had authorized an associate to serve as an anonymous source to the news media and that he obstructed a congressional proceeding. Comey has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was looking forward to a trial. The indictment does not identify the associate or say what information may have been discussed with the media, making it challenging to assess the strength of the evidence or to even fully parse the allegations.

Though an indictment is typically just the start of a protracted court process, the Justice Department has trumpeted the development itself as something of a win, regardless of the outcome. Trump administration officials are likely to point to any conviction as proof the case was well-justified, but an acquittal or even dismissal may also be held up as further support for their long-running contention the criminal justice system is stacked against them.

The judge was nominated by Biden

The judge randomly assigned to the case, Michael Nachmanoff, was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration and is a former chief federal defender. Known for methodical preparation and a cool temperament, the judge and his background have already drawn Trump’s attention, with the president deriding him as a “Crooked Joe Biden appointed Judge.”

Besides Comey, the Justice Department is also investigating other foes of the president, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California.

Several Comey family members arrived in court Wednesday morning ahead of the arraignment, including his daughter Maurene, who was fired by the Justice Department earlier this year from her position as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, as well as Troy Edwards Jr., a son-in-law of Comey’s who minutes after Comey was indicted resigned his job as a prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia — the same office that filed the charges.

Trump and Comey’s fraught relationship

The indictment was the latest chapter in a long-broken relationship between Trump and Comey.

Trump arrived in office in January 2017 as Comey, appointed to the FBI director job by President Obama four years earlier, was overseeing an investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The dynamic was fraught from the start, with Comey briefing Trump weeks before he took office on the existence of uncorroborated and sexually salacious gossip in a dossier of opposition research compiled by a former British spy.

In their first several private interactions, Comey would later reveal, Trump asked his FBI director to pledge his loyalty to him and to drop an FBI investigation into his administration’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Comey said Trump also asked him to announce that Trump himself was not under investigation as part of the broader inquiry into Russian election interference, something Comey did not do.

Comey was abruptly fired in May 2017 while at an event in Los Angeles, with Trump later saying he was thinking about “this Russia thing” when he decided to terminate him. The firing was investigated by Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller as an act of potential obstruction of justice.

Comey in 2018 published a memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” that painted Trump in deeply unflattering ways, likening him to a mafia don and characterizing him as unethical and “untethered to truth.”

Trump, for his part, continued to angrily vent at Comey as the Russia investigation led by Mueller dominated headlines for the next two years and shadowed his first administration. On social media, he repeatedly claimed Comey should face charges for “treason” — an accusation Comey dismissed as “dumb lies” — and called him an “untruthful slime ball.”

Tucker, Richer and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. Tucker reported from Washington.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday that will allow police oversight officials investigating misconduct to access confidential law enforcement personnel records, a change that watchdogs have argued will increase accountability for officers who break the rules.

Los Angeles County advocates and members of the county’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission pushed for months in support of AB 847. The legislation comes in response to what proponents have described as efforts by the sheriff’s departments in L.A. and other counties to stymie access to sensitive records.

When it takes effect on Jan. 1, the new law will “grant access to the confidential personnel records of peace officers and custodial officers … to civilian law enforcement oversight boards or commissions during investigations” into officers’ conduct, according to the bill’s legislative summary.

Hans Johnson, the chair of L.A. County’s Civilian Oversight Commission, said it’s a much-needed change.

“I’m pleased because this has been a long road,” he said in a phone call Monday night. “Tonight is a moment of vindication.”

The Sheriff’s Department wrote in a statement that “the passage of AB 847 provides clarity to a long-standing legal issue that has been the subject of contention between the Department and its Civilian Oversight Commission (COC) since its inception.” It added that the “Department will work with County Counsel, labor representatives, and the COC on the implementation of this new law.”

Some law enforcement unions and advocacy groups criticized the law.

Lt. Steve Johnson, president of the L.A. County Professional Peace Officers Assn., said in an email that his organization “fully understand[s] the intent to enhance civilian oversight,” but when “access to confidential records isn’t safeguarded with precision and responsibility, it opens the door to real dangers. Transparency must never come at the cost of personal safety or public trust.”

Newsom’s office did not immediately provide a comment Monday.

Johnson said the bill’s signing is an especially meaningful victory for the families of people such as Joseph Perez and Emmett Brock, who were beaten by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies in 2020 and 2023, respectively. He also cited the case of Andres Guardado, who was shot to death by deputies in 2023, “and others who were the subjects of efforts by our commission to get records disclosed to us under subpoena about sheriff deputies’ encounters and beatings.”

In a phone call Monday night, Vanessa Perez, Joseph’s mother, called the law’s signing a “big victory not just for Joseph, but for all families impacted by the Sheriff’s Department.”

Perez said she expects the new law will allow the Civilian Oversight Commission to review previously off-limits records about the deputies who beat her son and redacted portions of other documents.

She and other members of the general public will not be able to access the records, as the law requires “oversight boards to maintain the confidentiality of those records, and would authorize them to conduct closed sessions, as specified, to review confidential records,” according to its legislative summary.

Still, Perez is hopeful her son’s case will benefit from the additional disclosure now allowable under AB 847.

Robert Bonner, a former federal judge and former chair of L.A. County’s Civilian Oversight Commission who has said he was abruptly removed from that post earlier this year, praised the bill’s signing in an email Tuesday.

The law “will be essential to holding accountable those who use excessive force against members of the public,” Bonner wrote. “This is a big deal. This is a quantum leap forward for civilian oversight commissions.”

President Trump has tapped a career government attorney who worked behind the scenes for years to root out misconduct in federal law enforcement to serve as the Justice Department’s next internal watchdog.

The White House on Friday named Don R. Berthiaume to serve as the department’s acting inspector general, a high-profile position that oversees internal investigations into fraud, waste and abuse in the department and its component agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons.

Berthiaume is taking the oversight role at a time the Justice Department is in tumult. Prosecutors, agents and other employees have endured waves of firings and resignations as part of the Republican administration’s purge of those suspected of being disloyal to the president. The department has also dropped several high-profile criminal cases, including the indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged and convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, the most sprawling investigation in the department’s history.

