Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued a puzzling defense of her being in Ghana as the 2025 wildfires raged across her city, destroying the Pacific Palisades and most of Altadena.
Bass issued her defense of the 2025 visit during a KBLA Talk 1580 Town Hall and Ballot Forum on Saturday, saying that the city’s response to the wildfires would be exactly the same if she had been stateside, blaming it on the large size.
“When people go through grief — one of the stages of grief, and I know grief very well, is anger. People are mad,” she said. “You are mad and I understand that. And even though objectively, even if I was here, there really wouldn’t have been anything that was done different.”
“The problem in our very big city is that it’s very difficult to leave town and not have something that happens,” Bass added. “I’m not a firefighter, obviously, but it’s the role of mayor to be here.”
Bass admitted in July 2025 that her trip to Ghana was a mistake.
“I was asked, ‘Do I regret going?’ Hell yeah,” she told Vice News at the time. “I mean, let me just do a comparison. If you are out of town and your kid or a member of your family gets sick or hurt, it doesn’t matter where you were or why you were there. You feel horrible.”
Bass visited West Africa as part of a U.S. delegation to attend the presidential inauguration even after multiple weather reports indicated fire warnings and dangerously high winds.
In late 2025, the Los Angeles Times reported that Bass ordered the watering down of the after-action report following the wildfires. As Breitbart News reported in December, an initial report from the LA Times noted that the famed after-action report released by the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) showed it had multiple deletions and redactions to provide a smoother picture than what happened:
In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast “did not align” with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days.
Another deleted passage in the report said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire. A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.
The first draft of the report in August, overseen by the then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva after Mayor Karen Bass fired Kristin Crowley, also had side notes in the margins with suggestions to replace the cover page from a “negative” photo of flaming palm trees to a “positive” photo of firefighters hard at work. As many as seven drafts of the report were created before the final publication. No names were attached to the edited drafts.
According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, those edits were ordered by Mayor Karen Bass, most especially regarding the city’s “failure not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available engines ahead of dangerously high winds.” Though Mayor Karen Bass consistently denied ordering the edits, two sources indicated that she did:
Two sources with knowledge of Bass’ office said that after receiving an early draft, the mayor told then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva that the report could expose the city to legal liabilities for those failures. Bass wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions removed or softened before the report was made public, the sources said — and that is what happened.
The sources told The Times that two people close to Bass informed them of the mayor’s behind-the-scenes role in watering down the report. One source spoke to both of the people; the other spoke to one of them. The sources requested anonymity to speak frankly about the mayor’s private conversations with Villanueva and others.
One source flatly said that Bass “didn’t tell the truth when she said she had nothing to do with changing the report,” with the source saying that a confidant close to Bass said that altering the report “was a bad idea.”
The sources said that two confidants will testify under oath if the matter were to be litigated in court.
“All the changes [the Times] reported on were the ones Karen wanted,” a source said.
Bass’s office denied that the mayor ever demanded changes.
