Trump urges Georgia Supreme Court to keep DA Fani Willis disqualified from election interference case

(WASHINGTON) — When unemployed marine biologist Lanny Flaherty poked his head into the ranger’s station at the Wallowa Whitman National Forest in the Pacific Northwest and asked to be a volunteer, he said it put him on a 13-year career path with the U.S. Forest Service that included stints as a botanist, a wildfire resource adviser and a range ecologist.

When he wasn’t researching the effects of vegetation on fire behavior or identifying fungi on national forest land, the 40-year-old Flaherty said he was a “red-card” carrying certified firefighter, helping battle some of the biggest wildland fires in the nation.

In 2016, he helped fight the Great Smoky Mountain wildfires, the largest arson blazes in Tennessee history, and in 2021, he helped extinguish the Dixie Fire that swept through five Northern California counties, scorching nearly a million acres and destroying more than 1,300 structures.

“I’m so proud of everything I’ve done,” Flaherty told ABC News. “Stumbling into the Forest Service was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, this fits. I’m running with it. This is me.'”

But while on assignment last week with a U.S. Forest Service fire engine crew in Louisiana restoring federal land and structures at the Kisatchie National Forest that had been devastated by hurricanes, Flaherty said his job came to an abrupt end.

As a probationary range ecologist, he was among several thousand probationary workers terminated from the U.S. Forest Service in the Trump administration’s sweeping reduction in the federal workforce being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to end up under the bus on what’s obviously a politically motivated illegal termination,” said Flaherty, whose two-year probationary period wasn’t scheduled to end until November of this year. “I mean, I’ve got 13 years’ worth of qualifications and I was cast aside as a probationary employee, despite having proven myself time and time again in a multitude of different positions.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, announced that 2,000 USFS “probationary, non-firefighting employees” were being let go. At least 1,000 probationary employees of the National Park Service, which is under the U.S. Interior Department, were also terminated, including those who worked as secondary firefighters.

“To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.

Rollins, according to the USDA statement, “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”

“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve people, not the bureaucracy,” the USDA statement reads.

‘These fires are going to get exponentially bigger’

While hosting a roundtable in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters, Rollins praised their response to the devastating January wildfires in Los Angeles County that decimated the communities of Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Following the meeting, the USDA released a statement, saying, Rollins is “committed to ensuring that the United States has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world to save lives and protect our beautiful homeland.”

But the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) told ABC News that the USFS cuts will severely weaken the agency’s ability to respond to wildfires.

Steve Gutierrez, NFFE’s national business representative, said that based on data the union requested from the USFS, the number of fired probationary non-fire personnel is about 3,400.

Flaherty said that in the past five years, 40% to 50% of his job was fighting wildfires as part of what the Forest Services refers to as “militias” comprised of trained secondary firefighters.

“When a fire breaks out, we’re out there like everybody else getting into the fray,” Flaherty said.

Gutierrez, a former USFS firefighter, told ABC News that the cuts affect about 10% of the U.S. Forest Service’s total workforce. He said many of the terminated employees held dual jobs, like Flaherty, including working as firefighters responding to all-hands-on-deck blazes throughout the country.

“When I say ‘non-fire personnel,’ we can’t totally think that they don’t ever touch fire, that they’re not important,” Gutierrez said. “They’re all part of this logistical machine that helps support fire. They’re either ecologists, they’re mechanics, they’re pilots, they’re water systems operators, they’re grants and agreements folks, they’re land management, minerals and geologists to help recovery efforts from the aftereffect of fire.”

He added, “They support all of what happens before fire, during a fire and after a fire.”

Gutierrez said some of the federal employees who got fired had just helped battle the Los Angeles fires just weeks ago.

“They just fought this fire in LA, one of LA’s most devastating wildfires that we’ve ever had and now they’re terminated because they have ‘poor performance,'” Gutierrez said. “It’s just crazy to me that you can be so utterly disrespectful and ultimately it’s a slap in the face to these brave men and women who have risked their lives for the American public.”

Making matters worse, Gutierrez said, is an imposed hiring freeze, which has stalled the annual task of “fuels management,” which means clearing federal lands of fire hazards like dead trees and overgrown brush.

