Will Lewis told police he suspected Britain’s ex-PM Gordon Brown was plotting to steal the emails of Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. CEO. A detective’s verdict: “Poppycock.”
’ two 22-seat Gulfstream G650ERs will deliver him to Sun Valley in Idaho for America’s most concentrated annual gathering of power. On arrival, he is sure to see an old friend: Don Graham, the former publishing magnate and son of Katharine.at Sun Valley. “I do not know a finer man,” Bezos said of him at the time. He was full of optimism: Graham had sold him on the idea that he could change journalism.
This is the letter Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, wrote to London's most senior police officer, requesting a criminal investigation into News Corporation's conduct.“If someone is deleting emails ,” the police officer told the Beast, “they are perverting the course of justice.”to be the BBC’s next director general, one of the most prestigious jobs the British establishment can offer; Lewis did not get the role.
But Lewis’ ambitions exceeded the editor’s chair. Fascinated by power, he persuaded the Telegraph’s billionaire owners to send him on an eight-week crash course at Harvard Business School. He returned to London determined to remake himself as an entrepreneur, convincing his bosses to let him spin-off a new digital company while retaining the editorship. The venture, knowngroup general manager.
Lewis told the officers that he and Cheesbrough had, in January, discovered a plot to steal the emails of Rebekah Brooks, the company’s CEO. But this was no ordinary plot. It was—he, staggeringly—a conspiracy orchestrated by Gordon Brown, who had only stood down as the U.K.’s Labor prime minister the previous year, and who was famous for his probity.
One of the officers who heard Lewis and Cheesbrough outline the alleged plot told the Beast: “We got evidence from Nigel Newell , that in January and February 2011, News International were still deleting millions of emails. They said it had to be done quickly because Gordon Brown and Tom Watson were trying to get data through an employee or ex-employee of News International.”
What had been lost? Every email sent or received by any of News International’s employees before 2008 had been deleted. Emails from before 2005 were deleted shortly after Lewis’ arrival in September . The police were frustrated throughout 2011 in their efforts to access News International’s data. “We didn’t get into their IT system for weeks on end, while they were busy cleaning the system,” says the officer who spoke to the Beast. “Our operation started in January but we didn’t have control of what they were doing for a lot longer than that.”When the police first met with News International on Feb.
Murdoch’s lawyers have argued that “the security threats were believed to be genuine and were not devised as part of an alleged ‘cover-up’.” They are yet to respond to Greenberg’s “let the game begin” email, referring to it only as “inappropriately pleaded evidence”—accepting its accuracy but ignoring its meaning. They say they will respond to it “at trial if necessary”.
Days after the police interview, in which outlined his extraordinary claims about Gordon Brown, he was side by side with Rupert Murdoch.Lewis was at the center of events, working directly for the most powerful man in British media.
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