A former high school classmate of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has written to the L.A. Times to defend the mayor’s conduct during the Palisades Fire — which broke out when Bass was abroad at Ghana’s presidential inauguration.
The letter, by Dory Frank, argues:
It is one thing for a mayor to be away when rain can cause mudslides for homeowners in the burn areas. However, she would have to be a prophet to know that the forecast high winds and dryness would cause the destruction of Pacific Palisades and Altadena during her scheduled trip to Ghana as part of a delegation sent by then-President Biden
What would the mayor’s loud critics have done if they were in her shoes? It is easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback. She came back to Los Angeles as soon as possible.
Bass has admitted that the trip to Ghana — which she took despite having been warned, several days in advance, of extreme winds — was a mistake.
However, as the New York Times pointed out last month, it was worse than that: the trip to Ghana also broke a promise Bass made during the 2022 mayoral campaign: “[N]ot only would I of course live here [in Los Angeles], but I also would not travel internationally — the only places I would go would be D.C., Sacramento, San Francisco and New York, in relation to L.A.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
