The Freedom of Information Commission (FOIC) has ordered the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) to review their procedures for responding to public records requests for text messages after records were deleted when the agency’s executive director unlinked her personal and work cell phones.
A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought CHRO executive director Tanya Hughes’ text messages for a period of four years, spanning 2020 and 2024. But CHRO was only able to produce 14 messages because the records being requested were permanently destroyed when Hughes unlinked her personal cell phone from her work cell phone.
Also at issue in the case was CHRO’s delayed handling of the request, which the FOIC found could have resulted in more records being turned over if the agency had responded more quickly.
On December 4, 2024, Roger Codding submitted a FOIA request to CHRO seeking text messages from Hughes’s CHRO phone number from December 1, 2020, to December 1, 2024. CHRO acknowledged the request the same day.
On December 19, CHRO told Codding that no records had been reviewed and they “might need to purchase additional software to export responsive text messages, due to the broad scope” of the request.
Codding responded with a suggestion that the request be broken into “five subparts to help facilitate production of responsive text messages.”
A week later, Codding again reiterated that suggestion and said he was “losing patience” with CHRO’s “lack of compliance with his request and the lack of communication.” CHRO acknowledged Codding on January 3, a day after he sent yet another email to the agency with the same contents.
In early February, Codding filed an appeal with the FOIC.
According to the FOIC’s decision, Codding’s request was sent directly to Hughes, who forwarded it to Charles Perry, CHRO’s FOI officer. On December 19, 2024, Perry asked Hughes to send him responsive records to be reviewed for possible exemptions.
The same day, Hughes told Perry that she had responsive records “but was having difficulty retrieving them.”
On March 12, 2025, CHRO sent Codding 14 text messages from Hughes’ phone, all from December 2021.
At a hearing on Codding’s complaint, Hughes testified that at the time of his request, her work and personal cell phones were synchronized. She stated that “because the two cell phones were synchronized, she had difficulty separating responsive text messages from personal text messages unrelated to the conduct of the public’s business.”
In January 2025, Hughes separated her phones and, according to her testimony, in the process “accidentally deleted” responsive text messages from her work phone. Hughes also testified that she did not know why only the 14 text messages turned over to Codding remained.
In May 2025, CHRO attorney Jonathan Sykes, who also chairs the agency’s Information Technology Committee, was asked to help Hughes recover her text messages. Sykes reached out to the Department of Administrative Services’ Bureau of Information Technology Solutions (BITS), which provides IT services to state agencies.
According to the FOIC’s decision, BITS told Sykes to take Hughes’ cellphone to an Apple store to “enlist the help of Apple employees in recovering the deleted text messages.” Hughes did this on May 15, 2025, but Apple was unable to retrieve any data.
Hughes and Sykes also submitted affidavits to the FOIC testifying that they tried to recover the lost text messages from iCloud but were unsuccessful.
The FOIC concluded that while the 14 text messages were the only existing responsive records, CHRO’s delay in responding to the request meant “there were likely hundreds of additional responsive text messages that were subsequently deleted” by Hughes at the time Codding made the request. Evidence presented by Codding provided “credible evidence” of a Verizon Wireless billing record that Hughes received or sent 234 text messages in calendar years 2022 and 2023.
The FOIC concluded that CHRO violated FOIA’s requirement that public agencies respond promptly to requests and that the agency failed to provide all responsive records.
The FOIC declined to issue a civil penalty as requested by Codding, but warned CHRO that if they responded in the same way to requests for text messages in the future, civil penalties might follow.
CHRO was ordered to review their policies for handling requests for text messages and “to put better procedures in place for responding to such requests in the future.”
CHRO officials have previously had issues with deleting unread complaint emails, tracking lost evidence, and dismissing a claimant’s case after losing their paperwork.
Was this article helpful?
Topics on this page
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
The CHRO messed up 2 of my cases, regardless of the evidence on paper and recorded. They did not investigate at all. I put in about 4 complaints against HRO, to CHRI, on how their people, mainly the director, Diane Carter, was handling my case. They don’t care. I still have all the evidence on both cases, can you help me bring charges against CHRO?