In the months leading up to the election, a 2007 leak of a confidential report by a civilian police oversight panel has come back to haunt city attorney candidate Pete Holmes, who has long been rumored to have leaked the report. But documents released in a public disclosure request earlier this week show that the city attorney's office was responsible for sending the document to someone outside of city hall one day before the controversial report showed up on the front page of the Seattle Times.

Back in 2007, Holmes was chair of the Office of Professional Accountability Review Board when the three-member panel drafted a report accusing former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske of interfering in an internal investigation of two police officers, who were accused of assaulting and planting drugs on a wheelchair bound man in Downtown Seattle. The report was subsequently leaked to the Seattle Times , angering staff in Mayor Greg Nickels' office and the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). While Holmes has never publicly been accused of leaking the report, members of SPOG have privately pointed to Holmes as the source of the leak.

"Even to this day, they’re still talking about that," Holmes says. "It’s been on the campaign trail. It’s been maddening," Holmes says. "[Leaking the report] is unethical and I never did anything unethical,"

Indeed, SPOG sent out a press release last week, all but accusing Holmes of leaking the report.

On June 18, 2007, one day before the Seattle Times received a copy of the leaked report, Tom Carr’s office distributed the OPARB report to members of the city council.

The draft report was sent out to council members Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, David Della, Jan Drago, Jean Godden, Nick Licata, and Peter Steinbrueck. But the report was also accidentally sent to a Seattle attorney, Frederick Rasmussen, rather than Council Member Tom Rasmussen.

“[Carr’s office] sent something and somehow in their system I got substituted” for council member Tom Rasmussen, ” Frederick Rasmussen told Seattlecrime.com when contacted earlier this week. Rasmussen says he deleted the file and contacted Carr’s office to let them know he’d received the confidential report. “That’s the last I heard of it,” he says.

There's no reason to doubt Rasmussen, and this certainly doesn't prove Holmes didn't leak the report, but it does at least provide an interesting alternative to the "Holmes-leaked-it" theory. There are, however, a handful of people who could clear Holmes' name once and for all.

Holmes says he's repeatedly told the Seattle Times that they are free to reveal him as the source of the leak, if in fact he gave them the report. The Seattle Times has thus far refused to confirm or deny whether Holmes was the source of the report. "We don’t talk about sources," Times reporter Mike Carter says. "Or at least I don’t." Carter co-wrote the original Times story about the report, and is likely one of a handful of people who knows where it came from.

Despite the fact that the city attorney's office accidentally sent a copy of the report out into the wild, Carr, naturally, seems sure his office was not responsible for the leak. "[Rasmussen] is not the source of the leak," Carr says, adding that Rasmussen "would have to have been violating his ethical rules" if he had turned the report over to a reporter. "There’s only one person with an interest in leaking it," Carr says. "I have my own beliefs, but I can’t prove it. I know that it didn’t come from my office."