A completed report on Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan's missing text messages from a period during the last year s racial justice protests has yet to appear as Durkan prepares to leave office and officials aren't saying when it will.
It s been more than a year since the city attorney's office hired a private contractor to analyze the issue and over five months since the office said it hoped to share the contractor's completed report, The Seattle TimesSeattle Times reported.
The Crypsis Group had been paid $407,000 as of Nov. 29 and continued to bill the city for its work. The city attorney's office said that was up from $201,000 as of July 31.
The office could not say when the report would be available or what is taking so long this week.
Dan Nolte, a spokesman for Pete Holmes, said that they don't have any additional details to share at this point. Holmes is leaving his position at the end of the month.
A spokesman for Durkan said the mayor's office had nothing to add.
The forensic report could not only be a source of information for the public, but it could also be a source of information for the public regarding several lawsuits against Seattle over the city s handling of protests and unrest in mid- 2020.
Crypsis was hired by the city attorney's office to help with its defense because Durkan's texts were not retained from late August 2019 to late June 2020.
DIE IN' Texts from at least eight other officials, including the city s fire and police chiefs, were not retained from periods overlapping with June 2020, when police used tear gas and abandoned their East Precinct, and when the first of two fatal shootings occurred in a zone on Capitol Hill temporarily ceded to protesters.
By August 2020, the mayor's office knew that her texts were missing and the city attorney's office hired Crypsis in November 2020. The information didn't become public until May 2021 when the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission released a whistleblower investigation report.
Durkan said she believed her texts were being retained while acknowledging that the way the records requests were handled fell short of the state's law.