UK police special enquiry team to examine role of Washington Post chief in email deletions

A British police special enquiry team is examining allegations that Will Lewis, now the chief executive of the Washington Post, presided over the deliberate destruction of emails at Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper business when he worked for the company 13 years ago.

The Met has told the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown that its standing unit responsible for high-profile cases is reviewing a complaint he had submitted about Lewis after fresh disclosures emerged during civil actions relating to the phone-hacking scandal.

The letter, seen by the Guardian, is signed by the Met’s most senior officer, Mark Rowley, and tells Brown: “Please be assured that the contents of your letter, dated 2 May 2024, is being considered by the Met’s special enquiry team.”

The police chief adds: “The issues you raise are complex and will take time to consider against investigations that have already taken place.”

Brown’s original letter to Rowley had urged him to review new evidence relating to “the concealment and destruction of up to 30 million emails, hard drives and documents” – and police to launch an investigation “into the destruction of evidence” and “the cover-up that followed”.

In response, Brown, writing in the Guardian, questions whether Lewis is an appropriate leader for the flagship US newspaper owned by the billionaire founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos – accusing Lewis of displaying a “lack of ethics” when he worked for Murdoch during the hacking scandal.

“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?” Brown says.

The former PM goes on to accuse Lewis of trying to mislead British detectives investigating phone hacking at the News of the World in the summer of 2011 – by telling police that Brown himself was behind a plot to steal emails of senior executives at the tabloid’s UK owner, Murdoch’s News International.

“I have only recently discovered how Lewis attempted to accuse me of a crime I did not commit,” Brown says. He accuses Lewis of being engaged in a “complete fabrication”.

“While Lewis has always claimed that he was Mr Clean Up, these new allegations point to a cover-up,” he says.

Documents disclosed in high court civil actions this week include a minute taken by the Met police of a meeting detectives had with Lewis on 8 July 2011. Detectives were inquiring into the deletion of emails belonging to senior executives at Murdoch’s newspaper company.

In the meeting, Lewis justified the deletions by accusing Brown of “controlling” a plot with the former Labour MP Tom Watson to obtain the emails of Rebekah Brooks, the then chief executive of News International, through a third party. Lewis was the company’s general manager at the time.

“We got a warning from a source that a current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s [Brooks’] emails and had passed them to Tom Watson MP,” Lewis told the police, who told officers he went on to meet the individual behind the claim.

“The source repeated the threat,” Lewis continued, according to the police memo. “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.”

Brown writes that the police officer who headed the initial hacking investigation, Sue Akers, now regards this explanation as unbelievable, citing comments she made to the New York Times earlier this month. “Gordon Brown was obviously one of the victims,” she said. “The thought that he would do that is ludicrous.”

A spokesperson for the Washington Post said that Lewis declined to comment. He has consistently denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Lewis has enjoyed a high-flying career before and after the hacking scandal. He remained at News International until 2014, then moved on to another senior role in the Murdoch empire, as chief executive of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, until 2020.

Lewis was picked by Bezos to become chief executive of the Washington Post last year, and he caused controversy at the US paper by trying to appoint an old ally, the Briton Robert Winnett, as editor. After a furore, Winnett eventually decided not to take up the job.

In June, Bezos sent a memo to staff at the newspaper, defending Lewis: “Team – I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to also weigh in directly: the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change.”

Brown said he now he believed the Met police memo demonstrated that Lewis “gave the game away” because “his explanation conceded that the emails were destroyed to prevent them being seen”.

The email archives of a handful of senior executives at Murdoch’s UK operation, including those of Lewis and Brooks, had been deleted a few months earlier in January 2011, during a period in which allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World were growing.

Brown writes: “The destroyed emails that the police wanted were likely to have revealed much more of News Group’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people, not least ordinary families hit by tragedy, and almost certainly would have added to what I have only recently discovered about what happened to me.”

Back in July 2011, Lewis told police that Brooks was anxious about her emails becoming public, because of her professional relationship with Tony Blair, Brown’s predecessor as prime minister. “She was a Tony Blair supporter whilst she was editor of the Sun,” Lewis told officers.

“They were very good friends. There was potential for that to be used against her in a negative way,” Lewis said.

Civil actions relating to alleged phone hacking have been running in the English courts for more than a decade. Murdoch’s News Group has paid out hundreds of millions and settled more than 1,300 lawsuits relating to hacking at the now-closed News of the World, but always rejected allegations of wrongdoing at the Sun.

Brown writes in the Guardian he already knew that the Sunday Times had, among other things, “accessed information about my mortgage from my building society, had reverse engineered my telephone number, had faked my voice to secure personal information about me from my lawyer, and had paid an investigator to break into the police national computer to find out what personal information about me was available.”

But he claims he now knows the intrusion went much further than that.

“More recently, I have been given information that the Murdoch group also paid investigators to break into other personal accounts of mine – including bank, gas and electricity – suggesting that nothing was out of bounds.” Brown explains.

Murdoch’s goals were political and commercial, the former prime minister argues. The media mogul wanted to take full control of Sky television, buy control of ITV, “neuter the BBC” and “control much of the highly profitable UK telecoms industry, all of which the Conservatives were ready to go along with”.

A spokesperson for Murdoch’s News UK said that Brown had only seen “partial information” from the civil cases and “does not have access to all material including detailed statements served by the defence”.

They added: “He is seeking to persuade the Met to take sides in a public debate.”

It was “strongly denied” that News International “sought to impede or worse conceal evidence from the Met” by deleting emails, the spokesperson added.

They cited a Crown Prosecution Service statement from December 2015, which said: “There is no evidence to suggest that email deletion was undertaken in order to pervert the course of justice.”