Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly sided with the plaintiffs on two key counts in the lawsuit, while dismissing three others. Zilly will allow a jury to determine whether city officials — including former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D), former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins, and others — were culpable for “taking” the public’s “right to access” those establishments.
However, the most crucial ruling Zilly seemed to give in his 39-page order relates to text messages missing from the “City-owned” phones that had been given to those public officials for government use. Though attorneys for the plaintiffs issued several letters to the city in June and July 2020 requesting that its officials retain their text messages as possible evidence, nearly all of the text messages in many of their phones were wiped clean. …
“City officials deleted thousands of texts messages from their city-owned phones in complete disregard of their legal obligation to preserve relevant evidence,” Zilly wrote on January 13.
“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 added.
[This is a civil suit. Perhaps it should be a criminal investigation, but good luck getting that kind of accountability in the state of Washington for official support of an insurrection and a subsequent cover-up. — Ed]
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