“If we’re not able to get that process moving immediately, fires are not going to just be, like, small. These fires are going to get exponentially bigger. Communities are going to burn and people are going to die, and that’s what’s going to happen,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not going to be just a California problem. It’s going to be a United States problem. I mean, there are several states, New Jersey, for example, they had a fire every year, every month for the past year. There was a fire in New York, right there in Manhattan. It’s not going to stop. It’s a national issue.”

Almost stranded in Louisiana

Flaherty said that when he got a call in Louisiana from his forest supervisor relating that he was terminated effective immediately with no severance package, he was initially told he’d have to get his own transportation back to Oregon.

“He offered no solution whatsoever, despite being fully aware of the fact that I would be stranded in Louisiana and unable to make travel arrangements short of purchasing myself a ticket. I was not in Louisiana on my own time, I was there on official travel and his plan was to, I guess, just wing it,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty said his union, the NFFE, intervened and got the USFS to cover his transportation by temporarily rescinding his termination until it got him back to Oregon.

“It’s just really sad that the top of the food chain doesn’t understand the impacts of what they’re doing when they swipe their pen,” said Gutierrez, responding to Flaherty almost being stranded in Louisiana. “They don’t understand the complexities of the entirety of the government.”

Flaherty said the “insult still rings true even though I am back home.”

“To me, that just kind of sums up how callous and poorly thought out all of this is,” Flaherty said. “I have deep, deep concerns for the amount of stress that everybody has been put through in every agency, and it just continues. It’s harming people’s physical and mental well-being, and it’s criminal.”

‘Dream job’

Eric Anderson said that in June 2024 he landed a job as a biological science technician and lead fire effects monitor for the National Park Service, after working since 2021 as a seasonal employee.

“I spent two years, three years working as a temporary hire to keep my face seen, to improve my qualifications, to gain more experience. And now, I finally get into a position that I knew three years ago, OK, my predecessor, is probably going to be retiring. I think I can improve my qualifications and become useful to do that position. And I worked toward it, I applied, and I got the position.”

Like Flaherty, Anderson, 48, a married father of two high school-aged children, told ABC News that he was fired in what he called, “the Valentine’s Day massacre.”

“You finally get your dream job that you’ve been working toward for many years, and it just got pulled out from under you for politics,” said Anderson, who was stationed at the Indiana Dunes National Park on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

He said he received his dismissal letter in his email inbox from an Interior Department administrator he had never met.

“The Department determined that you have failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment because your subject matter knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs, and it is necessary and appropriate to terminate, during the probationary period, your appointment to the position of BioScience Tech (Fire Eff. Monitor),” reads the dismissal letter Anderson shared with ABC News.

“This is a lie. This says I’m fired because of my performance and my inability to do the job and that I’m no longer needed. My performance evaluations are excellent, and I’m crucial to the program. I have qualifications that we need within our unit to function,” Anderson said. “It’s a bit maddening.”

A former Peace Corps volunteer from 2000 to 2002 in Kenya, East Africa, Anderson said he used to work as a consultant in the private sector and took a huge pay cut when he joined the NPS as a seasonal employee.

“My bosses worked really hard to justify that I should be kept on, noting that in my position description, yes, it says biological science technician, but if you just read down a few lines, you see the box checked that says wildland firefighter, which was supposed to be in the protected ones that weren’t getting fired,” Anderson said.

In his job as a biological science technician, he said he would collect plant samples for analysis and prepped parklands in the winter months for the fire season, eliminating hazardous fuels by conducting prescribed or controlled burns. His work also included rehabilitating burned land.

“When bulldozers come through trying to protect towns, someone has to put that back together. So, we worked very much on how do we keep this from washing down the mountain during the next atmospheric river,” Anderson said. “By mid-August or so, we’re pretty much done with our sampling at various parks around the Great Lakes that we go to, and then we are available to do wildland fire or help as collaterals for wildland fires,” Anderson said. “A lot of the people that were let go in the last week were also collateral firefighters.”

In September, Anderson worked on the front lines of the Line Fire that burned more than 44,000 acres in and around the San Bernardino National Forest and threatened the community of Highland, California. In August 2023, Anderson said he helped battle the Happy Camp Complex Fire, which burned more than 21,000 acres in the Klamath National Forest in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.

He just returned in January from conducting prescribed fires in the Florida Everglades.

