Months of Mayor Durkan’s text messages go missing
Nearly 10 months worth of text messages from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and other city officials have gone missing during the months Seattle experienced numerous demonstrations, the SPD East Precinct was vacated, and the CHOP was constructed.
SEATTLE – The King County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to FOX 13 that it is in the early stages of investigating missing text messages from then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and other city leaders from 2020.
Nearly 10 months’ worth of Durkan’s text messages were unaccounted for following an investigation triggered by a whistleblower into the mayor’s office mishandling a series of public records requests.
The texts that were not acquired include messages from August 2019 to June 2020, during which demonstrations and the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) took place in Seattle and SPD officers had to vacate the East Precinct.
“The King County Sheriff’s Office is in the early stages of reviewing this matter. We look forward to sharing periodic updates as appropriate,” the KCSO said in a statement to FOX 13.
King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg told The Seattle Times that “it wasn’t clear to me that anyone was going to start this investigation without prompting.”
Durkan’s office attributed the disappearances to “unknown technology issues,” however, internal emails appear to show that officials had already known for months why the texts were gone and why they disappeared, The Seattle Times reported.
The settings were changed from ‘retain’ to ‘delete,’ the Seattle City Attorney’s Office said in August of 2021.
Under state law and guidelines, local elected officials’ texts and other communications about public business must be retained for at least two years before being transferred to the state archives for further assessment. Anyone who willfully destroys a public record that’s supposed to be kept is guilty of a felony, according to state law.
In May 2021, Dan Nolte, the then-spokesperson with the Seattle City Attorney’s Office, told FOX 13 that the city spent, to date: “hundreds of thousands of dollars in attempting to locate and reconstruct the missing messages.”
The city worked with forensic experts to require the missing messages from her phone, but due to a “retention setting” with Durkan’s iPhone, their efforts were unsuccessful.
Nolte told FOX 13 in May 2021 that six other officials have missing messages, some due to being locked out of their phones due to password problems. Some of those officials included Seattle Fire Chief Herald Scoggins and then-police chief Carmen Best.
