Episodes

Episode 20 continues our two-part look at the Washington Department of Licensing’s Administrative Law Office. In Part One, we covered the February 12, 2025 Teams chat where DOL hearing examiners discussed petitioners, attorneys, hearing tactics, order language, and a joke about hitting an attorney with a car hard enough to hospitalize him. Five days later, Governor Bob Ferguson suspended Washington’s automatic deletion of Teams chats. Now, in “Delete Another Day,” we look at what happened ...

Five days before Governor Bob Ferguson ordered a halt to Washington’s automatic deletion of Teams chats, a group of Department of Licensing hearing examiners were talking in Teams as if the walls had no memory. They discussed petitioners, attorneys, hearing strategy, objections, order language, and one hearing examiner even suggested that another could “help us all out” by hitting an attorney with her car. Under the state’s seven-day deletion policy, that chat may have been headed for the dig...

In this sequel to “The Watchdog’s Blind Eye,” Jamie Nixon examines how the Washington State Auditor’s Office tells citizens it lacks authority to audit public-records handling at other agencies — even though SAO has already performed public-records-related performance audits in 2008 and 2016. This episode walks through SAO’s Citizen Hotline Audit Request denials, the selective carve-out in the Bainbridge Island hotline matter, the removal of “Records” from the hotline’s public-facing category...

In this episode, Jamie breaks down the May 12, 2026 Seattle Times story about a Public Disclosure Commission complaint involving Brandi Kruse, Let’s Go Washington, and alleged unreported in-kind political advertising. But this is not just about Brandi. It is about a much bigger question: what happens when campaign-finance law collides with the modern influencer economy? The complaint alleges that Kruse’s repeated promotion of Let’s Go Washington initiatives may have provided reportable val...

When an Office of Financial Management public records officer complained in writing about requests from “West and Nixon,” she didn’t just vent about workload. She accused those requests of having “no legitimate concern,” suggested there should be ways to “tighten and restrict those particular types of requests,” and contrasted them with what she called “legitimate requests.” In this episode, Jamie Nixon breaks down why that email matters, what request OFM was actually processing at the time, ...

In this episode of The Public Records Officer Podcast, Jamie Nixon takes on one of the biggest transparency fights in Washington State: the Legislature’s push to keep its internal deliberations hidden from the public. After years of rhetoric about openness and restraint, courts have now handed lawmakers a powerful new shield — legislative privilege grounded in separation of powers. What does that mean in practice? More redactions, more withheld records, and less public access to the decisions be...

In our last episode, we exposed the alleged destruction and withholding of public records inside OMWBE. This case was documented through emails, chats, and timelines of their Public Records Officer. This week, we widen the lens. The allegations didn’t disappear. In this sequel episode, we break down the Attorney General’s stunning non-response to a credible felony report, the structural conflicts that leave public records officers defenseless, and the systemic incentives that now reward...

What starts as a routine public records request at a small Washington agency detonates into one of the clearest documented cases of alleged records destruction in recent memory. In this episode, Jamie Nixon walks through the stunning internal messages, emails, and timelines surrounding the Office of Minority & Women’s Business Enterprises (OMWBE), where leadership allegedly ordered staff to delete Microsoft Teams posts specifically because of an active request — and then retaliated when their pu...

On this important episode, Jamie Nixon breaks down the absurdity of the state’s response to the 2020 1.5 terabyte Teams chat deletion. After four months and multiple delays, the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) has delivered almost nothing, and the Governor’s Office claimed to find zero responsive records, even though records from another agency prove the Governor's own Public Records Officer and Deputy Counsel received emails on the matter. This episode features the news of two major lawsuits...

In this episode, we return to a recurring pattern in Washington’s public records system: agencies only search what you name — and quietly celebrate when you don’t. First, an update on PRR 24-530. WaTech has now formally closed the request while falsely claiming they produced the live DAUG meeting chats. They didn’t. What they provided were full-length recordings with a few seconds of chat accidentally visible on screen — not exported chats, not searchable text, and not compliant production. T...

