A British police special inquiry team is probing the allegations. Will LewisNow the chief executive of the Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch presided over the deliberate destruction of emails in Britain’s newspaper business when he worked for the company 13 years ago.

Matt has told the former Labor Prime Minister. Gordon Brown That its standing unit responsible for high-profile cases is reviewing a complaint it filed against Lewis after fresh revelations emerged during civil proceedings related 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 on the contents of your letter, dated 2 May 2024, the Met’s A special inquiry team is looking into it.”

The police chief added: “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 urged him to review new evidence related to the “hiding and destruction of 30 million emails, hard drives and documents” – and police “destruction of evidence” and “covers”. Start investigating. after this”

In response, Brown, writing in the Guardian, questions whether Lewis is a suitable leader for the flagship US newspaper owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos – accusing Lewis of “moral “lack of” when he worked for Murdoch. Hacking scandal.

“At the top of every edition of the Washington Post is this statement, ‘Democracy dies in darkness..’ But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts? Brown says.

Former prime minister Lewis was accused of trying to mislead British detectives investigating phone hacking at the News of the World in the summer of 2011 – telling police that Brown himself was a senior executive at the tabloid’s UK owner. was behind the plot to steal the emails. , Murdoch News International.

“I recently discovered how Lewis tried to frame me for a crime I didn’t commit,” says Brown. He accused Lewis of engaging in “total fabrication”.

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

Documents disclosed in High Court civil proceedings this week include a minute of a Met Police meeting with Lewis on July 8, 2011. Detectives were questioning the deletion of emails from senior executives at Murdoch’s newspaper company.

At the meeting, Lewis accused Brown, along with former Labor MP Tom Watson, of “controlling” the emails of Rebecca Brooks, the then chief executive of News International, to be deleted by third parties. Justified. Lewis was the general manager of the company at the time.

“We received an alert from a source that a current member of staff had access to Rebecca. [Brooks’] emails and passed them on to Tom Watson MP,” Lewis told police, who told officers he had gone to meet the person 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 were definitely passed and it was controlled by Gordon Brown.”

Brown writes that the police officer who led the initial hacking investigation, Sue Akers, now finds that explanation implausible, citing comments she made to The New York Times earlier this month. “Gordon Brown was clearly one of the victims,” ​​he said. “The idea that he would do that is ridiculous.”

A Washington Post spokeswoman said 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 stayed at News International until 2014, then moved to a more senior role in the Murdoch empire as chief executive of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, until 2020.

Lewis was named chief executive of the Washington Post by Bezos last year, and he caused controversy at the American paper by trying to appoint an old ally, British Robert Winnett, as editor. After the uproar, Vineet ultimately decided not to take the job.

In June, Bezos sent a memo to the paper’s staff defending Lewis: “Tim — I know you’ve already heard this from Will, but I wanted to address this directly: at The Post. Journalistic standards and ethics will not change.”

Brown said he now believed the Met Police memo showed Lewis “left the game” because “his explanation admitted the emails were destroyed to prevent them from being seen”.

The email archives of a handful of senior executives at Murdoch’s UK operations, including Lewis and Brooks, were deleted months earlier in January 2011, around the time allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World mounted. had been.

Brown writes: “The destroyed e-mails sought by the police could have revealed a great deal about the newsgroup’s intrusion into the private lives of thousands of innocent people, not least ordinary families, and almost certainly But it would have increased what I had just recently found out what happened to me.”

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

“They were very good friends. Lewis said there was a possibility of it being used against him in a negative way.

Civil actions relating to alleged phone hacking have been going on in English courts for more than a decade. Murdoch’s news group has paid hundreds of millions in more than 1,300 lawsuits related to hacking at the now-defunct News of the World, but has always denied allegations of wrongdoing at the Sun.

Brown wrote in the Guardian that he already knew that the Sunday Times had, among other things, “accessed information about my mortgage from my building society, reversed my telephone number, told my solicitor to my faked my voice to get personal information about me, and paid an investigator to look into the police’s national computer to find out what personal information was available about me.

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

“More recently, I have been informed that the Murdoch Group has also paid investigators to break into my other personal accounts – including bank, gas and electricity – suggesting that anything beyond do not have.” Brown explains.

The former prime minister says Murdoch’s motives were political and commercial. The media mogul wanted to take full control of Sky Television, buy control of ITV, “neuter the BBC” and “control the hugely profitable UK telecoms industry”, all of which the Conservatives would go along with. were ready for”.

Murdoch’s spokesman News UK He said Brown had only seen “partial information” from the civil cases and “did not have access to all the material, including detailed statements presented by the defense”.

He added: “He is trying to convince Matt to take sides in the public debate.”

The spokesman added that it was “strongly denied” that News International “attempted to obstruct or worsen the withholding of evidence from the Met” by deleting the emails.

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

The company believes the email security threat is real and “was not used as a justification for deleting the emails,” the spokesperson said.