Police in London are looking into allegations that Washington Post publisher Will Lewis led an effort to cover up a phone-hacking scandal more than a decade ago as it threatened to engulf Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire, it was disclosed Thursday.
They are are investigating claims Lewis attempted to frame Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, by claiming he was conspiring to steal the emails of Rebekah Brooks, who was chief executive of Murdoch’s News International at the time. Lews allegedly tried to justify the deletion of critical documents by claming Brown was part of a bid to steal them from Murdoch’s servers.
Brown revealed the police move in an op-ed for The Guardian on Wednesday that Scotland Yard had informed him it was assigning the matter to a “special enquiry team.” It will raise pressure on Lewis, the man picked by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to rescue his Washington Post after years of losses.
Himself once the target of tabloid hackers, Brown said he received the police response after writing to them about new evidence in the matter that emerged through recent civil litigation surrounding the misleading allegations at the time.
“I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit,” Brown wrote in the op-ed, noting that Lewis told authorities in a July 2011 interview that the emails were destroyed to prevent them being seen.
“While Lewis has always claimed that he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up,” he said.
Brown and other hacking victims allege that Lewis and his former boss, Murdoch loyalist Rebekah Brooks, in fact masterminded the deletion of millions of incriminating emails amidst a police investigation into the 2011 events.
Brown references Sue Akers, the police officer involved in the initial hacking investigation, who told The New York Times last month that she had only also just learned of the matter and found it to be “ ludicrous.”
“Gordon Brown was obviously one of the victims,” she said. “The thought that he would do that is ludicrous.”
The civil case, which includes among its plaintiffs Prince Harry, is scheduled to go to trial early next year. Lawyers for the plaintiffs told the London High Court at a pre-trial hearing this week that Murdoch executives invented a “fake security threat” to justify the obliteration of 30 million emails, according to The Washington Post. (All but 9 million were later recovered.)
Brown said the team sits under the London Metropolitan Police’s “central specialist crime command.” A Met spokesperson told CNN that investigators were looking into the “contents” of Brown’s letter but that no criminal investigation had been immediately launched.
“We have responded to Mr Brown to acknowledge receipt of his letter. Its contents continues to be assessed and we will be writing again to update him on the likely timescales involved in that work,” the spokesperson said.
Murdoch’s News UK told The Guardian that “it is strongly denied that News International sought to impede or worse conceal evidence from the Met investigation.” A spokesperson for the company said Brown was acting on “partial information” that had been in the public record for years.
Lewis declined to comment on the development through a Washington Post spokesperson, who said that neither he nor the paper had been contacted about any special enquiry.
Lewis, who was named publisher and CEO of the Post in November 2023, invited further scrutiny last month after it was revealed he tried to kill an NPR story on his potential involvement in the cover-up.
“Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’” Brown wrote in his op-ed. “But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?”
Lewis has repeatedly denied wrongdoing in the matter.
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