Woke ex-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan who let anarchists create CHOP zone is accused of deleting texts

Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan has been accused in court documents of manually deleting texts related to the lawless CHOP zone created in the city during the Black Live Matter riots of 2020.

According to a new forensic reportt carried out on behalf of entrepreneurs and residents who sued the city for its failed response to the riots, Durkan manually deleted nearly 200 text messages in July 2020, around the time CHOP was created.

The anti-police zone, established in the upscale Capitol Hill neighborhood, stood for Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and was also known as CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone).

It was billed as a peaceful utopia without police brutality, but soon sank into anarchy, even killing a teenager.

Local businesses watched desperately as customers stayed away for fear of violence – while Durkan vocally supported the infernal enclave.

Responding to a tweet from Donald Trump condemning the area, she tweeted: “The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurgency – it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to create a build a better world. Given his track record, it’s not hard to believe Trump is wrong again.”

She has previously been found to have deleted more than 5,000 messages since she changed her settings to automatically delete messages after 30 days.

The new report also concluded that the texts of several other key officials were destroyed during manual phone resets in July 2020, a month after Black Lives Matter protesters seized an area near Capitol Hill and the East Precinct and erected their own barriers. .

At first, protesters called the area the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), but that turned into the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or The CHOP, which lasted for weeks.

During the weeks-long riots in June 2020, a teenager was killed and several others injured in three other shootings.

Now, a group of residents and business owners are suing city officials for “planned to deprive plaintiffs of crucial evidence” by deleting their text messages about the riots, though it remains unclear what those texts said.

They accuse City Hall of “looting of evidence” and asking a federal judge to hold the city accountable for the crimes committed at the CHOP, or by advising a prospective jury to divert looting, police said. Seattle Times.

However, city officials have asked the judge to drop the case — with city attorney Ann Davison’s office accusing some of the plaintiffs themselves of removing their own texts about CHOP.

They argue that Durkan’s city government tried to de-escalate the protests rather than ignore them, as the plaintiffs allege.

And a spokesman for Durkan, who declined to be re-elected after the CHOP riots and was replaced by current mayor Bruce Harrell, told the Times she “believes strongly in the public’s right to know what their government is doing.”

But she called the lawsuitfiled last week in Washington’s Western District, “a deliberately inaccurate and misguided Hail Mary attempt to salvage a case that has no merit.”

Durkan’s text was originally reported missing by whistleblowers in her office in early 2021, a clear violation of the Public Records Act that requires certain texts to be preserved.

Anyone who willfully destroys a public record that should be preserved is guilty under the law of a felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.

But a previous forensic analysis, commissioned by City Hall in response to questions about how officials managed the June 2020 protests, found that the following month Durkan’s phone was set to automatically delete texts after 30 days, resulting in the loss of 5,746 texts.

It also indicated that Durkan’s phone was set to delete text messages stored in the cloud around the same time.

She has since handed over responsibility to the city’s information technology department and says she got her a new phone on July 9, 2020 — during the period when her text retention setting was changed to 30 days.

But the city government said it’s not part of its practice of changing text retention settings, and both forensics have identified July 4, 2020 as the date her phone was set to delete texts stored in the cloud. .

Durkan said in a statement that no one else handled her phone that day, the Seattle Times reports.

The new report now shows that in addition to the more than 5,000 text messages deleted before June 25, 2020, 191 were later lost between June 25 and November 16.

It concludes that the text messages were deleted manually.

Durkan now claims that problems arose with her phone after dropping it in a tide pool on July 4.

Her spokesperson told the Times that the lyrics are “largely innocent and irrelevant” and “completely consistent with her public statements at the time.”

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times reported more than a year ago that texts from a number of other officials — including the city’s firefighters and police chiefs — were missing or had not yet been recovered from the period when police used tear gas on protesters and left the East Precinct.

At the time, the paper reported, the city attorney said it was missing text by Durkan, then-police chief Carmen Best, fire chief Harold Scoggins, assistant chief of police Eric Greening, chief of police strategy officer Chris Fisher, emergency operations officer Kenneth Neafcy and public utility officer Idris Beauregard.

According to the new report, their phones were reset each in October 2020, removing more than 27,000 text messages from Best’s phone and more than 15,000 from Fisher’s phone.

Best has since admitted to regularly deleting her lyrics.

And the city has defended the factory resets on its phone because the officials were “locked out” from their phones.

It remains unclear what the deleted text messages said, but the forensic report prepared by Leatha Consulting LLC says the deletions “each resulted in the loss of text messages that the city had to keep.”

It also said the technology issues could have been resolved without resetting the phones and losing the texts.