Concerns deepened last month that Trump has weaponized the Justice Department to pursue investigations of his perceived enemies following the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.

Berthiaume’s appointment, which takes effect at the end of the month, comes amid Trump’s upending of the federal government, including his firing of more than a dozen IGs on his fourth full day in office. Several of those former watchdogs filed a federal lawsuit seeking reinstatement, saying their dismissals violated the law. That case is pending.

Berthiaume, 51, worked as an attorney in the Justice Department inspector general’s office for 10 years until 2020. Among his highest-profile assignments was detailing errors in the use of wiretaps in the federal investigation into alleged ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The last Senate-confirmed inspector general was Michael Horowitz, a former boss of Berthiaume and one of the few inspectors general who was not fired by Trump. In June, Horowitz was appointed to lead the Federal Reserve Board’s Office of Inspector General.

Created by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal, inspectors general serve as the first line of defense within agencies to stop waste, fraud and abuses of power. Their findings often lead to policy changes. Their investigators can also spearhead criminal probes.

Though inspectors general are presidential appointees, some have served presidents of both major political parties. Federal law requires they be hired “without regard to political affiliation and solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability.”

“It’s a very important job, but Trump’s firings have created a threat environment the likes of which IGs have never seen before,” said former Justice Department inspector general Michael Bromwich, who served in the role from 1994 to 1999. “IGs need to be prepared to investigate credible allegations of waste, fraud, and misconduct. If they are too afraid to do so, IGs are no longer fulfilling their mission.”

Given the recent turmoil, Department of Justice employees could perceive the inspector general’s office as “hostile territory,” said Stacey Young, a former department attorney who founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency’s employees.

“Responsible oversight of DOJ’s actions has never been more important,” Young said, “and I hope the next inspector general will exercise the independence and fortitude required to do it.”

The department’s inspector general handles some of the most explosive and politically sensitive inquiries in Washington.

In 2019, for example, Horowitz released a report faulting the FBI for surveillance warrant applications in Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had coordinated with Russia to interfere in the election. The IG determined the investigation had been opened for a legitimate purpose and did not find evidence that partisan bias had guided investigative decisions.

Special counsel Robert Mueller determined that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election through hacking and a covert social media offensive and that the Trump campaign embraced the help and expected to benefit from it against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. But Mueller found no evidence that Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Moscow to influence the election.

Berthiaume had a role in the inspector general’s review of Crossfire Hurricane and helped write a 2013 report on dysfunction and deep partisan divisions inside the Justice Department’s Civil Rights unit. His other work at the Office of Inspector General included exposing improper hiring of relatives and friends by senior leaders of the U.S. Marshals Service and probing a botched investigation into U.S. firearms traffickers suspected of selling grenades to Mexican cartels, according to his LinkedIn page.

Since 2023, Berthiaume has served as senior counsel to the inspector general at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he oversees attorneys investigating housing fraud and runs the agency’s whistleblower protection program.

Before joining HUD, Berthiaume spent three years at the Drug Enforcement Administration, managing the narcotics agency’s relationship with the Justice Department. He began his legal career prosecuting bank and credit card fraud cases at the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Goodman and Mustian write for the Associated Press. Goodman reported from Miami, Mustian from New York.

CHICAGO — Illinois and Chicago filed a lawsuit Monday aiming to stop President Trump’s administration from sending hundreds of National Guard troops to the city, just as troops prepared to deploy and hours after a federal judge blocked troops from being sent to Portland, Oregon.

The quickly unfolding developments come as the administration portrays the Democrat-led cities as war-ravaged and lawless and amid Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Officials in both cities have disputed the president’s characterizations, saying military intervention isn’t needed and it’s federal involvement that’s inflaming the situation.

The legal challenge comes after Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said some 300 of the state’s guard troops were to be federalized and deployed to the nation’s third-largest city, along with 400 others from Texas.

The lawsuit alleges that “these advances in President Trump’s long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois are unlawful and dangerous.”

“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the lawsuit says.

Pritzker said the potential deployment amounted to “Trump’s invasion” and called on Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to block it. Abbott pushed back and said the crackdown was needed to protect federal workers who are in the city as part of the president’s increased immigration enforcement.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson confirmed in a weekend statement that Trump authorized using Illinois National Guard members, citing what she called “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness” that local leaders have not quelled.

In Chicago, the sight of armed Border Patrol agents making arrests near famous landmarks amplified concerns from residents already uneasy after an immigration crackdown that began last month. Agents have targeted immigrant-heavy and largely Latino areas.

Protesters have frequently rallied near an immigration facility outside the city, and federal officials reported the arrests of 13 protesters on Friday near the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in Broadview.

The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that federal agents shot a woman Saturday morning on the southwest side of Chicago. A department statement said it happened after Border Patrol agents patrolling the area “were rammed by vehicles and boxed in by 10 cars.”

No law enforcement officers were seriously injured, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

In Portland, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut granted a temporary restraining order sought by Oregon and California to block the deployment of guard troops from those states to the city.

There has been a sustained and low-level protest outside the Portland ICE facility, but it’s been less disruptive than the downtown clashes of 2020 when demonstrations erupted after George Floyd’s killing.

Immergut, a first-term Trump appointee, seemed incredulous that the president moved to send National Guard troops to Oregon from neighboring California and then from Texas on Sunday.

“Aren’t defendants simply circumventing my order?” she said. “Why is this appropriate?”

Local officials have suggested that many of the president’s claims and social media posts about Portland appear to rely on images from 2020. Under a new mayor, the city has reduced crime, and downtown has seen fewer homeless encampments and increased foot traffic.

Most violent crime around the U.S. has actually declined in recent years, including in Portland, where a recent report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found that homicides from January through June decreased by 51% this year compared to the same period in 2024.

