As wildfires rage, Trump lashes out with false claims about FEMA and California water policy

 https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/09/politics/fact-check-trump-california-wildfires-fema/index.html

 Another natural disaster, another series of false claims from President-elect Donald Trump.

For years, Trump has littered his statements on California wildfires and other disasters with inaccurate assertions. He did it again on Wednesday as wildfires raged in Los Angeles County.

Newsom has never refused to sign a “water restoration declaration.” In fact, there is no such document, as Newsom’s office said on social media on Wednesday and experts on California water policy confirmed. As of early Thursday morning, Trump’s presidential transition team had not provided a response to CNN’s request from Wednesday afternoon to identify what Trump was talking about.

“There was no ‘water restoration declaration’ for him to sign,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, said in a Wednesday interview.

“There was never a ‘water restoration declaration’ in California that the Governor refused to sign,” Brent Haddad, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a Wednesday email.