Friday, July 29, 2011

2007 Letter Clearing Tabloid Is Under Scrutiny

2007 Letter Clearing Tabloid Is Under Scrutiny

By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Published: July 29, 2011

LONDON ? When a Parliamentary committee first confronted The News of the World with charges of phone hacking in 2007, the paper?s owners produced a reassuring, one-paragraph letter from a prominent London law firm named Harbottle & Lewis.

The firm had been hired to review the e-mails of the tabloid?s royal reporter, who had pleaded guilty to hacking the cellphone messages of royal household staff. The letter said senior editors were not aware of the reporter?s ?illegal actions,? which helped convince lawmakers that hacking was not endemic at the tabloid.

That letter has taken on new significance since it emerged in recent weeks that those e-mails, while not pointing to wider knowledge of hacking, did contain indications of payoffs to the police by journalists in exchange for information. The circumstances behind the writing of that single paragraph are being examined as part of criminal and Parliamentary inquires into whether the tabloid?s parent company, News International, the British subsidiary of the News Corporation, engineered a four-year cover-up of information suggesting criminal wrongdoing.

In interviews, two people familiar with both the contents of the e-mails and the discussions between the executives and the law firm provided new details about the possible payoffs. The two people also indicated that both News International and the law firm were aware of the information when the reassuring letter was written, yet defined their task as only addressing the hacking issue.

In one e-mail, from 2003, the paper?s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, complained to the top editor, Andy Coulson, about a management push to cut back on cash payments to sources, saying he needed to pay his contacts in the Scotland Yard unit that protects the royal family. In another e-mail, Mr. Goodman said that he did not want to go into detail about cash payments because everyone involved could ?go to prison for this,? according to the two people who described the e-mail?s contents.

The two people also said that in the exhange of e-mails, Mr. Goodman requested permission from Mr. Coulson to pay �1,000 for a classified Green Book directory, which had been stolen by a police officer in the protection unit. The book contains the private phone numbers of the queen, the royal family and their closest friends and associates ? a potentially useful tool for hacking.

In the years since the letter was written, various revelations have confirmed that phone hacking was endemic at the tabloid. Evidence disclosed in the past several weeks of widespread payoffs to the police have given rise to a second, and potentially more potent, front in the scandal.

Both Harbottle & Lewis and News International took notice of the e-mails to and from Mr. Goodman containing those initial indications of payoffs in 2007, according to the two people knowledgeable about the events. News International?s chief lawyer set them aside for a second look and they were among the e-mails retained in the files of the law firm. Yet they were not turned over to the police until last month, and no hint of their existence made its way into the firm?s single-paragraph letter four years ago.

The two people familiar with internal discussions between News International and the firm, who spoke on the condition of anonymity given the criminal investigations, said company executives urged Harbottle & Lewis to write a letter giving News International a clean bill of health in the strongest possible terms.

The firm had been hired to defend the paper after Mr. Goodman sued, claiming his dismissal over phone hacking was unfair because it was widely done and widely known. The firm was asked to examine 2,500 e-mails involving Mr. Goodman to defend against his claim that superiors knew about his hacking.

The correspondence between the company and the firm over framing the letter does not make reference to the e-mails on police payments, a source familiar with the exchanges said, but it does reflect ?huge anxiety? about the wording.

The final version of the letter, dated May 29, 2007, sent by the firm?s managing partner to Jon Chapman, who was head of the legal department for News International, read: ?I can confirm that we did not find anything in those e-mails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman?s illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the deputy editor, and/or that Ian Edmondson, the news editor, and others were carrying out similar procedures.?

The company rejected earlier drafts by Harbottle & Lewis that were not as broad, according to the two people with access to the correspondence. One of them said that lawyers on both sides seemed to struggle to find language that said the review had found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world/europe/30letter.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss

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