Since the start of his second term, Trump has sent or talked about sending troops to 10 cities, including Baltimore; Memphis, Tennessee; the District of Columbia; New Orleans; and the California cities of Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

A federal judge in September said the administration “willfully” broke federal law by deploying guard troops to Los Angeles over protests about immigration raids.

Press writes for the Associated Press.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia on human smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.

The case of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was a construction worker living legally in Maryland when he was wrongly deported to his home country, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown and mass deportation agenda.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw late Friday granted a request by lawyers for Abrego Garcia and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Abrego Garcia’s effort to show that the federal human smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.

Crenshaw said Abrego Garcia had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive.” That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.

The departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to inquiries about the case Saturday.

In his 16-page ruling, Crenshaw said many statements by administration officials “raise cause for concern,” but one stood out.

That statement by Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, on a Fox News program after Abrego Garcia was charged in June, seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful-deportation case, Crenshaw wrote.

Blanche’s ”remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights” to sue over his deportation “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct,” Crenshaw wrote.

Likewise, Crenshaw noted that the Department of Homeland Security reopened an investigation into Abrego Garcia days after the Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring back Abrego Garcia.

Abrego Garcia was indicted May 21 and charged June 6, the day the U.S. brought him back from a prison in El Salvador. He pleaded not guilty and is now being held in Pennsylvania.

If convicted in the Tennessee case, Abrego Garcia will be deported, federal officials have said. A U.S. immigration judge has denied Abrego Garcia’s bid for asylum, although he can appeal.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager.

In 2019, he was arrested by immigration agents. He requested asylum but was not eligible because he had been in the U.S. for more than a year. But the judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he faced danger from a gang that targeted his family.

The human smuggling charges in Tennessee stem from a 2022 traffic stop. He was not charged at the time.

Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Abrego Garcia, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang, among other things, despite the fact he has not been convicted of any crimes. The government has provided no clear evidence of gang affiliation, and Abrego Garcia denies the allegation.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have denounced the criminal charges and the deportation efforts, saying they are an attempt to punish him for standing up to the administration.

Abrego Garcia contends that, while imprisoned in El Salvador — in a notorious lockup with a documented history of human rights abuses — he suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has denied those allegations.

Levy writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 1 (UPI) — President Donald Trump said the Department of Education has reached a potential deal to settle a months-long battle with Harvard University over federal funding.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon “is finishing up the final details” of the plan, Trump said during an unrelated executive order signing Tuesday in the Oval Office.

She has “a good chance of getting that closed,” he said.

The plan would have Harvard University pay $500 million and require the school to open trade schools and teach artificial intelligence.

“They’ll be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things, engines, lots of things,” Trump said, adding that the school would run a “series of trade schools.”

Harvard did not immediately respond to Politico and CNN‘s requests for a comment on the matter.

Trump and Harvard have been locked in a legal battle after the president attempted to withhold more than $2 billion in funding and block Harvard from admitting international students after taking issue with students’ anti-Israel protests over the war in Gaza. The administration accused Harvard of failing to crack down on anti-Semitism.

Earlier this month, U.S. Judge Allison Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts restored the funding — in the form of grants and contracts — in response to a lawsuit brought by the university and employee groups. The lawsuit accused Trump of leveraging the funding “to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard.”

Among the programs affected by the block in funding were research in science and medicine, including on radiation exposure, ALS diagnostics and tuberculosis treatment.

On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights launched a process that could see Harvard ineligible for federal funding on Title VI grounds.

QUANTICO, Va. — President Trump revealed that he wants to use American cities as training grounds for the armed forces and joined Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday in declaring an end to “woke” culture before an unusual gathering of hundreds of top U.S. military officials who were abruptly summoned to Virginia from around the world.

Hegseth announced new directives for troops that include “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness, while Trump bragged about U.S. nuclear capabilities and warned that “America is under invasion from within.”

“After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help we’re defending the borders of our country,” Trump said.

Hegseth had called military leaders to the Marine Corps base in Quantico, near Washington, without publicly revealing the reason until this morning. His address largely focused on his own long-used talking points that painted a picture of a military that has been hamstrung by “woke” policies, and he said military leaders should “do the honorable thing and resign” if they don’t like his new approach.

Meetings between top military brass and civilian leaders are nothing new, but the gathering had fueled intense speculation about the summit’s purpose given the haste with which it was called and the mystery surrounding it.

Admirals and generals from conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere were summoned for a lecture on race and gender in the military, underscoring the extent to which the country’s culture wars have emerged as a front-and-center agenda item for Hegseth’s Pentagon, even at a time of broad national security concerns across the globe.

‘We will not be politically correct’

Trump is used to boisterous crowds of supporters who laugh at his jokes and applaud his boasts during his speeches. But he wasn’t getting that kind of soundtrack from the generals and admirals in attendance.

In keeping with the nonpartisan tradition of the armed services, the military leaders sat mostly stone-faced through Trump’s politicized remarks, a contrast from when rank-and-file soldiers cheered during Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg this summer.

During his nearly hour-long speech, Hegseth said the U.S. military has promoted too many leaders for the wrong reasons based on race, gender quotas and “historic firsts.”

“The era of politically correct, overly sensitive don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now at every level,” Hegseth said.

That was echoed by Trump, who said “the purposes of America military is not to protect anyone’s feelings. It’s to protect our republic.″

″We will not be politically correct when it comes to defending American freedom,” Trump said. “And we will be a fighting and winning machine.”

Loosening disciplinary rules

Hegseth said he is loosening disciplinary rules and weakening hazing protections, putting a heavy focus on removing many of the guardrails the military had put in place after numerous scandals and investigations

He said he was ordering a review of “the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing.”

The defense secretary called for “changes to the retention of adverse information on personnel records that will allow leaders with forgivable, earnest, or minor infractions to not be encumbered by those infractions in perpetuity.”

“People make honest mistakes, and our mistakes should not define an entire career,” Hegseth said. “Otherwise, we only try not to make mistakes.”

