The Public Records Officer Podcast

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 specific...

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 ...

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 exporte...

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 ...

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 sh...

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 stal...

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 tran...

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-...

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 mea...

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-do...

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 ...

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 d...

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 Me...

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 lett...