Last week, the Sanders administration's assistant chief operating officer, Rick Renolds, and purchasing and contracting director, Lance Wade, were abruptly fired. This morning, Wade confirmed an extremely disquieting story that is making the rounds. Wade confirmed that Fred Sainz, the mayor's press aide, made an end run around Reynolds by asking one of his underlings to provide internet protocol (IP) numbers for people in the city attorney's office. Reynolds wrote a memo that it was dangerous to try to gather this information, which is important to internal security. "They told him (Reynolds) to destroy the memo," says Wade, who theorizes that Sainz was going to slip the information to U-T blogger Chris Reed, who was trying to show that City Attorney Mike Aguirre had used the City's system to post a comment on the LA Times site about an ongoing murder trial in LA. Aguirre says he has confirmed with the LA Times that the poster was falsely using Aguirre's name. Wade gave the information he gave me to the Union-Tribune yesterday, but it did not appear in the story of the firings this morning. Wade says that another apparent reason for his firing was that he was pressured to give more contracts to African-American-owned construction companies, but needed more information about these companies. (He didn't mention this, but in cities throughout the country, contracts are awarded to purportedly minority-owned or female-owned companies, but those companies only shift the paper ownership to minorities or females to win contracts.) Reynolds did not want to talk about the subject, other than to say that, "I did not fit into the leadership team" for the Sanders administration. It sounds like Reynolds and Wade were honestly trying to do their jobs. Therefore, it is true that they do not fit into the Sanders team. It will be interesting to see if the Union-Tribune pursues this story, or attempts to drop it.