Bullying and toxic leadership has been the suspected and confirmed cause behind numerous military suicides over the past several years, including the very dramatic suicide of Brandon Caserta, a young sailor who was bullied into killing himself in 2018.

A Navy investigation found that Caserta’s supervisor’s “noted belligerence, vulgarity and brash leadership was likely a significant contributing factor in (the sailor)’s decision to end his own life.”

Gender-neutral physical standards

Hegseth used the platform to slam environmental policies and transgender troops while talking up his and Trump’s focus on “the warrior ethos” and “peace through strength.”

Hegseth said the department has been told from previous administrations that “our diversity is our strength,” which he called an “insane fallacy.”

“They had to put out dizzying DEI and LGBTQE+ statements. They were told females and males are the same thing, or that males who think they’re females is totally normal,” he said, adding the use of electric tanks and the COVID vaccine requirements to the list as mistaken policies.

Hegseth said this is not about preventing women from serving.

“But when it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral,” he said. “If women can make it excellent, if not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result.”

Hegseth’s speech came as the country faces a potential government shutdown this week and as Hegseth, who has hammered home a focus on lethality, has taken several unusual and unexplained actions, including ordering cuts to the number of general officers and firings of other top military leaders.

Hegseth has championed the military’s role in securing the U.S.-Mexico border, deploying to American cities as part of Trump’s law enforcement surges, and carrying out strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the administration says targeted drug traffickers.

Finley, Toropin and Vucci write for the Associated Press. Finley and Toropin reported from Washington. AP writer Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

Ever since Elijah Maldonado was born at just 29 months, he has needed specialty treatments that his family could afford only with publicly funded healthcare.

Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as an infant, he spent his first three months at a public hospital where the family lives in Orange County.

Now 7, Elijah receives physical and speech therapy among a host of other services paid for through Medicaid. He relies on a wheelchair funded by the government. An assistant paid for with taxpayer dollars makes sure he’s safe on the bus ride to and from school.

Each month, he receives a $957 disability check that helps to cover his and his family’s living expenses.

Josephine Rios wipes her grandson Elijah’s face.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Still learning to speak on his own, he uses a Proloquo speech app on an iPad provided by his school to tell his family when he’s hungry, needs to use the restroom or wants to play with his favorite toys.

“It’s his voice — his lifeline,” his aunt and primary caretaker Cassandra Gonzalez says of the app. Her compensation for his in-home care comes from taxpayer dollars too.

Now that lifeline — and much of the government assistance Elijah receives — is at risk of going away.

With hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cuts to Medicaid and food aid kicking in this fall thanks to the passage of the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — on top of earlier cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — a host of federally funded healthcare and nutrition programs that serve low-income Americans will be scaled back, revamped with expanded work requirements and other restrictions or canceled altogether if individual states can’t find alternate funding sources.

The budget reduces federal spending on Medicaid alone by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years nationwide, with initial reductions taking effect in the coming weeks.

Gov. Gavin Newsom responded by accusing the Trump administration of “ripping care from cancer patients, meals from children and money from working families — just to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich.”

L.A. public health officials called the cuts devastating for a county where nearly 40% of the population is enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. L.A. County’s Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and about two dozen clinics, projects a budget reduction amounting to $750 million a year, and federal funding for the Department of Public Health, which inspects food, provides substance-use treatment and tracks disease outbreaks, will drop by an estimated $200 million a year. Spending cuts have prompted hiring freezes and projections of ballooning budget deficits, county health officials said.

Spending reductions, combined with recent changes to the Affordable Care Act and Medicare, could leave an additional 1.7 million people in California uninsured by 2034, according to an analysis by the nonprofit healthcare research organization KFF.

Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), colloquially known as “food stamps,” will exceed $280 billion over the next decade, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

It’s not just that the cuts to these programs are massive by historical standards.

The new rules and restrictions are confusing and states have been given little guidance from the federal agencies that oversee health and nutrition programs on how, or even when, to implement them, experts at the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities wrote in a recent report.

What’s clear, the CBPP said, is that millions of children, older adults, people with disabilities and veterans stand to lose not just Medicaid coverage but federal aid to access the type of healthy foods that could prevent illness and chronic conditions.

More than 5 million California households receive food aid through the state’s CalFresh program and 97% percent of them will see their benefits either slashed or eliminated because of federal spending cuts, changes to eligibility requirements or financial constraints at the state level, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan California Budget Policy Center.

Elijah plays with toy cars outside his aunt’s home in Tustin.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

In Orange County, where Elijah’s family lives, public health officials were already reeling from federal spending cuts in the months before the budget bill passed, said Dr. Veronica Kelley, director of the OC Health Care Agency. For example, there was the $13.2-million cut to funding for family planning services in the county, and the $4-million reduction in funding to Women, Infants and Children nutrition (WIC).

The agency has worked to prevent mass layoffs by moving public-health workers in canceled programs to other departments or leaving some positions unfilled in order to save jobs elsewhere, and it has sought out nonprofit social service organizations and philanthropies to either take over programs or help fund them, Kelley said.

Now, Kelley is preparing for possible cuts to programs to combat obesity, maintain community gardens, help seniors make better healthcare decisions and reduce the use of tobacco. The agency also has to figure out how to make up for a $4.8-million reduction in federal funds for the county’s SNAP program that takes effect on Wednesday — another casualty of the federal spending bill.

The measures that the agency has leaned on to get through the year are not sustainable, Kelley said. “We can only do that for so long,” she said. “It’s chaotic. In terms of healthcare, it’s devastating… It feels like we’re taking so many steps backward.”

The looming cuts and changes have also set off alarm bells at Kaiser Permanente, California’s largest private healthcare provider with 9.5 million members statewide, 1.1 million of whom are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.

“Without the ability to pay, newly uninsured people will find themselves having to delay care, leading to more serious and complex health conditions, increasing the use of emergency services and more intensive medical services,” Kaiser Permanente Southern California Regional spokeswoman Candice Lee said in a statement to The Times.

