Eric Garcetti Goes Down With His Ship

@TheGussReport - Had LA Mayor Eric Garcetti considered Dostoevsky's words, "above all, don't lie to yourself," he might already be in Bombay with the title US Ambassador preceding his name.

Instead, Garcetti refused to participate in US Senator Chuck Grassley's recent investigation, which concluded that it was "extremely unlikely" that the mayor was unaware of alleged sexual harassment and racist comments by his aide Rick Jacobs that made his office a hostile work environment. 

Garcetti had to stay silent during Grassley's investigation because he had already claimed under oath that he knew nothing, saw nothing and had said nothing when questioned about the allegations during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

If only Garcetti recognized that he had an escape hatch from this self-induced mess.

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Why Eric Garcetti and Mike Feuer Should Cancel Themselves

 By Daniel Guss

@TheGussReport - LA's Buffoon Bros of Miscarriage and Corruption, Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Attorney Mike Feuer, should spend the coming holiday season reshuffling their future plans.

Eric Garcetti and Mike Feuer

Photo Credit: LA Times

In Garcetti's case, he should pick up the house phone and ring President Joe Biden to withdraw his nomination to become the next U.S. Ambassador to India.  Feuer should withdraw from the Mayor's race and see whether any of the other candidates would welcome his endorsement.  If those candidates are smart, they'll politely decline and change their phone number.

Garcetti and Feuer are more likely than not on the verge of being booted from those pursuits and instead creating mortifying footnotes for their forever Wikipedia pages.  

Better for them to quit rather than being publicly shown the door.

Beyond Garcetti's comprehensive failure as al calde of the second largest American city, everyone from his right-hand man Rick Jacobs to his disgraced former chief of staff Ana Guerrero (and those who covered up for them at the LAPD and City Attorney's office) have been exposed for the bullies and harassers many have long-known them to be, as shown by a series of mortifying exposés and depositions.  It is not possible that these issues have escaped the notice of the FBI and Biden advisors. 

The point is that Garcetti is responsible for all that literally took place right in front of him, and more. The buck is supposed to stop with a chief executive, but Garcetti hasn't taken ownership for any of it, including his welcoming Guerrero back into his office after a lengthy suspension for indiscriminately abusing everyone from little-known locals to historic and accomplished women of color like Dolores Huerta.

As for things that took place right in front of Garcetti.....

Rick Jacobs, Eric Garcetti and others

Photo Credit: LA Times

In fact, logic suggests that someone in the White House, perhaps chief of staff Ron Klain, may soon dial up Garcetti and "politely suggest" that Garcetti do exactly as I recommend.

That way, Garcetti can take his rightful place alongside his inglorious predecessors, like "The 11% Percent Mayor" Antonio Villaraigosa and traffic court judge James Hahn.  He can join some corporate boards, teach a college class and be shown on the 11pm sports report cheering on the Dodgers and Lakers.

I left the Rams out of that thought, because, despite Garcetti's untruthful claims that he "brought the NFL back to LA," they in fact play in the world's greatest stadium in a city he never represented; Inglewood, California.  Sure, Inglewood is in "LA," but that's LA County, where Garcetti has never been an elected official. 

Garcetti failed to get that stadium built in downtown LA as Farmer's Field, though he squandered much time posturing about it, as I pointed out in the Huffington Post a few years back.

And that's the rosier of the two futures outlined in this column.

Our crystal ball says things are much bleaker for Mike Feuer.

It is delusional that someone who is being investigated by the State Bar of California and whose office was raided by the FBI and whose legal hire, Paul Paradis, agreed this week to plead guilty to a $2.2 million kickback scheme while running that scam under the auspices of Feuer's office, thinks he will be elected to succeed Garcetti as Mayor!

Maybe delusional isn't the right word.  Nuts.  Feuer would have to be nuts to believe that.

Mike Feuer

Photo Credit: KTLA

But it's so much worse than that for The Frazzled 'stache of LA City Hall.   

Despite his assertions to the contrary, the U.S. Department of Justice says that Feuer's office knew that Paradis astonishingly represented both the plaintiff and defendant in the scandalous LADWP / PricewaterhouseCoopers lawsuit.

That alone should result in a suspension of Feuer's law license, if not out and out disbarment, even if he didn't personally profit from the bribery, which could include campaign donations to his nascent mayoral campaign.

