In an interview with KNX News on Wednesday, businessman Rick Caruso said he is reconsidering his decision not to run for L.A. Mayor in light of the Los Angeles Times report that Mayor Karen Bass ordered the watering down of the official report into the Palisades wildfire.
“Well, I've gotten a lot of calls today, as you can imagine, and I know there's been a lot of posts on X and other places, asking me to jump back in, and I'm honored by that,” he said. “But let's give me some time, and I don't have a lot of time to decide, obviously, because we've got a looming deadline this Saturday. But I'm going to be meeting and talking to the family, and we'll see what we decide to do.”
Caruso also weighed in on the L.A. Times report, calling it an “outrage.”
“For months, we've been talking about what has been labeled “Firegate” and how the city has attempted to cover up their failures in responding to the fire,” he said. “And now we clearly know that this failure goes directly to Mayor Bass, which is beyond unacceptable because you take an oath in office as a mayor to protect the residents of the city. The intent of this report is to learn from the mistakes, understand the mistakes that were made, be honest about the mistakes, mistakes that were made, just so it doesn't happen again and if you edit it, water it down, whatever you wanna call it, eliminate provisions in it, then you're putting everybody at risk again, and it just violates the sacred duty that an elected official has to the residents.”
You can listen to our full interview with Caruso in the audio above.
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