“This will affect all of us as the cost of this uncompensated care leads hospitals and care providers to charge paying customers more to cover their costs. Some hospitals and providers, especially those in rural and underserved areas, will be unable to make up for these unreimbursed costs, and will be financially threatened by these changes.”

Standing in front of her sister Cassandra’s town home in Tustin, a quiet suburban city of 80,000 about 10 miles south of Disneyland, Elijah’s mother, Samantha Rios; grandmother Josephine Rios; and Aunt Cassandra are filled with worry.

Elijah points to a command on his Proloquo speech app, which he uses to communicate his needs.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Josephine, a nursing assistant who works at a Kaiser hospital in Orange County, said she hears the panic in patients’ voices when they describe rushing to schedule needed medical procedures in anticipation of losing their Medicaid benefits.

Earlier this year, Josephine joined delegations of unionized California healthcare workers who traveled to Washington with the aim of pressing lawmakers to oppose spending cuts.

Rep. Young Kim, the Republican who represents the Rios family’s district in Congress, was receptive to the delegation’s pleas to vote no on the budget bill, Josephine recalls. The congresswoman ultimately voted for the bill, saying on her official webpage the legislation was good for Californians because it would relieve the tax burden on families, ensure that government dollars are used effectively and “strengthen Medicaid and SNAP for our most vulnerable citizens who truly need it.”

Elijah’s Aunt Cassandra and grandmother Josephine look over his shoulder as he watches a TV show.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Now, Josephine looked on as Elijah, seated in his wheelchair, played on his iPad and watched a Disney program on his phone. He can press a tab on the touchscreen to make the tablet say “My name’s Elijah” if he’s feeling unsafe away from home, another to tell his family he needs space when upset.

Watching Elijah enjoy himself, the women said they feel awkward broadcasting their woes to strangers when all they desire is what’s best for him. They don’t need the public’s pity.

The family wants lawmakers and the public to understand how seemingly abstract healthcare decisions involving billions of dollars, and made 2,000-plus miles away in Washington, have brought new financial turmoil to a family that’s already on the edge financially.

Samantha, a single mom, works full time to provide a home for Elijah and his two sisters, ages 10 and 8. A subscription to the Proloquo speech app alone would cost $300 a year out-of-pocket — more than she can afford on her shoestring budget.

Due to changes in household income requirements, Samantha had already lost Medicaid coverage for herself and her two girls, she said, as well as her SNAP food assistance, leaving her at a loss for how to fill the gap. She now pays about $760 a month to cover her daughters and herself through her employer-based health plan.

The cut to food aid has forced her to compensate by getting free vegetables, milk, eggs and chicken from the food pantry at a local school, a reality that she said she was at first too ashamed to disclose even to relatives.

Then came the bad news Samantha recently received about Elijah’s monthly Social Security Insurance for his disability. She was stunned to hear that because of stricter income cut-offs for that type of aid, Elijah would no longer receive those checks as of Oct. 1.

“Before, he was getting $957 a month — obviously that’s grocery money for me,” Samantha said. The money also went to buy baby wipes, as well as knee pads to help him move more comfortably on the floor when not using his wheelchair.

“I don’t get food stamps. I don’t get Medi-Cal for my girls. I don’t get any of that,” Samantha said. “As of Oct. 1, now I’ve got to figure out how am I going to pay my rent? How am I going to buy groceries?”

Luckily, the sisters said, the physical, speech and behavioral-health therapies that Elijah receives are safe — for now.

And the women know they can lean on each other in tough times. The sisters and Josephine all live within minutes of each other in Tustin, close enough for Samantha’s children to eat at someone’s home when their own cupboards are bare.

Every few months, Samantha said, Elijah experiences severe seizures that can last up to 90 minutes and require hospitalization.

Cassandra and Josephine like that they can run over to help if Elijah has a medical emergency. Another sister who lives farther away is on hand when needed too.

“What’s going to happen to other families who don’t have that support system?” Samantha said.

Given the potential for further cuts to programs that pay for home-based healthcare and assistants for people with disabilities, Cassandra wonders what will happen to her own family if she can no longer work as Elijah’s caregiver.

Where would the family get the money to pay a new caregiver who is qualified enough to work with a special-needs child who can speak a few words thanks to speech therapy but who cannot eat, walk or use the restroom without supervision? What if funding is eliminated for the assistant who travels with Elijah to school?

“People think that cutting Medi-Cal, cutting food stamps or whatever isn’t going to affect that many people,” Cassandra said. “It’s affecting my nephew and nieces. It’s affecting my sister. But it’s not just affecting her household. It’s affecting my household.”

“We’re not saying we’re going to Disneyland or going out to eat every day,” Cassandra said. “This is just living. We can’t even live at this point, with things being cut.”

The women offered up principles they feel are in short supply lately in the discourse over the government’s role in public health — among them “morals” and “empathy.” Samantha adds one more word to the list.

“Humanity,” she says. “We lack it.”

Sept. 27 (UPI) — The Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to rule on the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision following adverse rulings in lower courts.

President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in office signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship for anyone who does not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen, but lower courts have blocked the order’s implementation, according to NBC News.

“The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” the DOJ said in its appeal to the Supreme Court, as reported by USA Today.

“Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people,” the appeal said.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in July ruled in favor of a challenge filed by officials for Washington state and three others.

In a separate case, U.S. District Court of New Hampshire Judge Joseph Laplante granted class action status to a case filed by individuals, which enabled that court’s ruling against the president’s executive order to have national impact.

President George W. Bush appointed Laplante to the federal court in 2007.

The DOJ wants the Supreme Court to review the New Hampshire case and Laplante’s ruling despite the matter being appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.

The federal appellate court has not ruled on that case.

WASHINGTON — The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is only two pages and alleges he falsely testified to Congress in 2020 about authorizing someone to be an anonymous source in news stories.

That brevity belies a convoluted and contentious backstory. The events at the heart of the disputed testimony are among the most heavily scrutinized in the bureau’s history, generating internal and congressional investigations that have produced thousands of pages of records and transcripts.