“Maybe, this is that Peace Corps volunteer in me that looks for mission-driven work. I know that’s just my personality type. I need to be working somewhere that I feel it’s important,” Anderson said. “I very much want to go back and work for the place that I was just fired from. I live what I do. These are all very qualified, excellent people doing good work that needs to be done and they’re just slashed without any real cause.”

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(NEW ORLEANS, LA) — Witnesses described scenes of carnage in the wake of a car-ramming attack early Wednesday morning on Bourbon Street in New Orleans that left at least 10 dead and dozens injured.

The suspect, who has not yet been identified, was allegedly “hell-bent” on killing as many people as possible when he steered a pickup truck around barricades and plowed into a crowd of people ringing in the New Year, according to New Orleans Superintendent of Police Anne Kirkpatrick.

One witness, Paul S., who asked ABC News to withhold his full name, said he had watched a fireworks display and went back to his hotel, going to bed around 2:00 a.m. CT. A little over an hour later, he woke up to popping sounds.

“We heard a ‘pop, pop, pop, pop’ sound, followed by a sound that sounded like fireworks going off, like a big firework all at once, and it turned out that was the crash,” he said.

Paul said he peeked through the curtains to see what was occurring and saw police officers telling people in buildings to stay inside. He then went onto the balcony and started recording the aftermath of the attack.

“There’s litter all over the sidewalks, and then there were bodies laid up next to garbage cans and people rushing to give aid,” he said. “There were…these really bright lights out on Bourbon Street…and that illuminated the scene where you could look up and down a block and see it completely empty except for the bodies that were on the ground.”

“The one detail that feels the worst was a man who was in a wheelchair, who was clearly knocked out of it and on the ground in pain. It’s just right next to where the carpark ended,” Paul added.

Paul said he did not see the suspect but was able to see four bullet holes in the rear windshield of the pickup truck allegedly used in the attack.

Another witness, Jimmy Cothran, told ABC News’ Morgan Norwood he and his group ducked into a Bourbon Street nightclub when the commotion began.

Shortly after he entered the club, he said five girls ran in “frantically” and hid under chairs.

Cothran said he ran upstairs to the club’s balcony and witnessed “body after body mangled just as far as you could see. We counted 10, and at least six were instantly clearly deceased. Some were very clearly deceased, but others were yelling out. … It’s a lot to process.”

Cothran added that he saw some bodies in the street that bore tire marks.

“It looked like something out of a movie the way the bodies were mangled,” he said. “These people are never going to wake up.”

Dan McFee, another witness to the attack, had a close encounter with the suspect’s vehicle while standing on Canal Street, which intersects with Bourbon Street.

McFee said he was waiting for an Uber and saw the suspect’s pick-up truck. He heard tires “screeching” and the truck turned right onto Bourbon Street.

“It was heading directly towards me and the female friend I had with me. I basically wrapped my arms around her and threw ourselves to the right,” he told ABC News’ Diane Macedo.

McFee said he’s not sure if he was hit by the truck or by some debris but said he and his friend were flown into the air and came back down on the sidewalk.

He said he saw the truck barreling down the street, hitting other New Year’s Eve revelers and heard gunshots. He did not see the suspect inside the vehicle.

McFee added that he and his friend escaped with minor injuries.

“I believe we’re all alright. Fortunately, we had bumps and bruises and scrapes but no serious injuries,” he said.

The suspect was allegedly firing a gun as he mowed people down, law enforcement officials said. He was shot and killed by police when he got out of his vehicle with an assault rifle, the officials said.

ABC News’ Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — Pilots and air traffic controllers notified authorities about airplanes and helicopters flying alarmingly close at Reagan National Airport (DCA) in at least 15 incident reports dating back to 1991, according to an ABC News review of the reports.

Some of the reports warned that the flight space was “an accident waiting to happen” with others describing scenarios eerily close to what occurred when a military Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342 last week as the passenger jet approached the airport.

“One of these incidents would have been too many,” said former Air Force pilot and ABC News aviation consultant John Nance. “This barometer is in the red. It’s telling us there is a real problem here. There is a very, very clear track record of something that needs to be fixed.”

There are at least four reports of safety incidents associated with runway 33, the same runway that AA 5342 was approaching when the collision that took 67 lives occurred.

“This has been happening too many times over the years, and it’s now led to a tragedy that could have been prevented,” said Steve Ganyard, a former Marine Corps fighter pilot and ABC News contributor.

