Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised reporters she'd take their questions. Then she disappeared.

At a Tuesday press conference held to announce an executive directive banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement from using city property for staging operations, Bass told the assembled media she'd handle "political questions" after the formal Q&A. Her Deputy Mayor for Communications, Amanda Crumley, confirmed it.

Bass never came back.

According to the NY Post, Kolby Lee, responsible for strategic communications for the mayor, stepped in to deliver the update, stating that the mayor would not be coming out at that moment. Lee told reporters they could email their questions instead.

One reporter in the room captured the mood perfectly: "So, she lied to us?"

What She Was Running From

The timing tells the story. Only hours before Bass took the podium, The California Post published a report exposing sweeping changes made to the Palisades After-Action Fire report before its public release in January. The first draft — a 92-page document — was 22 pages longer than the final version that saw the light of day. Twenty-two pages of material, gone.

Bass has insisted she only reviewed an early draft and asked the Los Angeles Fire Department to ensure accuracy on weather and budgeting details. She claims neither she nor her staff made edits to the report. Those claims now sit against a backdrop of a dramatically altered document that the public was never told had been reworked.

During the press conference, a reporter from The California Post tried to question Bass about the report. Crumley intervened and said the matter would be addressed separately.

They didn't take it at all.

A Pattern, Not an Incident

This is not the first time Bass has treated press accountability like something to be managed rather than met. When the Palisades Fire was still burning, Bass was on a trip to Ghana. She returned to a city in crisis and refused to answer questions about the fire. The mayor who couldn't be found during the disaster now can't be found after it, either.

Bass had one off-topic question she was willing to field on Tuesday — about comments from Nithya Raman calling for more police. That she engaged with. The fire report? The missing 22 pages? The question of whether her office shaped the narrative before the public ever saw it? Those required an email.

There's a word for leaders who only answer the questions that don't threaten them. It isn't "transparent."

The Raman Problem

Bass's avoidance also has a political dimension she clearly doesn't want to discuss in front of cameras. Raman — a former ally of Bass and a democratic socialist — announced a surprise bid for mayor over the weekend. She poses a significant challenge to Bass's reelection, and the fact that a far-left challenger is now outflanking Bass on public safety by calling for more police says everything about how badly the mayor has lost the narrative.

When your democratic socialist rival is running to your right on policing, the ground has shifted beneath you in ways no executive directive can fix.

Bass's Tuesday press conference was supposed to be about the ICE directive — red meat for her progressive base, a signal that Los Angeles would resist federal immigration enforcement. But instead of controlling the news cycle, she handed reporters a better story: a mayor who promises answers and then vanishes when the questions get uncomfortable.

Accountability by Email

The suggestion that reporters email their questions deserves its own examination. Email is where accountability goes to die. It allows staffers to draft, workshop, and sanitize responses. It strips away the follow-up, the clarification, the moment when a public official's composure reveals more than their words. It is the opposite of a press conference, which is precisely why Bass's team offered it as a substitute for one she had already committed to holding.

The press conference wasn't about informing the public. It was about generating a headline. When the headline threatened to become one she couldn't control, she walked.

The Bigger Picture

Los Angeles is a city still reeling from a catastrophic fire, governed by a mayor who was absent during the crisis and evasive after it. The Palisades After-Action Fire report was supposed to be the authoritative account of what went wrong. Instead, it's now a document with a 22-page gap and a mayor who insists she had nothing to do with the changes — but won't stand in front of a microphone and say so under questioning.

Bass chose Tuesday to make a public stand against federal immigration enforcement. She did not choose Tuesday to make a public stand for transparency about the worst fire in her city's recent memory. That ordering of priorities is not an accident. It's a tell.

The reporters in that room asked the right question. She lied to them. And the people of Los Angeles — the ones who lost homes, who waited for answers, who deserved a full and unaltered accounting of what happened — got exactly what Bass has given them from the start: a mayor headed for the exit.