[cxf12]

"The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages."

Could the writers of this piece not come up with a more lurid and entertaining headline?

[lesuorac]

That part isn't a great quote, The actual explanation is all of the above.

The mayor dropped their phone in water and it stoped working and after they received a new phone it had the 30d retention setting set (and this all being city equipment, the mayor didn't set their own phone up). Also pretty much everybody in the case (defendent + plantif) had deleted some messages ...

[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17292181/166/hunters-ca...

[layer8]

That one bit seems unlikely though:

> the former chief apparently deleted more than 27,000 of those text messages by hand.

[therealdrag0]

Can you see what’s been deleted by hand or not?

[lesuorac]

No. Part of the reasoning provided by the judge as to why the sanctions were limited was that the plantif's own efforts could not determine which of the deletions by the defendants were manual or automatic.