Those investigations were focused on how Comey and his agents conducted high-stakes inquiries into whether Russia had unlawfully colluded with Republican Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton and her use of a private email server while she was Secretary of State.

Here are some things to know about that period and how they fit into Comey’s indictment:

What are the allegations?

The indictment alleges that Comey made a false statement in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The single quote from the indictment appears to be from an interaction with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Prosecutors contend that Comey lied when he denied having authorized anyone at the FBI to be an anonymous source to the media, alleging he had done so by telling someone identified as “Person 3” in the indictment to speak to reporters.

“It’s such a bare-bones indictment,” said Solomon Wisenberg, a former federal prosecutor and now a defense attorney in private practice. “We do not know what the evidence is going to be” at trial, he said.

What did Comey say to Congress?

Wisenberg said the testimony in question appears to have come when Cruz was pressing Comey over the role that his deputy director at the time, Andrew McCabe, played in authorizing a leak to the Wall Street Journal for a story examining how the FBI handled an investigation into Clinton’s use of the private email server.

Cruz’s question was complicated, but it boiled down to pitting Comey against McCabe. The senator noted that Comey told Congress in 2017 he had not authorized anyone to speak to reporters. But Cruz asserted that McCabe had “publicly and repeatedly said he leaked information to the Wall Street Journal and that you were directly aware of it and that you directly authorized it.”

“Who’s telling the truth?” Cruz asked.

Comey answered: “I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.”

At that time, Comey had been put on the spot by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Comey was asked whether he had “ever authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports about the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation.”

Comey answered, “No.”

The indictment says Comey falsely stated that he had not “authorized someone else at the FBI to be an anonymous source in news reports,” but Comey appears not to have used that phrasing during the 2020 hearing at issue, potentially complicating efforts to establish that he made a false statement.

What may have sparked the questions?

“Person 3” is not identified in the indictment, but appears to have been discussing an investigation related to Clinton, based on a clearer reference in a felony charge that grand jurors rejected. Comey figured in several inquiries into alleged leaks in the Clinton investigation, all of which generated extensive paper trails.

One involved McCabe and the Journal story. McCabe told the Justice Department’s inspector general that he had authorized a subordinate to talk to the Journal reporter and had told Comey about that interaction after the fact.

It’s unlikely the indictment is focused on that episode because McCabe never told investigators that Comey had authorized him to talk to the media, only that the FBI director was aware that McCabe had done so.

Two other leak investigations involved a friend of Comey’s who served for a time as a paid government advisor to the director. That advisor, Daniel Richman, has told investigators he spoke to the media to help shape perceptions of the embattled FBI chief.

Richman, a law professor at Columbia University, was interviewed by FBI agents in 2019 about leaks to the media that concerned the bureau’s investigation into Clinton. Richman said Comey had never authorized him to speak to the media about the Clinton investigation but he acknowledged Comey was aware that he sometimes engaged with reporters.

Comey has acknowledged using Richman as a conduit to the media in another matter. After Comey was fired by Trump in 2017, he gave Richman a memo that detailed his interactions with the president. Comey later testified to Congress that he had authorized Richman to disclose the contents of the memo to journalists with the hopes of spurring the appointment of a special counsel who might investigate Trump.

How did we get here?

Trump and Comey have been engaged in a long-running feud. Trump blames Comey for having started an investigation into Russia’s election meddling on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller. Mueller spent the better part of two years investigating whether Trump’s campaign illegally colluded with the Kremlin.

In the end, Mueller uncovered no evidence that Trump or his associates criminally colluded with Russia, but found that they had welcomed Moscow’s assistance and that Trump had obstructed justice during the investigation. Those findings were largely adopted by bipartisan congressional reports on the matter.

Trump, who was convicted of felony fraud last year, has long vented about the “Russia hoax,” which shadowed and defined the early years of his first term. He has spent the ensuing years bashing Comey and saying he should be charged with treason.

Just days before the indictment, Trump publicly urged his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to act against Comey and two other perceived Trump enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump posted on social media last week. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW.”

Within hours of the indictment being returned, Trump turned again to social media to gloat: “JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey.”

Comey has remained resolute in his defense, while criticizing Trump on a host of matters. In a 2018 memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey compared Trump to a mafia don and said he was unethical and “untethered to truth.”

Like Trump, Comey took to social media after his indictment.

“My family and I have known for years there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump,” he said. “My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent. So, let’s have a trial.”

Tau writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Saturday he will send troops to Portland, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary,” to handle “domestic terrorists” in Oregon’s biggest city as he expands his deployments to more American metropolises.

He made the announcement on social media, writing that he was directing the Department of Defense to “provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland.”

Trump said the decision was necessary to protect U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which he described as “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for details on Trump’s announcement, such as a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved. He previously threatened to send the National Guard into Chicago but has yet to follow through. A deployment in Memphis, Tenn., is expected to include about 150 troops, far fewer than were sent to the District of Columbia for Trump’s crackdown or in Los Angeles in response to immigration protests.

Pentagon officials did not immediately respond to requests for information.

Since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the Republican president has escalated his efforts to confront what he calls the “radical left,” which he blames for the country’s problems with political violence.

He deployed the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles in June as part of his law enforcement takeover in Democratic-run cities.

The ICE facility in Portland has been the target of frequent demonstrations, sometimes leading to violent clashes. Some federal agents have been injured and several protesters have been charged with assault. When protesters erected a guillotine this month, the Department of Homeland Security described it as “unhinged behavior.”

Trump, in comments Thursday in the Oval Office, suggested that some kind of operation was in the works.

“We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people in Portland,” he said, describing them as “professional agitators and anarchists.”

Earlier in September, Trump had described the environment in Portland as “like living in hell” and said he was considering sending in federal troops, as he has recently threatened to do to combat crime in other cities, including Chicago and Baltimore.

“Like other mayors across the country, I have not asked for — and do not need — federal intervention,” Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said in a statement after Trump’s threat. Wilson said his city had protected freedom of expression while “addressing occasional violence and property destruction.”