The safety reports were filed with the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a program established by the FAA and managed by NASA that enables professionals within the aviation community to voluntarily and confidentially report safety concerns and incidents in a non-punitive manner.

In response to questions from ABC News, the FAA said, “Due to the ongoing NTSB investigation, we cannot provide information at this time.” The FAA added that ASRS reports are “one of many data sources we use to identify system-level safety risks.”

The reports detail accounts of airplane flight crews at DCA who were surprised by helicopters flying too close, oftentimes describing near misses in the air within just hundreds of feet.

One captain for a major carrier went so far as to call DCA “probably the most dangerous airport in the United States” in a report concerning their broader safety concerns about flying in and out of the airport.

In 2015, the flight crew of a regional jet reported a near mid-air collision when it was switched from landing on runway 1 to runway 33 at DCA, coming “within very close contact” of a helicopter also in air. The safety report continues, “This occurred about 400 feet off the ground to the point where the pilot monitoring had to take the controls to make a correction in order to prevent it from becoming a midair collision.”

The reporting crew says that only after taking action to avoid a collision was the regional jet informed by DCA air traffic control of the close traffic, with the flight crew adding “at that point it would have been too late.”

American Airlines Flight 5342 was also switched to runway 33 after lining up for runway 1, in order to keep traffic moving, a common practice at DCA.

It is not yet known whether air traffic control ever communicated the helicopter’s close proximity to the American Airlines flight crew, though the Black Hawk helicopter was asked if they had the airplane in sight and replied that they did.

One airplane captain reported a near mid-air collision with a helicopter in April 2024, writing, “We never received a warning of the traffic from ATC so we were unaware it was there.” The captain urged “better separation for DCA traffic on the river visual to the helicopter traffic that is flying up and down the river.”

In 2013, an airplane captain reported coming within 200 feet of a military helicopter while approaching DCA to land, writing, “There are always numerous military and government helicopters running up and down that river at all times of the day and night. Because of this, what would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country has become commonplace at DCA. The FAA allows these aircraft to operate in this environment and we have no choice, but to accept it and deal with it.”

The concerned airplane pilot in that incident continued, “I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the paths of airliners carrying hundreds of people!”

Nance said this collection of safety incident reports “details a tale of dress rehearsals for what happened last week.”

In a separate incident report filed in 1997, an airplane first officer detailing a close encounter with a military helicopter said, “I was not comfortable with the level of safety involved with flying within 400 ft [vertically] of a heli and that is considered a normal op.”

In 1993, a captain of an airplane that came close to a helicopter flying above the Potomac River said, “This heli conflict around DCA is a daily prob!… This is an accident waiting to happen.”

In 1991, yet another flight crew reporting a converging flight path with a military helicopter wrote, “Here is an accident waiting to happen.”

Nance said an examination of these reports illustrates “flight crew confusion at critical junctures in the approach caused by alarming interactions with helicopter traffic,” “wildly variable altitudes flown by the helicopter traffic,” and “overburdened tower controllers” who “appear to consider the pace of operations and the number of close calls with helicopters in critical areas as business as usual.”

“The helicopter routes around DCA allow for little margin for error,” Ganyard said. “You cannot have aircraft constantly flying so close together and expect to maintain safety.”

“In the AA crash we see the consequences of a minor mistake becoming a tragedy,” Ganyard added. “Step one for the FAA is to reroute helicopter traffic around DCA.”

In the aftermath of the crash last week, the FAA restricted helicopter traffic over the Potomac River around DCA while the NTSB completes its preliminary investigation. At that point, the FAA said, it will review the airspace based on the NTSB’s report.

The Aviation Safety Reporting System was established in 1976 to “support the FAA in its mission to eliminate unsafe conditions in the national aviation system, and prevent avoidable accidents,” according to its website. The program is managed by NASA as an independent third party with no regulatory or enforcement role, which says it “ensures that de-identified incident data and the results of special studies are communicated to those responsible for aviation safety.”

On its website, the FAA said it established it is “a positive program intended to ensure the safest possible system by identifying and correcting unsafe conditions before they lead to accidents.”

In a report last year on near mid-air collisions, ASRA said, “Such incidents are independently submitted and are not corroborated by NASA, the FAA or NTSB. The existence in the ASRS database of reports concerning a specific topic cannot, therefore, be used to infer the prevalence of that problem within the National Airspace System.”

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