EXCLUSIVE: Seattle officials had no plans to honor religious exemption on Covid vax mandate, ignored fake vax card allegations

At the center of the controversy is an October 13, 2021, meeting of Seattle department heads in which Adrienne Thompson, then a senior advisor to Mayor Jenny Durkan, reportedly told department leaders that the city had no intention of approving religious accommodations, despite a public process that suggested otherwise.

According to documents obtained by The Ari Hoffman Show on Talk Radio 570 KVI, an internal email from Assistant Chief Chris Lombard, cited in Walsh’s whistleblower declaration, Thompson responded to a direct request for clarity on the matter by saying, “After talking to the attorneys, we are not comfortable providing such a statement,” but made it clear verbally that the City’s position was to deny all accommodation requests unless employees could fully isolate themselves from others—a virtually impossible standard for most jobs.

Lombard’s email documented the meeting “for the sake of a paper trail” and was later used as key evidence in lawsuits against the city, including Collins v. Seattle and the ongoing federal case Vale v. Seattle. In text messages, Walsh and Lombard referred to the email as a legal “torpedo” against the city’s defense.

Walsh’s 2022 sworn declaration called the city’s accommodation process “a sham,” alleging that leadership had predetermined the outcome long before any employee applications were submitted. Firefighters and other workers who sought religious exemptions said they were misled into believing their requests would be fairly reviewed.

“Unless a department/city employee could ensure they would 100% avoid contact with all other city employees, the public, and any city facility, they would not be able to receive an accommodation,” Thompson allegedly stated, according to Lombard’s contemporaneous notes.

Despite this internal directive, the city made no public announcement that it had adopted a blanket denial policy, raising questions about potential civil rights violations under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Even more troubling is what happened when department leadership was told fake vaccine cards were being used to circumvent the mandate. Lieutenant Lance Fisher, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and a longtime firefighter, told investigators that he personally informed Fire Chief Harold Scoggins during a March 2022 Loudermill hearing that fake CDC vaccine cards were being submitted by employees. Fisher recalled telling Scoggins: “It’s known that people are submitting fake vax cards. What are you doing to verify the authenticity?” Scoggins’ response, according to the official investigation report: “It wasn’t his problem.”

That moment is now at the center of criticism against the city’s leadership, not just for failing to prevent the abuse of the mandate, but for allegedly turning a blind eye when concerns were raised directly, and the denial of religious accommodations.

Investigators confirmed that the city’s verification process was essentially a “system of trust.” Employees were allowed to submit vaccine cards without any external validation unless they consented to a rare state records check—something most opted not to do.

As Sarah Smith, then Deputy Director of Policy and Operations in the Mayor’s Office told investigators: “No further checking” was done on whether vaccine cards were authentic, as long as the data fields were filled in.

Multiple employees told investigators that real, blank CDC vaccination cards were left unsecured at fire stations after the department ceased operating vaccination sites. One firefighter described “stacks of vax cards” sitting around at Station 10.

Despite numerous red flags—including direct messages between employees warning each other to “keep their mouth shut” to avoid audits—the city never launched an internal investigation into fraudulent vaccine submissions, but still went ahead with terminating employees who wouldn’t get the jab.

According to the lawsuit, the city acknowledged the sincerity of their religious objections to the COVID-19 vaccine but denied all accommodation requests anyway. The suit alleges: “By his own admission, Defendant [Fire Chief] Harold Scoggins was ultimately responsible for the accommodation or non-accommodation decisions regarding Plaintiffs.”

The plaintiffs claim the entire process was predetermined. Citing Walsh’s sworn statement, they allege that “the Seattle Fire Department engaged in an open practice of prioritizing medical objectors over religious objectors,” treating secular objections more favorably in direct violation of federal civil rights law. This, they argue, was part of a “city-wide policy.”

The plaintiffs allege that even after terminating unvaccinated firefighters, the department suffered significant COVID-19 outbreaks among fully vaccinated personnel. Deputy Chief Walsh stated that despite forcing out religious objectors, the department continued to see major infections and still does.

Deputy Chief Walsh—once the department’s third-highest-ranking officer and union president—summed up the situation in his court declaration: “As Deputy Chief, it is apparent to me that the individualized accommodation assessment process and the so-called interactive process was a sham because it was predetermined by the Department that no religious accommodation would be accommodated.”

The lawsuit references a 2021 study co-authored by King County EMS Medical Director Dr. Thomas Rea that concluded there was “a very low overall risk for COVID-19 infection among EMS first responder workforce.” Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden, Governor Jay Inslee, and the CDC had already begun scaling back vaccine-related mandates and policies.

By December 2021, the fire department was using the exact same mitigation strategies—masking, testing, and distancing—that religious objectors had requested as alternatives to vaccination, the suit notes. “At the time of the attempted terminations… the City lacked adequate evidence to support its assertion that the vaccine stopped or substantially inhibited virus transmission,” the plaintiffs argue.

Nathan Arnold, one of the attorneys representing the firefighters, blasted the city for what he called a campaign of scapegoating: “Seattle public safety is in shambles. The Fire Department is paying unprecedented overtime.”

He also highlighted the involvement of top officials in the mishandling of the 2020 Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), including missing texts from Chief Scoggins, Mayor Durkan, and then-Police Chief Carmen Best—many of which were later recovered and revealed coordination with CHOP’s self-declared "warlord" Raz Simone.

Arnold previously told The Post Millennial, “If they don’t correct the prior administration’s errors—CHOP, the text message scandals, pretending to defund the police but really just changing the name of 911 dispatch, and the baseless termination of these prior ‘heroes of the pandemic’—then this administration owns the scandal.”