Mayor's press team uses disappearing WhatsApp messages, avoiding scrutiny
Los Angeles city rules demand public records be kept for two years, yet the mayor’s own press team is deliberately erasing its WhatsApp chats to dodge accountability.
Mayor Karen Bass’s communications staff has adopted a routine of sending official business through WhatsApp messages set to disappear, a practice that directly circumvents the city’s requirement to retain public records for at least two years.
The administrative code is unambiguous: every relevant record must be preserved. Yet the mayor’s press team has chosen a tool engineered for ephemerality, ensuring that inquiries from journalists, watchdogs or even future investigators hit a blank wall after 24 or 48 hours.
This is not an accidental feature of modern messaging. WhatsApp’s disappearing-messages option was built to leave no trace. By routing government business through it, Bass’s office has converted a statutory obligation into an optional suggestion that can be switched off at will.
The pattern fits a larger drift in California governance where transparency rules are treated as decorative. When the law says two years and the mayor’s team chooses zero days, the public record shrinks to whatever the officials decide to keep. That is not compliance; it is evasion dressed up as administrative convenience.
Exactly how many policy discussions, damage-control strategies or responses to constituent crises have already vanished is unknown, because the very act of using disappearing messages makes the count unknowable. The city code’s two-year floor now applies only to the records the administration chooses not to hide.
The contradiction is glaring: a city that lectures residents on accountability cannot simultaneously run its own press operation on self-destructing chats. Either the administrative code means something or it does not. Bass’s team has supplied the answer.
Original reporting: LA Times (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-24/mayors-press-team-uses-disappearing-whatsapp-messages-avoiding-scrutiny)
Original reporting: LA Times, California.
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