"The situation ought to be straightforward. The city mishandled text messages and other communications about government action, and deleted material that by law is required to go into official records. Mayor Jenny Durkan's text messages from August 2019 to June 2020 were systematically deleted because of a cellphone setting. The city stonewalled records requests from The Times and other news agencies, and whistle-blowing public records officers claimed they were forced out.

"The full story of this tumultuous period of Seattle history must be told, and accountability is in order for the decisions made and the botched record keeping. The right thing to do is for city leaders to take responsibility, fix the structure that allowed this problem to fester and genuinely commit to transparent governance. But Seattle's top officials have instead chosen bellicosity and obfuscation, not accountability. The city responded to the Times' lawsuit over these records by aggressively countersuing.

"'Who's punished? The public, because the taxpayers' dollars are the ones that fund all this stuff.'"