Seattle officials won’t face charges for thousands of deleted CHAZ text messages

Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion and Dan Clark of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO) wrote to the King County Sheriff’s Office in documents provided to The Post Millennial, “Based upon your investigation and our legal analysis of the facts as you presented, we conclude that there is no legal basis to file criminal charges in this case.”

In a report from the King County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Intelligence Unit that was provided to The Post Millennial, the department wrote in an executive summary, “After reviewing over 5,720 pages of sworn testimony, digital evidence, expert witness reports, and contemporaneous communications, I have found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy to destroy public records contained in any city cell phones, and no evidence that unauthorized access from outside the city had caused the loss of data.”

In the summary, the sheriff’s office claimed that no single factor led to the deletion of the text messages. “It was a perfect storm of training delinquencies, outdated and conflicting policies and procedures, and insufficient safeguards to prevent the loss of records that primarily contributed to the destruction of these text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.”

As a result, “…the factual nuances of each case as they bear on the state’s evaluation of the evidence and ultimately, its inability to file charges.”

Manion and Clark concluded they "cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that any of these City of Seattle employees had a criminal intent to destroy public records.”

Manion notes that she kept the investigation in-house in her department, rather than sending it to an outside prosecutor even though she is acquaintances with Durkan and Best. The Seattle Times noted that Best even provided a quote for Manion’s campaign for prosecutor.

The results of the investigation and subsequent decision not to file charges were revealed to some of the media outlets that had first filed the public disclosure requests for the text messages during a press briefing on Tuesday. In a recording of the conversation obtained by The Post Millennial, reporters from various outlets expressed skepticism about the reasons given for not pressing charges and the excuses provided by city officials for deleting the texts.

The King County Sheriff’s Office refused to allow The Ari Hoffman Show on Talk Radio 570 KVI to interview Detective Joe Gagliardi, who led the investigation, claiming it was “thorough” and declined to add any information beyond what was shared at the press briefing.

Then-King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg requested that Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall investigate the city officials’ deleted texts on July 28, 2022.

In May 2023, the city of Seattle was ordered to pay $2.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought by city employees who were mistreated after they helped expose that thousands of Durkan’s text messages had been deleted. The whistleblower complaint revealed that the texts of Best, Scoggins, and other top officials were also intentionally deleted. Several lawsuits were filed against the city and officials in response to the riots and the autonomous zone and ordered that records, including texts, be preserved. However, according to the sheriff's office, many of the parties involved were not served with a subpoena to do so until after they had already deleted the information.

Durkan’s office previously claimed that an “unknown technology issue” caused the texts to go missing. However, a city-commissioned forensic report found that Durkan’s phone was changed in July 2020 to delete texts automatically after 30 days as well as texts stored in the cloud.

Durkan also previously claimed that she dropped her phone in a tide pool on the July 4 weekend of that year, but a subsequent forensic report commissioned by business owners and residents suing the city over the deadly autonomous zone revealed that Durkan texts were manually deleted.

US District Judge Thomas Zilly previously sanctioned the city for destroying evidence and noted that Durkan’s excuses “strained credibility.”

Over 27,000 texts were deleted from Best’s phone and forensic reports show that phones used by Scoggins and others were reset in October 2020, with many claiming they forgot the password and were required to do a factory reset of the devices.

Missing texts from city officials included communications with the infamous “warlord” of the autonomous zone, Raz Simone.

Seattle was ordered to pay nearly $200,000 in 2022 and pledged to improve its public records processes to settle a lawsuit brought by The Seattle Times that alleged the city had mishandled requests from reporters who asked for the messages between city officials.

The city has paid out millions of dollars in settlements from the riots and deadly autonomous zone.