Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Tuesday deflected questions about her controversial overseas trip to Ghana as newly unearthed photos show her at a cocktail party in the African country when the first fire in the region began to spread.
The embattled first-term city leader was at the US ambassador’s home in Accra for the celebratory gathering as part of a delegation sent by the White House for the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama, the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday.
She appeared in photos snapped at the party around 8 p.m. local time on Jan. 7, which was just before noon in LA when evacuation orders regarding the Palisades fire were about to be given, the newspaper reported, citing one photo where a person’s watch was visible.
The photo was posted online by a city staffer not part of the delegation, according to the publication.
Bass, a liberal Democrat, has faced immense scrutiny over her trip to the African country that got underway around the time warnings about an impending windstorm went out in the Californian metro area. She finally made it back to LA after fires forced mass evacuations and burned thousands of acres of land.
Another set of photos reportedly shows Bass with a smile and posing with Ghanaian broadcaster Nathaniel Attoh at the event.
A spokesperson for the mayor told the LA Times that Bass and the rest of the US delegation attended the cocktail party at the US Ambassador’s home during a stop along the way to the military plane that flew the group back to the US. The plane landed in Washington, DC and from there, Bass hopped on a commercial flight to LA.
“For the majority of the time, the mayor was in a different room on calls from LA,” the spokesperson said, adding the delegation left between 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. local time to beeline straight to the tarmac.
“Looking back, would you have taken your trip overseas?” CBS News’ Jonathan Vigliotti asked Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. https://t.co/OsWDYaZ1h3 pic.twitter.com/A1hH6KNwxe
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 14, 2025
Bass was on the military flight by 9 p.m. Ghanaian time, the newspaper reported.
The mayor, a former US congresswoman, previously vowed in a New York Times interview leading up to the mayoral election in 2022 that she would not travel out of the country if she was elected.
When asked about her trip to Ghana on Tuesday by CBS News, she couldn’t muster up an answer, according to footage posted online by the network.
“Looking back, would you have taken that trip overseas?” asked reporter Jonathan Vigliotti.
“You know, I am gonna focus today on what we,” she said before Vigliotti interrupted to press her on the question before she exclaimed “no” and turned away.
Los Angeles residents continued to rip Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom this week for what they called woeful leadership and a lack of preparedness by the city and state leading up to the deadly fires.
The blazes have killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 12,000 buildings in some of the priciest neighborhoods in the nation.
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