Ep. 13 Get It Gone: Anatomy of a Records Crime

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 public records officer refused to play along.

This is the story of Julie Bracken, a PRO who followed the law, preserved the evidence, and tried to warn her agency before the consequences spiraled. Instead, she found herself sidelined, overruled, isolated, and ultimately disciplined by the very people implicated in the misconduct.

With primary documents, internal chat logs, and verbatim excerpts from Bracken’s notes, this episode dissects how a single deletion order grew into a full-blown culture of obstruction — and what it reveals about Washington’s fragile transparency infrastructure. Transcript with links to source materials found here. 

If you care about accountability, ethics, or how easily public records can be erased in the shadows of bureaucracy, this is an episode you won’t forget.

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Tip of the hat to the musicians who created the music used on the show: Alex Grohl, Ian Post, Jakub Pietras, lumine wave, Roberto Pravo, Solis, ...