Lawyers for the group of Capitol Hill real estate developers, property owners, and businesses suing the City of Seattle over its handling of the 2020 CHOP protests are asking a judge to bring the federal lawsuit to an end and rule in their favor in what could be a multimillion judgement over thousands of missing text messages from top officials including then-Mayor Jenny Durkan, her Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best, and Seattle Fire Chief Scoggins.
In the “Spoliation of Evidence” motion filed this week, lawyers representing the group say that revelations about the deleted texts should result in sanctions against the city in the case and either require an “adverse inference” instruction to the jury at trial and “monetary sanctions,” or an immediate end to the suit in a default judgment for the plaintiffs.
In the motion, lawyers representing the property owners and businesses claiming more than $3 million damages from the summer 2020 protest camp over “due process and takings violations, negligence, and nuisance resulting in business loss, property damage, and other harms” say their claims “depend on evidence such as communications between city policymakers.”
“Yet Plaintiffs will never be able to access many of these critical communications because Seattle Mayor Durkan, Police Chief Best, Fire Chief Scoggins, and four other key officials deleted their text messages, well after this case began and in blatant disregard of their duties as public officials to preserve their texts,” lawyers from the Morgan, Lewis and Bockius firm representing the group write. “The City’s explanation for the delay and why the officials deleted the texts—using factory resets, 30-day auto deletions, and manual deletions—are either non- existent or incredible.”
UPDATE 1:45 PM: The Seattle City Attorney’s office has immediately fired back in the case not by disputing the allegations about the deleted texts from the mayor and her top officials — which City Attorney Ann Davison’s office says will come — but by accusing the real estate and business owner group of also intentionally deleting texts and emails. ** More at the end of this report **
UPDATE 9/30/2022 8:45 AM: NBC has reviewed the forensic analysis submitted to the court by the plaintiffs and reports that 191 texts were manually deleted from Durkan’s phone. NBC reports Durkan said through a spokesperson’s statement that “most of her texts, which were ‘mostly innocuous and irrelevant,’ were recovered.” Durkan previously denied intentionally deleting any text messages.
Thanks to a whistleblower, revelations about the missing texts from city officials grew in the months following CHOP amid investigations into the protests and the city’s response to the Black Lives Matter and anti-police movements as officials and technical teams at City Hall changed their stories and more evidence was recovered. Even two years later, new evidence continues to come to light including revelations that Durkan and Best were more closely involved with the decision to abandon Capitol Hill’s East Precinct headquarters than had previously been disclosed.
In the new motion in the lawsuit brought by the collection of Cal Anderson Park-area property owners and businesses, lawyers say that a combination of factory resets, 30-day auto deletions, and manual deletions wiped away key evidence and that forensic efforts to recreate some of the communication between officials from that summer of 2020 are inadequate. Continue reading →
