Federal Judge: Seattle Officials Violated Order, Intentionally Purged Thousands of Texts About 2020 Autonomous Zone

A federal judge has placed sanctions on Seattle for its alleged deletion. thousands of text messages between officials, including the former mayor, police chief, and fire chief during the deadly three-week-long Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, also known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous ZoneThe CHAZ or CHOP was also known as the CHAZ.

US District Judge Thomas Zilly sent Hunters Capital, for over a dozen companies that were located in the Capitol Hill that was overthrown by protestors, to trial. Three other claims were dismissed.

On June 24, 2020, the businesses led by Hunters Capital in Seattle filed a lawsuit for damages. They claimed that the zone had cost them nearly $3 million in lost revenue. Their attorneys sent a series of letters demanding that city officials preserve any evidence pertaining to city officials’ alleged support of the zone’s creation, according to the court documents.

Zilly ruled, that the city should be charged with the crime “directly participated” in creating CHAZ through its decision to provide barriers, portable toilets, hand-washing stations, dumpsters, and other accommodations during the June 8 to July 1, 2020, armed occupation, can go to trial. 

He also ruled that the jury should decide if city officials’ actions amount to a violation of the Constitution. “right-of-access taking” Allowing rioters to block access to local businesses is a way to do this.

Zilly dismissed claims by the plantiffs that there had been an alleged violation or negligence of due process rights, illegal taking of property, and civil rights.

The judge also ordered the city to pay attorneys’ fees for plaintiffs that demonstrated that city officials destroyed significant evidence regarding their decisions during the armed occupation of 6 blocks of the city by BLM and Antifa rioters, including their decision to abandon the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct that led to the creation of the zone.

According to the judge, officials had worked for months to conceal the evidence. They even deleted texts. He wrote: “The Court finds substantial circumstantial evidence that the city acted with the requisite intent necessary to impose a severe sanction and that the city’s conduct exceeds gross negligence.”

He stated that he would impose a penalty if the case went to trial. “severe sanction” on the city and instruct the jury to presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s case and that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally.

Zilly wrote in 39-page order, “City officials deleted thousands of text messages from their city-owned phones in complete disregard of their legal obligation to preserve relevant evidence. Further, the city significantly delayed disclosing … that thousands of text messages had been deleted” This information could not or was not recovered.

He concluded: “As a result, substantial evidence has been destroyed by the city and is unavailable to plaintiffs to support their position in this litigation.”

The judge noted that the attorney for the plaintiffs sent multiple letters to the mayor’s office and other officials about the lawsuit, which was filed June 24, 2020, but the city did not issue an order instructing officials to preserve evidence until July 22.

It was too late. Former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins, Seattle Public Utilities official Idris Beauregard; assistant police Chief Eric Greening; SPD’s chief strategy officer Chris Fischer; and Seattle Emergency Operations Center coordinator Kenneth Neafcy had deleted tens of thousands of text messages from their devices.

Durkan had previously claimed that her phone was accidentally dropped in water. “someone” set her new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, and that she accidentally changed the phone’s deletion settings.

Zilly stated in the order that he found the former mayor’s “various reasons for deleting her text messages strain credibility.”

The order notes that Best’s phone was also set to delete text messages after 30 days and that the former chief deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.

Zilly wrote, “Although the city issued a significant number of litigation holds” This required preservation of all evidence related to lawsuits filed months before. “Officials at the highest levels of city government completely disregarded these holds and deleted thousands of relevant text messages.”

In the order, he stated that “Instead, Mayor Durkan, Chief Best, Chief Scoggins, and other key city officials purged (through factory resets, changed retention settings, or manual deletions) thousands of CHOP-related text messages from their phones after they were under a clear legal obligation to preserve such information and without confirming that all of their text messages had been preserved through other means.”

Texts recovered by The Post Millennial These officials were seen coordinating with the so called “warlord” This autonomous zone.

A previous lawsuit filed by the Seattle Times over the missing texts was settled for $200,000 and a pledge by city officials to improve Seattle’s public records process.

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