Karen Bass Admitted in Interview That the Response to LA Fires Was ‘Botched’ But the Audio is Curiously Missing

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass recently did an interview with Matt Welch of Reason Magazine. He hosts a podcast called the Fifth Column.

At one point near the end of their discussion, she apparently admitted that the response to the Los Angeles fires was botched, but the audio has been cut from the interview and no one seems to know why.

It’s not exactly a breaking news story that the response was botched. All you have to do is look at the disgraceful lack of rebuilding in Los Angeles to know that.

The Los Angeles Times reported on this:

‘Both sides botched it.’ Bass, in unguarded moment, rips responses to Palisades, Eaton fires

The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.

The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.

Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip.

Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said.

She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred.

“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.

Matt Welch was asked about the now missing audio but does not want to discuss it.

The mayor’s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to “The Fifth Column’s” YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version — one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.

The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast’s YouTube channel.

Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can’t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.

“We’re not going to be talking about any of that right now,” he told The Times before hanging up.

Who deleted the audio and why did they do it?

Did Karen Bass’s team pressure Welch to take it out? IF they did, why didn’t he expose them for that? Don’t the people of Los Angeles, especially those who lost their homes, deserve to know?

Is Welch just covering for Bass? That would be standard operating procedure for the journalism industry. We can’t prove Trump was right about something, can we?