The Public Records Officer Podcast

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...