In Tennessee, Memphis has been bracing for an influx of National Guard troops, and on Friday, Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who helped coordinate the operation, said they will be part of a surge of resources to fight crime in the city. Memphis is led by a Democratic mayor.

Megerian writes for the Associated Press.

The acting U.S. attorney in Sacramento has said she was fired after telling the Border Patrol chief in charge of immigration raids in California that his agents were not allowed to arrest people without probable cause in the Central Valley.

Michele Beckwith, a career prosecutor who was made the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California earlier this year, told the New York Times that she was let go after she warned Gregory Bovino, chief of the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector, that a court injunction blocked him from carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in Sacramento.

Beckwith did not respond to a request for comment from the L.A. Times, but told the New York Times that “we have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Sacramento declined to comment. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

Bovino presided over a series of raids in Los Angeles starting in June in which agents spent weeks pursuing Latino-looking workers outside of Home Depots, car washes, bus stops and other areas. The agents often wore masks and used unmarked vehicles.

But such indiscriminate tactics were not allowed in California’s Eastern District after the American Civil Liberties Union and United Farm Workers filed suit against the Border Patrol earlier in the year and won an injunction.

The suit followed a January operation in Kern County called “Operation Return to Sender,” in which agents swarmed a Home Depot and Latino market, among other areas frequented by laborers. In April, a federal district court judge ruled that the Border Patrol likely violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

As Beckwith described it to New York Times reporters, she received a phone call from Bovino on July 14 in which he said he was bringing agents to Sacramento.

She said she told him that the injunction filed after the Kern County raid meant he could not stop people indiscriminately in the Eastern District. The next day, she wrote him an email in which, as quoted in the New York Times, she stressed the need for “compliance with court orders and the Constitution.”

Shortly thereafter her work cell phone and her work computer stopped working. A bit before 5 p.m. she received an email informing her that her employment was being terminated effective immediately.

It was the end of a 15-year career in in the Department of Justice in which she had served as the office’s Criminal Division Chief and First Assistant and prosecuted members of the Aryan Brotherhood, suspected terrorists, and fentanyl traffickers.

Two days later on July 17, Bovino and his agents moved into Sacramento, conducting a raid at a Home Depot south of downtown.

In an interview with Fox News that day, Bovino said the raids were targeted and based on intelligence. “Everything we do is targeted,” he said. “We did have prior intelligence that there were targets that we were interested in and around that Home Depot, as well as other targeted enforcement packages in and around the Sacramento area.”

He also said that his operations would not slow down. “There is no sanctuary anywhere,” he said. “We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere. We’re going to affect this mission and secure the homeland.”

Beckwith is one of a number of top prosecutors who have quit or been fired as the Trump administration pushes the Department of Justice to aggressively carry out his policies, including investigating people who have been the president’s political targets.

In March, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles was fired after lawyers for a fast-food executive he was prosecuting pushed officials in Washington to drop all charges against him, according to multiple sources.

In July, Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, was fired by the Trump administration, according to the New York Times.

And just last week, a U. S. attorney in Virginia was pushed out after he had determined there was insufficient evidence to prosecute James B. Comey. A new prosecutor this week won a grand jury indictment against Comey on one count of making a false statement and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

Across the nation’s beloved national parks this summer, skeleton crews — whittled down by the Trump administration’s reduction of the federal workforce — have struggled to keep trash from piling up, latrines from spilling over and injured hikers from perishing in the backcountry.

They’ve mostly succeeded, but it has been a struggle.

Now, as bickering politicians in Washington, D.C., threaten to shut the government down and furlough federal employees as soon as next week if a budget deal isn’t reached, 40 former stewards of the nation’s most remote and romantic landscapes have sent an “urgent appeal” to the White House.

If the government shuts down, close the national parks to prevent a free-for-all inside the gates.

Pointing to the strain the parks are already enduring since the new administration fired or bought out roughly 24% of the workforce, the retired superintendents — including those from Yosemite, Joshua Tree, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon — warned of chaos.

If the parks stay open with no employees to manage them, “these nascent issues from the summer season are sure to erupt,” the former superintendents wrote to Doug Burgum, secretary of the Department of the Interior, on Thursday. “Leaving parks even partially open to the public during a shutdown with minimal — or no — park staffing is reckless and puts both visitors and park resources at risk.”

Unlike many federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, whose once obscure and mundane day-to-day operations have become flash points in the nation’s toxic and polarizing culture war, the national parks remain a beloved refuge: a place where Americans of all stripes can unplug, exhale and escape.

In 2024 the parks set an attendance record with over 331 million visitors; that’s nearly two and a half times the number of people (136 million) who attended professional football, baseball, basketball and hockey games combined.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal. Exhausted by the bickering on cable news and social media feeds? Go climb Half Dome in Yosemite, or stroll among the giant trees in Sequoia, or camp beneath the stars in Joshua Tree.

But if the parks stay open with nobody around to maintain them, that cleansing experience will turn nasty the moment a bathroom door opens, according to the retired superintendents.

In previous shutdowns stemming from budget disputes or the COVID-19 pandemic, facilities inside the parks deteriorated at an alarming rate.

Unauthorized visitors left human feces in rivers, painted graffiti on once pristine cliffs, harassed wild animals and left the toilets looking like “crime scenes,” according to a ranger who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

“It’s just scary how bad things can get when places are abandoned with nobody watching,” she said.

In an interview Thursday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said a government shutdown was still “avoidable” despite sharp divisions ahead of Wednesday’s deadline to pass a funding bill.

“I’m a big believer that there’s always a way out,” the South Dakota Republican said. “And I think there are off-ramps here, but I don’t think that the negotiating position, at least at the moment, that the Democrats are trying to exert here is going to get you there.”

Thune said Democrats are going to have to “dial back” their demands, which include immediately extending health insurance subsidies and reversing the healthcare policies in the massive tax bill that Republicans passed over the summer. Absent that, Thune said, “we’re probably plunging forward toward the shutdown.”

