Richard Grenell: There Will Be Conditions On Los Angeles Fire Aid

President Donald Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell said there will be strings attached to California wildfire aid.

“As a Californian I’m all for it,” Grenell said during a conversation with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Friday.

Grenell said the administration is talking about what these conditions will be. He floated the idea of targeting the California Coastal Commission, which he called “a disaster” and an unelected group of people who are “crazy woke left.”

Grenell has served in a wide-ranging role in the first month of Trump’s administration — including accompanying the president while touring wildfire damage and leading the Kennedy Center in Washington.

His targeting of the Coastal Commission echos both Trump and Elon Musk, who sued the powerful state agency last year over its rejection of SpaceX's rocket-launch plan. The commission, which oversees much of the permitting along the state’s vaunted 840-mile coastline, has a long history of tangling with developers, Hollywood stars and billionaires.

“Squeezing their federal funds, making sure they don’t get funds, putting strings on them to get rid of the California Coastal Commission is going to make California better,” he said.

But the commission, one of the most powerful regulatory bodies in the state, was established by voters through a ballot initiative in 1972. That means state lawmakers would have put any changes to the agency in front of voters, a tough ask in a state where environmental conservation remains popular.

“I don’t have faith that if we went back and just gave California hundreds of millions of dollars, they were gonna go back to their same old ways of not giving us enough water, having dangerous situations on the ground in terms of forestry — it’s going to happen again,” Grenell said.

Grenell lives in the Los Angeles area and has been heavily critical of Democrats’ response to the fires. He also hinted on Friday that he could be interested in running for office in his home state.

Grenell repeated that he’s open to throwing his hat in the ring for the California governor’s race, but only if his Democratic opponent is former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to resist running against her,” he said.

The longtime Trump ally engaged in a wide-ranging interview that also broached the subject of negotiations with Ukraine. Grenell, a longtime diplomat, backed up the Trump administration’s approach to the conflict, stating that Trump is focused on peace.

“What we want to see is talks with Putin,” Grenell said, following a week of sparring between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where Trump called the Ukrainian leader a “dictator without elections.”

When asked if he agreed with Trump’s statements on Zelenskyy, Grenell hit back that he understood people were angry at Zelenskyy for not having elections — but stopped short of calling him a dictator. He did, however, acknowledge Russian President Vladimir Putin as a dictator.

The conversation was bookended by Grenell’s latest assignment as the head of the Kennedy Center, which he said he is helping “clean up” after claiming the performing arts center had run out of money. He said the center will be hosting a grand Christmas celebration in December. (A local church recently canceled its performance at the Center after the Trump takeover.)

“We want to make art great again,” Grenell told Burns.

Alex Nieves contributed to this report.