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As virtually every Angeleno now knows, Mayor Karen Bass was on a diplomatic trip to Ghana when the Palisades fire exploded.
What remains hazier is how the mayor interacted with the person assigned to lead in her absence — City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who was the acting mayor during her trip, including the day the fire broke out.
Following a protracted back and forth last month, The Times obtained some of Bass’ text messages from the nearly 24 hours she spent in transit from Ghana to Los Angeles on Jan. 7 and 8.
After initially saying the mayor’s texts had been deleted, her staffers revealed they were able to recover them, providing about 125 messages, while also noting that an unspecified number of additional messages were “redacted and/or withheld” based on exemptions to the California Public Records Act.
The cache of messages was revealing. But one name was notably absent: Harris-Dawson.
(The Times sued the city last month over the mayor’s texts. Even though city officials ultimately provided some texts, The Times is contesting the city’s argument that releasing them was not required under state law.)
Back on March 10, while we were still waiting to see if Bass would provide any of her texts, we filed a separate public records request with Harris-Dawson’s office, seeking all of his communications with Bass (via email and text message, as well as messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp) sent or received between Jan. 6 and Jan. 16.
Three weeks later, Harris-Dawson’s office said it had “conducted a…