Los Angeles’ floundering Mayor Karen Bass fled from reporters after promising to answer tough “political questions” — instead escaping to another event — only hours after The California Post exposed the coverup of the Palisades Fire report.
Bass held a press conference to announce the signing of an executive directive banning Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement from using city property for staging operations Tuesday. During the event, a reporter asked Bass to respond to challenger Nithya Raman’s comments calling for more police.
Bass answered the question, but told reporters any further off-topic subjects would be addressed at the end.
“The purpose of this Q & A is about the executive directive, if people do want to ask me political questions we can just do that afterwards,” Bass said. “I don’t want to hold everyone up here.”
When a California Post reporter tried to follow up with another question about Raman — a former ally of Bass who announced a surprise bid for mayor over the weekend — it was quickly shut down.
“We’ll take that separately,” Amanda Crumley, Deputy Mayor for Communications, told The Post.
But Bass broke her promise, leaving the podium and never coming back out to answer questions from the media.
“She’s not coming out right now,” Kolby Lee, who does strategic communications for Bass, told reporters, adding that they can instead email their questions.
“So, she lied to us?” another reporter responded.
Bass was likely to face tough questions not only about Raman, who poses a significant challenge to her reelection efforts, but the damning rewrite of the Palisades After-Action Fire report.
The Post obtained the first draft of the report — before it was quietly altered and released to the public.
Newly uncovered edits show sweeping changes to the 92-page document that was meant to deliver a warts-and-all account of the disaster. It was also 22 pages longer than the final version released in January.
Mayor Bass has insisted she only reviewed an early draft and asked the Los Angeles Fire Department to ensure accuracy on issues such as weather and budgeting. She claims that neither her or her staff made edits to the report.
Bass also received heavy criticism for her refusal to answer questions about the Palisades Fire immediately after it happened — showing zero emotion as she was asked about it upon returning from her trip to Ghana while the city burned.
