Embattled Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass admitted she “botched” the response to the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in an on-camera podcast interview – but her team later demanded that the confession be cut from the final video, according to a bombshell report.
On an episode of Matt Welch’s “The Fifth Column” podcast, released last month, Bass ended a roughly 66-minute wide-ranging interview – in which she discussed President Trump, ICE raids and education – with an accidental unguarded moment, the LA Times reported.
“Both sides botched it,” she told Welch, giving a brutally honest assessment of the emergency response to the tragedy, which became the most destructive wildfire in LA’s history.
“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she added, according to the Times, referring to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where 19 people died.
In prior interviews, the mayor pinned blame on former fire chief Kristin Crowley, whom she canned in February, while she was busy on a diplomatic mission in Ghana.
Bass purged her text messages about the fires during and after that trip — a violation of public disclosure laws, an ABC7 investigation revealed. Bass told the outlet her messages auto-deleted after 30 days.
Bass has since acknowledged the trip was a mistake.
The Los Angeles Fire Department union boss blasted the mayor for the firing, claiming the head firefighter was being used as a “scapegoat.”
Meanwhile, Bass failed to quickly deploy a crisis response team amounting to hundreds of trained volunteers and a nearly million-dollar budget during the critical early days of the disaster.
The team sat on its hands for nearly a week in January, and was only deployed after The Post started asking questions.
Bass’ office later asked the off-the-cuff conversation, which lasted 4 minutes, be scrubbed from YouTube after the interview was published, the Times reported.
“The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said in a statement to the outlet.
Bass’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
The mayor also insisted in an interview with the Times that she only made the remarks in a “casual conversation” and called the situation “unfortunate.”
Meanwhile, in another part of the wide-ranging podcast interview, Bass lamented that she has been held responsible for the poor response – seeming to shift blame onto the city’s legislators.
“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said in the 66-minute version of the podcast. “I’m responsible for everything.”
