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Staff Report
In a blatant misuse of taxpayer dollars, both acting LA County Assessor Santos Kriemann and David Sommers, Press Secretary for LA County CEO Bill Fujioka, launched an all-out assault on Los Cerritos Community News on its coverage of Rick Caruso. It included sending a letter to LCCN and LA blogs, appearing on radio stations, and attacking the newspaper on Twitter.
Kreimann sent a 600 word letter Friday to LCCN disputing the entire article and defending Caruso: “Mr. Caruso had no relations with Dale Beckwith or Michael Schaff”, said Kriemann. The article also appeared on several blogs a few hours later.
“It shows just how entrenched Mr. Caruso is in LA politics”, said LCCN Publisher Brian Hews, “what does it say when the LA County Assessor writes a letter, sending it to a newspaper and several blogs, defending Caruso, a private citizen?”
Below are emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that clearly show Beckwith and Schaff were working for Caruso.
“It seems that Kriemann did not know Beckwith and Schaff were representing Caruso”, said Hews.
At approximately 3 pm Friday, David Sommers, Press Secretary for LA CEO Bill Fujioka called LA radio station KFI and defended Caruso. “Everything in the article is basically false” , Sommers said.
“Within minutes of each other Sommers went on the LA radio station to call into question the article in LCCN, and Kreimann sent the letter to LCCN, it was obviously a coordinated effort”, said Hews.
On another front, Caruso’s political advisor Matt Middlebrook took to Twitter to defend Caruso coordinating with CEO Bill Fujioka who tweeted about the article also.
On Monday, Los Cerritos Community Newspaper Group will file a public documents request under the Freedom of Information Act with the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration to get additional information about communications between Caruso, and members of his inner circle with LA County officials.
Brian Hews, Publisher of Los Cerritos Community Newspaper said his request will include all internal emails, text messages, phone logs, and other any other communications between Rick Caruso, his political advisor Matt Middlebrook, any and all employees of Rick Caruso, Acting Chief Deputy Assessor Santos Kriemann, Los Angeles County Chief Executive Officer William Fujioka, and David Sommers, Acting Communications Director for Fujioka.
“Los Cerritos Community Newspaper believes in total transparency, especially when it comes to any decisions that have been made out of the public light at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration, and Los Angeles City Hall,” Hews said.
“We demand that all members of the media in Los Angeles County follow the lead of Los Cerritos Community Newspaper and demand full accessibility and transparency,” Hews said in a statement
Damn,,, this story just keeps getting bigger and BIGGER!!
Now, one question is, what what do those running in November elections have to say? On the record of course.
Why does this look like Randy commenting on his own article?
Why is it that LCCN gets attacked by people when they write an investigative article? And the comments are always stupid. Instead of addressing the article they attack and ignore the evidence in the article.
A better question Air-head would be why did Kriemann say Beckwith et al did not represent Caruso when they did Air-head.
Is it Air or Airhead? If it wasn’t for Lccn news we would never have found out about misuse of power and public funds in la county assessor’s office. So be nice Air…
No need to overreact.
I didn’t question anything about the article.
because the city, elected officials, and corpororate cronies pay bloggers like air head
Dear Ms. Murphy: I just read your comment and found you to be a bully and just down right mean. Why did you start talking about how one looks and attack their personal life? What does looks have to do with the article? Why do people like you always have to attack people about their apearance when you disagree with their statments, opinion, thought process or any other writings? You made no sense when you began the personal attack. I could have responded to you by saying you made your statments when you were on your period if you still… Read more »