Ep. 3 The Watchdog's Blind Eye
Correction (added August 2025): In this episode I incorrectly said the State Auditor’s Office was not a party to my lawsuit. The SAO was added in an amended complaint, but only for purposes of being bound by a potential injunction on the auto-deletion policy. This does not change the substance of the issues raised in this episode.
What happens when the agency tasked with transparency goes silent? When the watchdog looks away, or worse, helps cover the tracks?
In this episode, we confront the growing crisis inside the Washington State Auditor’s Office. Top legal counsel Al Rose publicly accused WaTech of a yearlong cover-up, then quietly backed off, offering an apology letter that only deepens the mystery. Meanwhile, his own office refused to audit the agency at the center of it all, and instead sicced two Assistant Attorneys General on a citizen who simply asked for clarification. That citizen? Me.
From vanishing mailboxes and mysteriously missing emails to a legal joke about chickens that never clucked in court, this episode dissects a failure of courage at the highest levels of Washington's transparency apparatus. If silence is complicity, then the State Auditor’s Office has some serious explaining to do.
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