Washington’s culture of secrecy just hit a new low. In this episode, host Jamie Nixon digs into Governor Bob Ferguson’s disappearing act... no press availabilities, no transparency, and apparently, no clue that he has a responsibility to report to the people. From the governor’s vanishing public schedule to WaTech’s “off-the-record” meetings and the newly surfaced, soon to be infamous quote “And have it discoverable? LOL,” the PROP exposes how state officials are actively ensuring the p...

In this episode of The Public Records Officer Podcast, Jamie Nixon takes aim at Brandi Kruse’s September 12th show Undivided — a sanctimonious, victimhood-soaked screed that used the assassination of Charlie Kirk as political capital. Kruse demanded Democrats apologize, banned discussion of January 6th, and scolded anyone who dared call Donald Trump authoritarian — all while ignoring the receipts and the rank hypocrisy. Through a sharp mix of humor, mockery, and fact-checks, this episode coll...

What happens when secrecy becomes routine in local government? From zoning boards to school districts to state agencies, closed-door decision-making shifts power away from the public — and it’s happening everywhere. In this episode, Jamie Nixon is joined by journalist Miranda Spivack, author of Backroom Deals in Our Backyards, and reporter Shauna Sowersby of the Seattle Times. Together they unpack the tactics governments use to stall, deny, or bury records — and how everyday people can push b...

What happens when governments let artificial intelligence draft their words? Who’s really behind the keyboard when AI systems churn out emails, press releases, or chatbot responses on behalf of public agencies? In this episode, Jamie Nixon sits down with journalist Nate Sanford of Cascade PBS to talk about his reporting on how AI is creeping into government communications, and what that means for authorship, accountability, and transparency. From “transitory” excuses to the risk of bot-writte...

WaTech just burned through a decade and nearly $300 million on a project that never left the planning phase. Meanwhile, Fish & Wildlife commissioners were caught telling each other to delete their texts about state business. Add in lawmakers giving themselves a 30-day auto-delete loophole, and you’ve got a masterclass in bipartisan backroom survival tactics. In this episode, Jamie Nixon breaks down how government failure, cover-ups, and partisan blame games all add up to the same result: the ...

What happens when a government designs its record-keeping system to fail the very people it’s supposed to serve? In this episode, we dig into the human cost of Washington’s auto-deletion policies and the Attorney General’s defense of destroyed evidence. From litigants denied a fair trial because key Teams chats vanished, to families of children with disabilities fighting for services without access to past rulings, the damage is measured, not just in megabytes lost, but in due process denied....

The clock is running out on Governor Bob Ferguson’s six-month “pause” of Washington’s Microsoft Teams chat auto-deletion policy, and with it, the last thin excuse for secrecy. Will he restore transparency or quietly restart the digital shredder? In this episode, Jamie Nixon takes you inside the backstory Ferguson hopes you’ve forgotten: the years he spent defending this legally risky policy as Attorney General, the behind-closed-doors review with zero public input, and the ongoing culture ...

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 ...

Washington’s bureaucrats weren’t just slow-walking transparency—they were engineering its demise. In Episode 2, host Jamie Nixon exposes how state agencies, led by WaTech, quietly adopted a Microsoft Teams auto-deletion policy that wiped out 50 million public records per week. And now? They're calling critical records “transitory” just because they were sent in chat. We dig into the cynical legal arguments used to defend mass deletion, hear from whistleblowers and internal agency voices, and ...

Governor Bob Ferguson didn’t kick off his term with a speech on education or housing. He talked about Microsoft Teams. Why? This episode unpacks a scandal years in the making—one that saw millions of government chat messages auto-deleted under the radar. Host Jamie Nixon traces the story from a fumbled deposition to the governor’s emergency suspension of the policy, with appearances by journalist Shauna Sowersby and attorney Joan Mell. You’ll hear the documents, the audio, and the bureaucrati...

Welcome to The Public Records Officer Podcast (PROP)... a show about transparency, accountability, and the absurd bureaucratic hoops government agencies jump through to avoid both. I'm Jamie Nixon... dad, guitar player, former Washington State public information officer & communications director, and a records nerd with stories to tell. This isn’t just a podcast. It’s a whistleblower's field guide, an exposé, and a letter of thanks to the public servants working tirelessly to get it right. Ne...