Ep. 20 DOL 2: Delete Another Day

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 after those records survived.

The records show DOL’s Administrative Law Office reacting not with humility, accountability, or a renewed commitment to transparency, but with suspicion toward its own public records staff, talk of “double deleting,” “Delete Soon” folders, “do not release” folder labels, video meetings to avoid creating records, and a search for more “transitory” communication tools.

At the center is a June 17, 2025 email from DOL supervisor Audrey Ross that captures a deeper cultural problem: public records treated as a threat, requesters treated as adversaries, and records staff treated as traitors for doing their jobs.

This episode is about more than one ugly Teams chat. It is about what Washington’s auto-deletion culture taught public officials to believe: that the public’s business is safer when the public cannot see it.

Full transcript and source documents available at ThePublicRecordsOfficer.com.

Some voices in this episode are AI-generated to read from public records. The words are real.