Los Angeles County has hired a consulting firm associated with anti-Trump retied general Stanley McChrystal to handle public engagement about recent wildfires — rather than simply listening to the public — among other duties.
McChrystal, the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was fired by President Barack Obama in 2010 over a Rolling Stone article in which his aides disparaged the president. He then went on to become one of several retired military and intelligence leaders to attack President Donald Trump during his first term. Some even called for the president’s removal from office.
In 2020, the Washington Post reported that McChrystal was advising a project that was using military counterintelligence measures to oppose President Trump, specifically on the issue of coronavirus. Many of the media orthodoxies around the pandemic, which were used to censor critics, were later disproven.
In an email to constituents, Third District L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath noted that she had led an effort to hire McChrystal’s firm to conduct “community listening sessions,” among other services.
Breitbart News has reached out to Horvath’s office for comment.
The decision to hire McChrystal was actually announced in February. The county said it had hired the firm, and McChrystal personally, to conduct “an independent review of the evacuation policies and emergency alert notification systems utilized by the County and its partners in responding to the Palisades and Eaton Fires.”
Faulty evacuation orders have been blamed in media accounts for deaths, specifically in the area of Western Altadena, which did not receive alerts until it was far too late for some residents to escape.
In another controversial arrangement, the Los Angeles City Council hired Hagerty Consulting for $10 million in a behind-closed-doors deal that was questioned at the time, given the fact that two former lead consultants at the firm had pleaded guilty of misappropriating disaster relief funds.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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