British police investigate allegations against Washington Post publisher: NPR

LONDON — Scotland Yard has launched an initial investigation into allegations that Washington Post Publisher and chief executive Will Lewis obstructed justice 13 years ago by helping Rupert Murdoch deal with the growing wiretapping scandal at his British tabloids.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who himself has been the target of tabloid attacks, announced the news in an article in Guardian.

“At the top of each issue there is an inscription Washington Post is the statement, “Democracy dies in darkness,” Brown wrote. “But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts?”

As first reported by The Guardian, the police commissioner has written to Brown that the review requested by the former prime minister will be carried out by a “special investigation team”, which Brown says “falls under the central specialist crime command”.

The investigation poses the most serious threat yet to Lewis’ position at the top. Washington Postone of the most august institutions in American journalism. Since Lewis took office in January, he has been dogged by accusations stemming from that years-long scandal.

He has previously broadly denied any wrongdoing but declined to comment through a spokesman.

News UK, where Lewis worked, said in a statement that Brown was “seeking to persuade (the police) to take a position in the public debate on media responsibility” and to help plaintiffs bringing a lawsuit against the company.

In a statement, British police told CNN: “There is no criminal investigation underway at this time.”

Meeting with police over deleted emails

The investigation focuses on events in 2011. Murdoch’s tabloids had for years hacked into phone records and otherwise illegally obtained private records of celebrities, including Prince Harry, civil servants and ordinary people in search of juicy stories. As private lawsuits piled up, police launched investigations.

Shortly after joining News UK, Lewis became the main police liaison. Records filed in the lawsuits against News UK show that police questioned Lewis and technical director Paul Cheesbrough in July 2011 about the deletion of millions of emails six months earlier that the plaintiffs claimed contained evidence of criminal offences.

When police asked why the emails had been deleted, Lewis and Cheesbrough said they were told Brown and another MP had planned to pay a former News UK employee to obtain the emails of chief executive Rebecca Brooks. Brown and former MP Tom Watson deny such a plan.

“We were tipped off by a source that a current staff member had accessed Rebecca’s emails and passed them on to Tom WATSON,” Lewis said, according to police notes from the meeting, later released in court. “The source then came back and said it was a former staff member and the emails had certainly been passed on and that they were controlled by Gordon BROWN. That increased our concerns.”

“Tom WATSON was extremely well informed on this matter,” Lewis added, according to the notes. “We apologize for concealing this work from you.” (Capitalization and spelling reflect those in the original notes.)

Apart from a single email sent by Cheesbrough describing the alleged conspiracy, News UK has provided no evidence to prove the source existed, much less to corroborate the allegations. Cheesbrough is now a senior figure at Murdoch’s Fox Corp. in New York. (A Fox Corp. spokesman referred comment to News UK. Both are controlled by the Murdoch family.)

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 lawsuits. In its statement, News UK said the company believed the security concerns were “genuine” and were not used as justification for deleting the emails, despite police notes documenting the July 2011 meeting.

She strongly denies trying to obstruct or conceal evidence from police. News UK also pointed to a 2015 statement from the Crown Prosecution Service that no evidence had been found to suggest the emails had been destroyed “with the intention to pervert the course of justice”.

A difficult start to Lent

At the end of last year, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos appointed Lewis to head the esteemed but financially troubled newspaper. Lewis ran Murdoch “Wall Street Journal” on solid ground with the successful acceleration of digital subscriptions.

In December, a month before Lewis took his new position, NPR reported on the allegations against Lewis, which were discussed in more detail in materials recently filed with the court.

Further events in court this spring led to Fasting herself to handle the cases. The stories were a point of tension between Lewis and then-editor Sally Buzbee. He offered her another editorial role; she decided to leave.

In early May, Brown personally wrote to the police commissioner asking for a criminal investigation into Lewis’s role in deleting the emails.