Nobody is taking duty for lack of Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s textual content messages

Two weeks after an ethics report revealed that text messages from Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan were missing for a 10-month period, which included the culmination of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, no one is held responsible for the potential loss taken over important public records and no external authority investigated.

Durkan’s office admitted last week that at least one of the three city-issued phones she used in 2019 and 2020 would at some point keep her texts for just 30 days rather than forever.

But the mayor later said she didn’t choose the 30-day setting (the shortest of three options for storing messages on an iPhone), and Seattle’s information technology department, which provides phones to city workers, isn’t adopting either Fault.

Durkan switched phones to gain access to a first responder network in October 2019 and in July 2020 due to “screen cracks and water damage,” according to her office.

In an email last week, Megan Erb, an IT spokeswoman, said that all three phones Durkan used were “set up to our standards” and then “handed over to their employees.”

Since then, Erb has repeatedly avoided answering direct questions about whether this means someone in the IT department or the mayor’s office set one or more Durkan phones to erase texts and not copies to the city’s online accounts get saved. The mayor’s texts are missing from the end of August 2019 to June 25, 2020.

While other Seattle officials are also missing texts for a June 2020 period, the 30-day suspension was only cited as a problem in Durkan’s case.

“It is not Seattle IT’s practice to change the retention settings on phones,” Erb replied when asked if the department selected the 30-day setting.

The point could be crucial in determining if someone has deliberately set the mayor’s phone to erase texts, which goes against the state’s Public Records Act, which generally requires keeping communications about government business.

Whether intentional or in error, it was Durkan’s responsibility under state law to preserve such texts. It was also their responsibility under the Seattle IT Security Policy. The directive burdens “every city employee” with keeping public records, Erb said.

The city’s IT security policy also states, “When the city receives a public disclosure request, a litigation-related discovery request, or any other form of request that it must legally respond to, a record must be kept on a device owned by the city until the city responds to the request. “

There are several active lawsuits against Seattle pending on City Hall’s decision last June. Many of Durkan’s textual conversations with other city employees were over those employees’ phones, but not all. At least eight other officials in Seattle are also missing texts.

State law requires every elected officer to undergo training on the Public Records Act and the Record Retention and Inadmissible Destruction Act.

The mayor’s office said Durkan believed that all of her texts would be backed up automatically. However, according to the IT department, there are no guidelines for text backup in the city and Durkan’s office and department may or may not be able to tell why the mayor’s texts were not saved in the cloud.

The public learned of the missing texts earlier this month when an ethics report sparked by a whistleblower complaint by public records officials misused Durkan’s office records. The report found that the mayor’s law firm had wrongly excluded the missing texts from certain file requests and failed to inform applicants of the missing texts.

The report said Durkan’s legal advisor learned that texts were missing in August. The mayor did not say exactly when she found the texts disappeared and it is unclear why June 25, 2020 is the date after which her texts were put on hold. Durkan’s office did not answer these questions this week.

The ethics report only focused on the records rather than examining how the texts were lost. Since its release on May 8, much of the report has been obscured due to the mayor’s claims of attorney and client privilege.

Meanwhile, several candidates for Seattle’s 2021 Mayor race (Durkan is not seeking re-election), including Colleen Echohawk and Jessyn Farrell, have called for outside investigation. Echohawk sent letters to Attorney General Bob Ferguson and King County Attorney Dan Satterberg.

Neither Ferguson nor Satterberg have received any formal referral from law enforcement agencies on the matter, their offices said this week. Such referrals are usually required for a case to be investigated.

Among other Seattle mayoral candidates, Andrew Grant Houston said Durkan should resign and Bruce Harrell told The Stranger to consider resigning.

According to Durkan’s office, the mayor is dedicated to government transparency. The office has worked with prosecutors to pull up text conversations from other employees’ phones and their administration is currently testing automatic cloud-based data collection for texts, a spokesman said.

But the mayor’s office this week declined to answer several follow-up questions about their jumbled texts, and moved to a pending report on forensic analysis by a consultant. The analysis, commissioned by prosecutors more than six months ago and failed to restore the texts, has cost the city $ 123,000 so far, a prosecutor’s spokesman Dan Nolte said this week.

The mayor’s office also failed to respond this week to requests from the Seattle Times and, separately, the nonprofit Washington Coalition for Open Government (WCOG) for Durkan to waive her legal and client rights so the public can see the May 8 Ethics report Completely.

“It is time to be completely transparent,” wrote WCOG President Michael Fancher in a letter to Durkan on May 18. “This is at the core of your relationship with the city’s voters and taxpayers, as well as your legacy as mayor.”

The eight other officers missing texts from last June include then police chief Carmen Best, fire chief Harold Scoggins and four members of the police authority’s command staff. Lawyers suing Seattle over the Capitol Hill protest zone last summer warned City Hall in June to keep texts.

Prosecutor’s spokesman Nolte said that Best and Deputy Police Chief Eric Greening’s texts were missing for “reasons we will discover.” The office has cited problems with phone passwords and software for the other city officials.

In an October 8th email thread provided by the Times fire department, Scoggins asked several IT and fire departments for tips on how to access his iPhone.

After troubleshooting suggestions didn’t work, Scoggins later wrote to the group that he “ended up in the Apple Store,” where his phone was reset. All texts in his phone were lost before October 8, said a fire department spokesman.

When asked for more details on how the police department officers lost their texts, the department did not provide additional clarification.

“Due to pending legal disputes, certain SPD telephones were collected and handed over to the public prosecutor for forensic extraction,” said a statement by a department spokesman. “In most cases, these phones were no longer used because they were replaced as part of a planned transition to a new operator.”

Andrew Myerberg, director of the city’s Office of Police Accountability, said he received at least one complaint about the missing texts from Best. Myerberg said this week that he had not decided whether to open a formal investigation and noted that the matter might be better addressed during a legal battle.

The city is facing several legal disputes resulting from the handling of the demonstrations last summer. Several lawyers representing those who are suing the city have stated that the missing texts may be key to their cases and that they intend to address the destruction of evidence as an issue.

Nolte said this week Seattle was “working hard to track down information on all fronts,” but declined to say whether the city had tried to subpoena one of its cellular operators to find copies of the missing texts. Prosecutors seldom do this, and the staff couldn’t imagine a time when a subpoena “got actual text from the carrier,” he added.

But Mark Lindquist, a former prosecutor who represents a woman who is suing the city for her son’s fatal shootout in the protest zone, largely abandoned by police, said criminal investigators commonly “use warrants to get phone records from service providers, including Text messages, to seize “.

An upcoming report from Crypsis Group, the consultant hired to conduct forensic analysis on the issue in November, is expected to be presented to attorneys for those suing the city “by the end of next month, if not before,” Nolte said . Prosecutors will also separately “provide a full written report of all efforts the city has made to track these text messages, including whether we have requested information from the transport companies or a subpoena,” Nolte said.

Meanwhile, a Durkan spokesman said this week the mayor’s iPhone was set to keep text “forever.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story merged details of an upcoming consultant’s report on forensic analysis and a written report on the city’s efforts to locate the missing texts. They are separate reports.

Daniel Beekman: 206-464-2164 or dbeekman@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @dbeekman. Daniel Beekman, Seattle Times staff reporter, covers the Seattle city government and local politics.