A long-awaited forensic analysis has provided some clarity on how former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan's text messages went missing from her phone. However, the critical questions of why they were deleted and who did so, in violation of public records law, remain a mystery.
Mayor Bruce Harrell should call for an independent investigation into this law-flouting morass. Transparency and accountability — both of which have been in short supply since the missing texts became public knowledge in May — demand an answer.
The analysis, which investigated what happened to the texts but was unable to recover them, found that a setting on Durkan's phone was changed in July 2020 to delete any texts 30 days or older. That option was reverted to the default setting of keeping messages "forever" later that month. An option to store texts in the cloud was also set to "disable and delete" in early July.
