SEATTLE — Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s text messages from one of the most tumultuous periods in city history vanished because a phone setting likely was manually changed to delete texts automatically, and ex-Police Chief Carmen Best deleted her texts, a long-overdue forensic analysis has found.
The analysis, which tried but failed to recover the texts and investigated what happened to the public records — including messages exchanged during Seattle’s racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 — indicated that Durkan’s texts were set in July 2020 to delete after 30 days and that Best’s texts were “periodically deleted.”
“We investigated whether there were any events that could have changed [Durkan’s] text message retention settings without manual intervention, and to date have not identified any that apply,” a report on the analysis says.
