King County prosecutor won’t pursue charges over Seattle leaders’ deleted texts during CHOP

The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO) announced Tuesday that it will not move forward with charges related to a series of deleted text messages from city leaders during the events that led up to the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) in 2020.

In 2020, it was discovered that then-Mayor Jenny Durkan had deleted text messages on her city-issued phone sent and received between Oct. 30, 2019 and June 24, 2020. Text messages for parts of that period were also missing from the phones of former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, Seattle Fire Department Chief Harold Scoggins, and a series of other high-ranking SPD and city officials.

An investigation from the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) that wrapped up last week concluded that “there was no single factor that led to the destruction of text messages belonging to high-level city officials during this four-month period.”

“Rather, it was a perfect storm of training delinquencies, outdated and conflicting policies and procedures, and insufficient safeguards to prevent the loss of records that primarily contributed to the destruction of these text messages,” an executive summary of the KCSO’s investigation reads.

For Durkan, it was determined that a setting on her phone had changed to only keep messages for 30 days sometime in July of 2020. Once that change was made, all texts for that October 2019 to June 2020 period were permanently deleted.

Then in August of that same year, an old phone of Durkan’s was factory reset by a city IT employee, deleting all remaining text messages on the device. A month later, “in an attempt to recover those missing texts, the same City of Seattle IT employee performer another factory reset, again destroying any texts on the phone.”

“These two factory resets also prevented investigators from pinpointing exactly when and on which phone the above change to ‘Keep Messages: 30 days’ occurred which resulted in the loss of Durkan’s data,” the KCPAO said.

Chief Best’s situation differed from Durkan’s, with Best testifying in a civil suit that “she routinely deleted text messages off her phone, believing (mistakenly) that the City of Seattle was automatically archiving all texts in a cloud just like her email, and that she was simply removing the texts off the device itself.” In reality, Best’s phone had disabled the “Messages in iCloud” function.

Fire Chief Scoggins’ messages were deleted after he reportedly forgot the passcode to his phone, and was told at an Apple Store to use a hard reset to get back into the device. He later said he didn’t realize a hard reset would delete his phone’s data. Similar to Best, the iCloud backup for Scoggins’ phone was also disabled.

“Scoggins was not technically proficient and only used his phone primarily as a telephone and for its calendar function,” the KCPAO further clarified.

Messages deleted from the phones of other high-ranking city leaders were lost in a similar fashion, according to the KCSO’s investigation.

“Many of the employees wrongly assumed that the City of Seattle was automatically archiving data (similar to Best’s assumption),” the KCPAO said. “Notably the City of Seattle prohibited use of ‘iCloud’ backup setting.”

In its decision not to move forward with charges related to the destruction of public records (a class C felony), the KCPAO noted that prosecutors “would need to establish malintent,” and prove that the messages were deleted willfully.

“There is no evidence that the involved individuals intended to permanently delete anything,” the KCPAO described. “In all but one instance, the facts reflect that involved individuals actually were trying to recover access to their phones, which due to a confluence of technical issues, unfortunately resulted in the loss of data.”

In May of 2023, the City of Seattle paid out over $2 million to a pair of whistleblowers who had initially revealed the deleted messages while working as public disclosure officers. They claimed the city had compelled them to resign, and sued over lost wages, general damages, and legal fees.