A special investigation team of British police is looking into allegations that Will Lewis, now chief executive of the Washington Post, oversaw the deliberate destruction of emails at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper business when he worked at the company 13 years ago.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a victim of tabloid hacking, said in an article in The Guardian:
Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement, “Democracy dies in darkness.” But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?
As first reported by The Guardian, the police commissioner wrote to Brown that a review of the case requested by the former prime minister would be handled by a “special investigation team.” According to Brown, this team “reports to the central special offences directorate.”
The investigation poses the most serious threat to Lewis’s position as editor-in-chief of the Washington Post, one of the most respected institutions of American journalism. Since taking the post in January, Lewis has been haunted by allegations related to the years-old scandal. He has previously strongly denied wrongdoing but declined to comment through a spokesman.
News UK, where Lewis worked, said in a statement that Brown was “trying to persuade [police] to take one side or the other in the public debate about media liability” and to help plaintiffs suing the company. British police told CNN, “There is no criminal investigation underway at this time.”
Deleted emails
The investigation centres on events in 2011. The Murdoch’s tabloids had for years hacked into the phone records and otherwise illegally obtained the personal records of celebrities including Prince Harry, government officials and ordinary people in search of juicy scoops. As private lawsuits piled up, police began investigating.
Soon after joining News UK, Lewis became the police’s chief liaison. Documents filed in lawsuits against News UK show that in July 2011, police questioned Lewis and chief technology officer Paul Cheesbrough about the deletion six months earlier of millions of emails that the plaintiffs suspected contained evidence of crimes.
When police asked why the emails had been deleted, Lewis and Cheesbrough said they were told that Brown and another MP had plotted to pay a former News UK employee to retrieve the emails of its chief executive Rebekah Brooks. Brown and former MP Tom Watson denied there was any such plan.Lewis said, according to police records of that meeting, which were later made public in court:
We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails and had passed them to Tom WATSON. Then the source came back and said it was a former member of staff and the emails had definitely been passed and that it was controlled by Gordon BROWN. This added to our anxieties. Tom WATSON has been remarkably well-informed on this. We apologise for hiding this piece of work from you.
Apart from a single email sent to Cheesbrough describing the alleged conspiracy, News UK has provided no evidence of the source, much less substantiated the allegations. Cheesbrough is now one of the most senior figures at Murdoch’s Fox Corp. in New York. (A Fox Corp. spokesman referred comment to News UK. Both companies are controlled by the Murdoch family).
False security threat
Lawyers representing a large group of people suing News UK, including Watson, argued in court earlier this week that Lewis “fabricated a false security threat” to justify deleting millions of emails during a police investigation.
Lewis is not a defendant in the claims. In its statement, News UK claims the company believed the security concerns were “genuine” and were not used as an excuse to delete the emails, despite police notes documenting that meeting in July 2011.
The company categorically denies it tried to interfere with or hide evidence from police. News UK also cites a 2015 statement from the Crown Prosecution Service that it found no evidence that the emails were destroyed “to pervert the course of justice.”
A rocky start atop the Post
Late last year, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos appointed Lewis to head the well-known but financially struggling newspaper. Lewis led Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to a strong position by successfully developing digital subscriptions.
NPR reported the allegations against Lewis in December, a month before Lewis took his new position, which were further detailed in a recent court filing.
Subsequent court developments this spring led the Post to cover the cases itself. Those materials became a point of tension between Lewis and then-executive editor Sally Buzbee. He offered her another role in the newsroom, but she chose to leave.
Brown personally asked the police commissioner in early May to conduct a criminal investigation into Lewis’s role in the deletion of the emails.
