Questions on Seattle mayor’s missing texts unanswered as Durkan leaves office

Former Mayor Jenny Durkan has left office, leaving behind unanswered questions about the contents of 10 months worth of her missing text messages.

City of Seattle records officers learned last year that nearly 10 months of the mayor’s text messages — from Aug. 28, 2019, to June 25, 2020 — were missing. By state law, these records must be kept, and turned over when requested by the public.

It was later discovered that a retention toggle on one of the mayor’s three work phones had been switched to the 30-day retention setting. There has been no explanation about who engaged the setting, or why they did.

In a recent interview with KUOW, Durkan said most of her messages have been recovered. The approach was not forensic; the texts were found by asking city employees to share texts that Durkan had sent them.

“We have been working to recover, and have been able to recover most of the messages,” Durkan told KUOW’s Angela King, in an exit interview in December.

Missing, however, would be messages exchanged with people who were not employed by the City of Seattle.

Of the missing texts, Durkan said she had thought they were being retained and archived by the city.

Meanwhile, two lawsuits prompted by the city’s handling of the missing texts remain ongoing, a forensics report on one of the mayor’s devices is long overdue, and the city has transitioned to the leadership of Mayor Bruce Harrell.

City employees discovered the texts were missing after a flurry of public records requests sought records of city communication during the summer of 2020, former records officers Kimberly Ferreiro and Stacy Irwin wrote in a lawsuit against the city. They are suing over allegations of wrongful discharge.

The City later found that former police chief Carmen Best and Fire Chief Harold Scoggins were also missing text messages from their phones from that time.

Reporters were interested in this period to better understand the handling of protests following the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. Night after night, Seattle protesters tried to march past the East Precinct on Capitol Hill, and police responded with tear gas and blast balls. Seattle police left the precinct building in early June — but there was confusion over who made the call to leave.

Related: We finally know who made the call to abandon the East Precinct

Before leaving office, Durkan pledged to create a more transparent record keeping system.

“The other thing that was really important to me was not just how did this happen, but how do we make sure it doesn't happen again?” Durkan said. “So we put in a range of policies and technology changes, so that we couldn't lose this kind of electronic data.”

An advisory group will be formed to uncover what could be done better, faster, she said.

Durkan said that she believes the public has a right to access public records and “know what its government is doing.”

Behind the scenes, Michelle Chen, Durkan's former legal counsel, calculated how to act. How would Chen, and the two records officers she supervised, respond when reporters and the public asked that they disclose documents that didn’t exist?

As previously reported by The Seattle Times — the newspaper is suing the city over allegations of mishandling their records requests — Chen first wanted the approval of Mike Fong, former deputy mayor, and Stephanie Formas, Durkan’s former chief of staff, before acting.

A Seattle records officer wrote to Chen in December 2020, asking that Chen meet with her and the other records officer in charge of turning over the mayor’s texts.

“Yes, that's fine to meet just the 3 of us first, but I don't want to raise your and Stacy [Irwin’s] expectation that I am the decision-maker on this one,” Chen replied. “This is too high profile and too much at stake that I need to run this up and get Formas or Fong's sign-off.

“I have been emailing Formas about it with the recommendation that you made to me, and that I made to her that we have some verbiage for the text messages that we can't recreate.”

When city staff released records to KUOW in November, in response to a records request for six days worth of Durkan’s text messages in June 2020, they did not disclose that the text messages were not taken from the mayor’s device or that the mayor’s texts were missing.

“This request will be the first request released with the missing text situation and will determine how we move forward if missing text messages cannot be retrieved,” the records officer handling KUOW’s request wrote to Chen in November.

“Go ahead, invoice and release it with no additional comment (in other words just use your standard verbiage that includes sorry for the delay due to covid etc .. ). If (the reporter) appeals or has any follow up we will cross that bridge when we come to it. She may not even pick it up as many requestors tend to do,” Chen wrote back.

After the records officer had requested the meeting with Chen, the records officer wrote to another employee months later that it never happened. “I was willing to stand up to Formas that we have to tell the requestees that these are not ALL the records.”

Formas said responses to requestors were run past the City Attorney’s Office in this case.

KUOW submitted a records request for a forensics report on one of Durkan's cell phones, launched after a city records officer filed a whistleblower complaint against her boss, Chen and Durkan’s texts discovered missing. A public records officer for the Seattle City Attorney’s Office said Dan Nolte, the department’s public information officer, would provide the report once completed.

At the end of 2021, KUOW again reached out to the city attorney’s office, and was told that Nolte no longer works for the city attorney and there were “no updates” on the report.