And yes, I do speculate that Feuer has already spoken with white collar criminal defense law firms to potentially represent him.  One would have to be a nuts (there's that word again) to be raided by the FBI and not immediately pick up the phone to find one.

But to think he still has even a remote chance of becoming mayor?  

Come on.

Then again, maybe Feuer's counting on LA making the same dumb choices for mayor as it has for the past 20 years with Hahn, Villaraigosa and Garcetti.

Hmmmph.  Perhaps he's on to something.

Nevermind, then. We'll simply say this.  If Feuer runs, he will finish with fewer votes than any other major candidate and perhaps even fewer than the spectacular 9,115 votes hauled-in (without spending a dime) by Venice street performer David "Zuma Dogg" Saltsburg in 2009, when he finished in 4th place in a field of ten.   

That's the over/under for Feuer should he stay in the race. Nine thousand one hundred and fifteen votes.  We will see whether Feuer gets fewer than Zuma Dogg.

Of course, there's more to this story than just that.   

What about the names that keep Mike Feuer up at night and whether and when they might resurface?  That's precisely why Feuer's deputy at City Council meetings, one Strefan Fauble, has established a pattern and practice of illegally censoring this column from participating in the meetings of late and his peers continually failing to cure and correct such abuses, as outlined in upcoming complaints, plural, to the State Bar of California.

(Daniel Guss, MBA, was runner-up for the 2020 Los Angeles Press Club journalism award for Best Online Political Commentary and was a runner-up in 2021 too. He has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Downtown News, and The Los Angeles Times in its Sports, Opinion and Entertainment Sections and Sunday Magazine among other publishers. Tell your friends to follow him on The Twitters @TheGussReport, and DM him there to join his distribution list for early story notifications, tips and more.)

NEW YORK MAGAZINE: "The Mayor Knew: Eric Garcetti's Top Aide Was a Serial Harasser, According To Multiple Accusers. The Mayor, They Say, Ignored it."

By Daniel Guss

@TheGussReport - Don't count on LA Mayor Eric Garcetti making his way to Bombay.

The city's beleaguered chief executive, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the next U.S. Ambassador to India, allegedly knew about, but ignored, serial sexual harassment by his right hand man Rick Jacobs.

That's at least according to a slew of people as described in New York Magazine.

The article says that Garcetti and Ana Guerrero, his disempowered former Chief of Staff, repeatedly ignored horrendous behavior by Jacobs, who is the subject of a sexual harassment lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles by the Mayor's former LAPD bodyguard.

"'He crushes me against his body, pulling me in with all his strength,' she says now, telling her story for the first time. 'I'm like a rag doll.  He's pulling me into him and kisses me on the lips for some long, uncomfortable period of time. He kisses me on the lips.  I'm trying to pull back, but he has my arms pinned down against the sides of my body so I have no leverage to push back.'"

That's from Naomi Seligman, Garcetti's Director of Communications on April 14, 2016, describing an encounter with Jacobs in front of a slew of witnesses in an excerpt from the article.

"'I'm surrounded by my entire team, and they've seen this act of dominance over me,' she recalls."

Yesterday, this column was first to predict that LA City Attorney Mike Feuer's mayoral campaign is DOA due to a federal corruption plea deal by Paul Paradis, a legal hire of his who admitted to a $2.2 million kickback scheme.  We now predict that Garcetti's nomination to become Ambassador will soon be down for the count, as well.

So when, exactly, does Guerrero get fired and the LA City Council take a vote of No Confidence, in Garcetti?  

At any rate, we look forward to Biden pulling Garcetti's nomination before too long.  If not, look to Senator Ted Cruz to deliver the knockout blow.

The story by Alissa Walker can be found here: 

(Daniel Guss, MBA, was runner-up for the 2020 Los Angeles Press Club journalism award for Best Online Political Commentary and was a runner-up in 2021 too. He has contributed to CityWatch, KFI AM-640, iHeartMedia, 790-KABC, Cumulus Media, KCRW, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Magazine, Movieline Magazine, Emmy Magazine, Los Angeles Business Journal, Pasadena Star News, Los Angeles Downtown News, and The Los Angeles Times in its Sports, Opinion and Entertainment Sections and Sunday Magazine among other publishers. Tell your friends to follow him on The Twitters @TheGussReport, and DM him there to join his distribution list for early story notifications, tips and more.)