Gaining the company’s voluntary cooperation seemed more expedient.
‘Green light’
As Mr. Cheesbrough described a long-planned email upgrade at that Feb. 9 meeting, police records say, and detectives say, he left out a fact that investigators learned only recently as evidence emerged in the hacking lawsuit: The most of the emails had been deleted just a few days earlier, in the key early days of the investigation. And Mr. Lewis was involved in that decision.
In January, the company deleted about 11 million emails, according to the lawsuits.
Then on February 3, Mr. Lewis sent an email giving the “green light” to delete another 15.2 million emails, the plaintiffs alleged, citing News Corporation records.
It wasn’t until March, after those deletions, that the company and the police reached an agreement. From now on, detectives could ask the company to do keyword and name searches, which would be handled by a third party, and then filter through the company to consider raising objections.
By April, the company had turned over just 54 emails, according to the plaintiffs’ filings.
It was around this time that Mr Lewis became the main point of contact for the police, helping to cement his reputation as a critical partner. The Guardian newspaper, which broke the phone hacking scandal, called him a “News Corp clean-up campaigner”. Even Sue Akers, head of the task force, would later say that the relationship with the company improved when Mr. Lewis arrived.
But detectives closest to the case quickly came to question this new spirit of cooperation. As potential evidence began to be turned in under the new protocol, Detective Sgt. Wayne Harknett, a computer expert, noticed something strange. Even given the deletions, “The emails we expected to find did not appear to exist,” he said in a previously unreported document.
