Lawyers for victims say state committed fraud

SEATTLE — Attorneys for victims and family members in the deadly 2014 landslide in Washington state have accused state lawyers of orchestrating a fraud to hide the truth by deleting emails between defense expert witnesses.

In a motion filed Tuesday, the attorneys say the state has spent over $3 million in taxpayer dollars developing the opinions of its seven-person expert team. They claim that undertaking, however, was started with a pact approved by the attorney general to destroy emails and deceive about what they were doing.

The plaintiffs say they obtained some of the emails sent among the state's expert witnesses that were mistakenly spared from deletion. They allege the emails show that the experts were "constantly shifting their story in service of the state's defense."

"What we will never know is the true depth of this deceit, because the vast majority of emails were destroyed and will never see the light of day," the attorneys wrote.

Read more: http://www.mailtribune.com/news/20160823/lawyers-for-victims-say-state-committed-fraud