hey thanks

for letting me send you intense emails this year

Real quick: Thank you for not unsubscribing to my emails this year. I’m really bad at promoting myself and asking for money, so this is the only time of year that I really do it. It’s too bad writing and journalism has been reduced to an email job where you’re always begging strangers for money. I basically do this newsletter for fun because I have a compulsion to write, so if you can at least forward or share my posts to spread the word that would be…so cool. If you’re among those that are still paid subscribers after three years of reckless experimentation, random dispatches, and hard news, thanks. You are my real boss.

With every post I tried to give you something you couldn’t get anywhere else. I tried to be unconcerned with the daily news rat race. I tried to write from a perspective, with authority and honesty. Giving you detached, third-person journalism is not something I was interested in. There’s a lot of places you can get that, and they charge you for it. I hope along the way I changed your mind, made you feel things, or maybe reminded you of something that you already knew to be true but had maybe given up on. I hope sometimes I crossed a line. But really, I hope I made you laugh along the way. I feel like things are at a crossroads so I don’t know how The Debaser will look going forward, but stay tuned.

With that, let me remind you what I did this year:

I continued my beat-setting coverage of the corruption that took place inside the City Attorney’s Office and the Department of Water and Power, raising important questions about how the U.S. Attorney’s Office handled its criminal investigation. The investigation’s end was officially announced this year, but I speculated that it was over more than a year ago.

I outlined how prosecutor’s failed to hold accountable senior city officials who were involved in the criminal activity, which included an extortion payment, and outlined the circumstantial evidence pointing to how then-City Attorney Mike Feuer at least knew about it. I questioned what federal prosecutors were hiding when they sought to block from becoming public discovery related to their investigation. A couple months later, we got a glimpse into what those documents might contain: An affidavit in which the FBI determined Feuer committed federal crimes, something that has not been challenged by the judge, prosecutors or Feuer himself.

We got confirmation that there is indeed a massive State Bar investigation into nearly 20 attorneys involved in the city’s legal scandal, amounting to perhaps the largest California Bar investigation in history. I wrote about how the Bar was investigating LADWP two years ago.

I covered the media spectacle that was Tom Girardi’s competency hearing on whether he should stand trial for wire fraud charges. I said hi to Girardi and he called me Joe. Lol

Charlie Munger, who owned a newspaper I used to work for, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, died, so I wrote an obit because all the coverage was pretty one-sided.

I wrote about how the president of the LADWP board asked for a higher per diem to stay at a $700 a night, 5-star hotel in Dubai for COP28. City personnel said she falsified her form when asking for the funds.

I also wrote some fiction and stories about Poland. You can check those out in new sections I’ve put up. They are under Sunday Scaries and Polska.

Got a tip? Or want me to write about something? Or stop writing about something? LMK. You can respond directly to these emails.

Happy holidays. I hope you spent some time away from doom scrolling.

Peace,

Justin