After a shutdown in late 2018 and early 2019, park rangers in Death Valley returned to find mounds of feces and what they jokingly called “toilet paper flowers” scattered across the desert floor.

At Joshua Tree, officials found about 24 miles of unauthorized new trails carved across the desert by off-road vehicles, along with some of the park’s namesake trees toppled.

In the absence of park staff, local climbers volunteered to keep the bathrooms clean and stocked with toilet paper, and gently tried to persuade rowdy visitors to put out illegal fires and pick up their trash.

Some complied right away, climber Rand Abbott told The Times in 2019, but “70% of the people I’m running into are extremely rude,” he said. “I had my life threatened two times. It’s crazy in there right now.”

People weren’t the only unruly guests moving in and making themselves at home.

At Point Reyes National Seashore, along the Marin County coast, officials had to close the road to popular Drakes Beach during the shutdown. The absence of humans created an ideal opportunity for about 100 elephant seals to set up a colony, taking over the beach, a parking lot and a visitor center.

The seals didn’t just poop everywhere, they threw a full-scale bacchanal. As far as the eye could see, enormous, blubbery beasts — males can reach 16 feet long and weigh up to 7,000 pounds — were rolling in the sand and mating in broad daylight.

Females, which can weigh up to a ton themselves, wound up giving birth to something like 40 new pups. When the park reopened, flustered officials had little recourse but to open a public viewing area at a safe distance and send employees — primly referred to as “docents” — to explain what was happening on the once serene seashore.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The race for Los Angeles County sheriff is already heating up — even with the primary not scheduled until next June. Six candidates have officially entered the field to unseat Robert Luna, with the early challengers slinging barbs, probing the incumbent’s political weaknesses and setting the stage for a heated campaign in the coming months.

Most vocal and well-known among the contenders is former Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who lost to Luna in 2022 and is now vying for a rematch. He is among a field of current and former lawmen who have criticized Luna’s time in office as ineffective, uninspiring and opaque.

Luna told The Times he deserves to keep his job through 2030, arguing voters should choose stability as Southern California prepares to host major events in the coming years.

“The last thing we need is more inconsistency in leadership as we start working toward the World Cup and the Olympics,” Luna said.

Villanueva registered a campaign committee in July and has since leveraged his ability to draw attention like few others in L.A. politics.

But the political dynamics have changed since 2022, when Joe Biden was president and Villanueva was still in charge of California’s largest law enforcement agency. Now, President Trump has ratcheted up political pressure on L.A., and last year, Janice Hahn defeated Villanueva in the primary for her county supervisor seat by a nearly 30-point margin.

Through it all, Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College, said it seems as though “Luna is generally liked, perhaps because he has brought a steady hand to the department” after what she termed “upheaval” under Villanueva.

The former sheriff has been heavily criticized for his combative personal style, pursuit of political vendettas and his handling of investigations into so-called deputy gangs deputies and other alleged misconduct.

“Does Villanueva have a lane to come back? I don’t think so,” said Sadhwani.

Luna launched jabs at his opponents, with the sharpest reserved for his predecessor.

“Not one of those individuals that is running comes close to the experience that I have and the accomplishments that I’ve had so far,” Luna said. “There were a lot of controversies and scandals with the previous sheriff that, again, eroded public trust.”

And yet, there’s no conversation about the sheriff’s race that won’t mention Villanueva, whose name recognition runs deep across L.A. County.

Villanueva told The Times he’s “eager to get back in the saddle,” especially now, when “there are prosecutors ready to prosecute,” a nod to the tough-on-crime stances of Acting U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman.

Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva talks with reporters at an election night gathering in Boyle Heights on June 7, 2022, when he was defeated by Robert Luna.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

Villanueva had strong words for his 2022 opponent.

“The status quo is failing miserably the people of L.A. County,” he said. “I just can’t believe what Luna’s done to the organization I’ve spent my entire adult life in.”

Others jockeying for contention are pitching themselves as offering a breath of fresh air.

Lt. Eric Strong, who has served over 30 years in law enforcement and was seen as the most progressive of the 2022 candidates, is throwing his hat back in the ring after coming in third in that year.

“What really got me interested in running is seeing the continued failed leadership within the department,” Strong said in a recent interview. “Nothing’s changed. … Honestly Luna’s just a quieter version of Alex Villanueva.”

Then there’s Oscar Martinez, a proud immigrant and U.S. Marine Corps. veteran who made a career at the sheriff’s department after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Andre White, 34, is the youngest candidate. A Compton-raised detective with 11 years at the department, he promises to take a “community-oriented approach” if he’s elected sheriff.

Brendan Corbett served as the assistant sheriff for custody operations under Villanueva.

Lastly, there’s Capt. Mike Bornman, who has decades of experience in the department and lists a “comprehensive forensic audit” of its books as the top priority on his campaign website.

In a recent phone interview, Bornman said he considered Luna a “vulnerable” incumbent.

The sheriff has faced criticism from opponents and advocates who say he has done too little to improve jail conditions, leading to a surge in inmate deaths this year. Like Villanueva, he has also faced pressure to do more to root out deputy gangs and boost recruitment.

“The morale is as bad as I’ve ever seen it,” Bornman said. “Something has to change,” he added. “I don’t think the department can take another four more years with the guy.”

Political analysts cautioned that the race is sill wide open, with one expert declining to speculate during the “embryonic” stages as the field takes shape.

Anything can happen in the eight months remaining before the primary, but Sadhwani said one thing is clear: Unseating the current sheriff won’t be easy.

“I will say in general that an incumbent such as Luna typically has the upper hand and challengers need not only cause but the campaign fundraising ability to get their message out — no small feat in a county as large as L.A.”

So far, fundraising has been mostly anemic, at least according to the county’s most recent comprehensive campaign finance data available for the sheriff’s race, which covers only Jan. 1 through June 30.

Over those six months, Luna raised about $393,000; Bornman brought in nearly $23,000 of contributions; Martinez brought in about $6,700; and White raised less than $3,000. The other three candidates had not even declared their candidacies by June 30.