Winning the company’s voluntary cooperation seems more expedient.
“Green light”
As Mr. Chisbrough described a long-planned email escalation at the Feb. 9 meeting, police records show, detectives said he left out a fact that investigators only recently learned about because Evidence emerged in hacking lawsuit: Emails had been deleted just days earlier, during a critical early stage of the investigation. Mr Lewis was involved in the decision.
In January, the company deleted about 11 million emails, the lawsuit said.
Lewis then sent an email on February 3 that gave him the “green light” to delete another 15.2 million emails, the plaintiffs said, citing News Corp. records.
It was not until March, after those removals, that the company and police reached an agreement. Going forward, detectives could ask the company to conduct keyword and name searches, which would be handled by a third party and then screened through the company for consideration of objections.
As of April, the company had turned over just 54 emails, according to the plaintiffs’ filing.
Around this time, Mr Lewis became the main liaison with the police, helping to cement his reputation as a vital collaborator. The Guardian, which exposed the phone-hacking scandal, called him “News Corp.’s cleanup campaigner.” Even Sue Akers, the task force leader, later said relations with the company had improved since Mr. Lewis arrived.
But the detectives closest to the case soon became suspicious of this new spirit of cooperation. As potential evidence begins to be turned over under the new protocol, Detective Sgt. Computer expert Wayne Hacknett noticed something strange. He said in a previously unreported filing that even after the content was deleted, “the emails we expected to find did not appear to be present.”
