LOS ANGELES (CN) — A Superior Court judge on Friday said he was leaning toward allowing a public records lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Times against the city of LA over the mayor’s text messages to go forward to discovery and then a trial.
At issue: Is a text message a public record? And is the city obligated to read through every employee’s text messages before deciding which ones should be kept?
The case stems from a public records request filed by a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning LA Times reporters for text messages sent or received by Mayor Karen Bass in January 2025 as deadly wildfires began to spread through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Bass was away in Ghana when the fires broke out, and was heavily criticized for traveling when the National Weather Service had been forecasting “critical fire weather conditions.”…