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.
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.
Bass’ team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. “The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said Tuesday in an email.
In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.
“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said on the original 66-minute video. “I’m responsible for everything.”
Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a “casual conversation” — a situation she called “unfortunate.” Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response “numerous times.”
In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.
“The city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,” she told The Times.
Bass was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.
Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire have created an opening for Bass’ rivals. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor — and has been a harsh critic of her performance.
Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor’s use of the word “botched” a “stunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor” on “the biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.”
“She’s admitting that she failed her constituents,” Beutner said.
Bass isn’t the first L.A. elected official to use the word “botched” in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass’ office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.
“Let’s be honest,” she told one of the mayor’s staffers. “You guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.”
Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.
“It’s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there’s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,” she said.
Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions on “Naked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.” She also went on “Big Boy’s Off Air Leadership Series” to discuss the Palisades fire and several other issues.
On “Big Boy’s Off Air,” Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February, she cited the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.
Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters “were sent home and they shouldn’t have been.”
She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later, causing the Palisades fire, “shocking.” The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn’t fully extinguished.
Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn’t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana.
Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: “At the end of the day, I’m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.”
On “The Fifth Column,” Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles and the effort to rewrite the City Charter to improve the city’s overall governmental structure. She also described the “overwhelming trauma” experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.
“To lose your home, it’s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,” she said. “You lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it’s overwhelming grief and it’s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.”
In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.
“Right,” Bass responded.
Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”
“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”
The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”
