Scotland Yard had doubts about Will Lewis’ cooperation

It seemed more effective to persuade the company to cooperate voluntarily.

‘Green light’

In that Feb. 9 meeting, police transcripts show, and detectives say, Cheesbrough described a long-planned update of email addresses. He left out a fact that investigators only recently learned when evidence surfaced during the hacking trial: The majority of the emails had been deleted just days earlier, in the crucial early days of the investigation. And Lewis was involved in that decision.

According to the lawsuits, the company deleted around 11 million emails in January.

Then, on February 3, Mr Lewis sent an email giving the “green light” to delete an additional 15.2 million emails, the plaintiffs allege, citing News Corporation records.

It was only in March, after these deletions, that the company and the police reached an agreement. In the future, criminal investigators could ask the company to search for keywords and names. This search would then be carried out by a third party and then filtered by the company in order to be able to raise objections.

According to the plaintiffs’ documents, the company had only handed over 54 emails by April.

It was around this time that Lewis became the police’s main contact, earning him a reputation as a key collaborator. The Guardian newspaper, which uncovered the wiretapping scandal, called him “News Corps’ clean-up shareholder.” Even Sue Akers, the head of the task force, later said that relations with the company improved when Lewis arrived.

But investigators closest to the case quickly began to doubt this new spirit of cooperation. As potential evidence was being turned over under the new protocol, Detective Sgt. Wayne Harknett, a computer specialist, noticed something odd. Even taking the deletions into account, “emails we expected to see didn’t appear to be there,” he said in a previously unpublished document.