No charges for former Mayor Durkan over missing text messages

A King County investigation into the missing text messages of high-level employees has found:

• Former Mayor Jenny Durkan's phone was changed to "delete messages after 30 days" for roughly three weeks, which effectively destroyed past texts.
• Former Chief Carmen Best deleted her text messages, saying she thought the city backed them up, as they do with email.
• Fire Chief Harold Scoggins conducted a hard reset on his phone, destroying his text messages, because he couldn't remember the passcode on his phone.

An investigation initiated by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office found there were no grounds to seek charges over former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s texts that went missing from 2020, a contentious period when city leadership was under scrutiny.

"There was no single factor that led to the destruction of text messages belonging to high-level city officials during this four-month period," reads a memo from the King County Prosecutor's Office.

"Rather, it was a perfect storm of training delinquencies, outdated and conflicting policies and procedures, and insufficient safeguards to prevent the loss of records that primarily contributed to the destruction of these text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."

Dan Clark, chief of the mainstream criminal division, told reporters on Tuesday that there's no evidence that individuals intended to permanently delete anything.

“I know that there's a lot of focus on the time period of this," said Leesa Manion, King County Prosecuting Attorney. “But again, in order to file criminal charges, we would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a willful intention to destroy, and the timing is not something that is a factor in making that legal decision.”

The investigation memo says that on July 4, 2020, Durkan dropped her phone in salt water. She got a new phone, which restored her text messages.

But then sometime between July 4 and July 22, someone changed the setting on Durkan’s phone to delete all messages after 30 days. All of Durkan's sent and received messages between Oct. 30, 2019 and June 24, 2020 were lost.

Someone changed the setting back to keep the messages forever between July 22 and July 26.

“It is unclear who changed this setting or why,” the investigator memo says.

Twelve higher level employees were missing text messages, among them Durkan, Police Chief Carmen Best, and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins.

"Unfortunately, many employees forgot their original passcodes (after only using biometrics for a long period of time)," the investigative report says.

Last July, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg asked Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall to investigate why thousands of text messages were absent from the cellphones of former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former Police Chief Carmen Best, and other city leaders — including those exchanged during the height of Seattle protests on Capitol Hill three years ago.

Washington state has laws that outline which public records can be deleted, and when.

The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office gathered the journalists who had requested the text messages from city leaders into a room at their downtown office on Tuesday, to announce the investigation's findings.

Seattle’s East Precinct was at the center of the daily protests calling for police reform during the summer of 2020. When officers packed up and left the East Precinct, there was little clarity into why the decision was made or who made it.

RELATED: We know who made the call to leave Seattle’s East Precinct

KUOW made a public records request for six days of Durkan’s text messages, incoming and outgoing, from June 5 to June 10 of 2020.

The records arrived five months later – but they weren’t the mayor’s text messages. Rather, they were recreations of some of her messages that appeared to have been collected from the cell phones of other city employees, including her then chief of staff and deputy mayor.

RELATED: We asked for Jenny Durkan’s text messages. This is what they gave us

Whistleblowers within the city’s records department filed a complaint in 2021 after media outlets filed records requests seeking the texts. The complaint said the staffers were forced to recreate the missing text messages. Later they filed a lawsuit against the city in which argued that work conditions pushed them to resign. The city agreed to pay them a $2.3 million settlement earlier this year.

In a statement via a communications consultant, Durkan wrote,

"This result was the only one supported by the truth and now three years later the City’s full focus now can rightfully shift to solving our real challenges and seizing the incredible opportunities ahead. Mayor Durkan wants to thank the King County Sheriff’s Office, which devoted significant resources and its best personnel to fully review this matter, despite being very short-staffed and facing multiple crises, including gun violence and fentanyl in the County.”

Law firm Corr Cronin, representing the dozen employees with missing text messages, also submitted a statement:

"This outcome underscores what has been obvious all along: none of the numerous city workers swept up in this investigation did anything improper. The outcome was never in doubt."