UK police examining allegations Washington Post publisher purposely deleted emails in phone hacking scandal

New York (CNN) — London police are looking into allegations that recently installed Washington Post publisher Will Lewis oversaw the intentional mass deletion of emails more than a decade ago while he was tasked with cleaning up a phone hacking scandal that roiled Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloids.

In a piece published Wednesday in the Guardian, former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that he wrote to Metropolitan Police to look into what he believed was new evidence that Lewis was part of an attempt to conceal and destroy millions of emails while authorities were investigating Murdoch’s newspapers for using illegal methods, including hacking phones, for reporting.

The Guardian said Brown wrote to police after documents that were recently made public during civil court proceedings reportedly showed Lewis met with detectives in 2011. According to The Guardian and Brown, Lewis acknowledged in the meeting that emails had been deleted because executives believed Brown and another member of parliament, Tom Watson, had a plan to obtain emails from Rebekah Brooks, then the head of Murdoch’s News International.

According to the Guardian, Lewis told police that a source had warned them that a “current member of staff had got access to Rebekah’s emails,” and that that the whole operation was “controlled by Gordon Brown.” Brown called the allegations “a complete fabrication.”

The allegations come as Lewis has faced serious ethical questions since taking the helm of The Washington Post after a lawsuit from Prince Harry and other high-profile figures revived claims that Lewis helped Murdoch cover up for senior executives in the scandal. After he was hired by the Post, Lewis also tried to kill a story about his alleged involvement in the phone hacking scandal coverup, offering an NPR reporter an interview in exchange for squashing the forthcoming article. Lewis has previously denied any wrongdoing and is not a defendant in the lawsuits.

In May, Brown wrote to the Metropolitan Police and said he was told that the “Met’s special inquiry team” would look into it.

In a statement, a Metropolitan Police spokesperson confirmed to CNN that police are looking into the “contents” of Brown’s letter but added that “there is no criminal investigation at this time.”

“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.

A spokesperson for Murdoch’s News UK strongly denied that the company had “sought to impede or worse conceal evidence” from the police investigation.

News UK said that in 2011 there was “a direct threat” that someone was “actively trying to sell data belonging” to the organization, and that a source “indicated that someone from inside [News International] IT had been leaking Mrs Brooks’ email data to a person who had met with Gordon Brown.”

Because of that threat, News UK said it made “multiple copies of confidential” data.

“The security threat was not used as a justification for the deletion of emails. The security threats were believed to be genuine and were not devised as part of an alleged ‘cover-up’ and there is no evidence to show that is the case,” the News UK spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said Brown is basing his allegations on “partial information which has merged from civil litigation” and pointed to a Crown Prosecution statement from 2015 in which they said the email deletions were examined and found “no evidence to suggest that email deletion was undertaken in order to pervert the course of justice.”

“[Brown] is seeking to persuade the MPS to take sides in a public debate in relation to media accountability and advance the position of Claimants in ongoing civil proceedings, which he is not a party to,” the spokesperson added.

A Washington Post spokesperson said Lewis had declined to comment on the report, adding the paper had only learned of the special enquiry from news reports Wednesday and had not been contacted about it.

The allegations swirling around Lewis have roiled The Washington Post newsroom in recent months. In June, two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists at the Post called on Lewis to step aside amid questions about his integrity. Lewis’ incoming hand-picked top editor for the newspaper, Robert Winnett, also declined to join the publication after several reports emerged about his own history, including the use of materials from a self-described “thief” for reporting purposes.

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has signaled his support for Lewis amid the turmoil, writing in a memo to staff last month that “the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change.”

In his column for the Guardian, Brown questioned if Lewis is “a master of the dark arts” and suggested that the “revelations” show a “cover-up.”

“We count on our journalists to shed light on the darkest of areas – to awe us with novel reporting, not commit groundbreaking crimes of their own,” Brown wrote. “During these challenging times for print journalism, the answer to any paper’s financial woes is not to operate at the edge of the law, but to follow a clear moral compass.”

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