Breaking from The Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch's News International company has been found by a parliamentary committee to have "deliberately" tried to block a Scotland Yard criminal investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World.
The report from MPs on the all-party home affairs committee will be released on Wednesday morning. Its publication has been moved forward in time for a statement on the scandal by the prime minister, David Cameron.
The report's central finding comes a day after Rupert and James Murdoch testified before the culture, media and sport committee. The home affairs committee report marks an official damning judgment on News International's actions.
It finds the company "deliberately" tried to "thwart" the 2005-2006 Metropolitan police investigation into phone hacking carried out by the News of the World.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
And from the New York Times:
British Panel Says Murdochs Are Blocking Inquiries
LONDON — A parliamentary panel investigating Britain’s spreading phone hacking scandal accused the Murdoch empire on Wednesday of “deliberate attempts” to thwart its investigations.
...
The report said there had been “deliberate attempts by News International to thwart the various investigations” into the illicit hacking of voice mail.
...
“There has been a catalog of failures by the Metropolitan Police, and deliberate attempts by News International to thwart the various investigations,” the home affairs committee chairman, Keith Vaz, said.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Did Rupert never learn that the cover-up is always worse than the crime? Or perhaps he did, but in this case, the crime is in fact much, much worse.
In other News Corp. Hacking scandal news, Hugh Grant just won a court victory to see hacking information seized by Police. From AFP:
LONDON — Actor Hugh Grant and his former girlfriend, socialite Jemima Khan, obtained a court order Wednesday requiring police to hand over evidence indicating their phones may have been hacked.
High Court judge Geoffrey Vos ruled that it was "expedient and proper" that they be able to see information seized in 2006 by police from Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator employed by the now defunct News of the World.
http://www.france24.com/...
UPDATE 1:
From AnnetteK in the comments:
Latest from Guardian Live Blog
7.23pm: News International says it has authorised solicitors Harbottle & Lewis to answer any questions from Scotland Yard and the Commons home affairs committee about its work for the firm.
Harbottle & Lewis was in 2007 asked to keep a file of paperwork which it is now known contains evidence of wrongdoing at the News of the World. Earlier today (see 2.48pm) John Whittingdale, the chairman of the culture committee, said the law firm had told him that News International had refused its request to be released from its duty of client confidentiality, so it could help MPs learn more about who knew about the contents of the file four years ago.
UPDATE 1.5: From cleduc2 in the comments:
Slippery Rupert limits waiver to lawfirm:
8.00pm: David Allen Green, the New Statesman's legal correspondent, has suggested the waiver News International has granted Harbottle & Lewis is not a full waiver.
Accordingly, based on @DRoseTimes tweets, there seems to have been a qualified waiver of LPP and confidentialty, not a complete waiver.
This waiver could also have profound effects for the course of the civil privacy and criminal litigation.
I said that James Murdoch dumping on the lawyers would not end well.
UPDATE 2:
More GOLD from our intrepid AnnetteK:
Just reading through the comments on Guardian live blog.
They are saying that Channel 4 news just announced that the police have said Rebekah was lying to the committee yesterday about her meeting with the Yard.
Also they confirmed that Jeremy Hunt has dropped David Cameron right in the poo by saying he did discuss the BSkyB deal.
This could be big.
UPDATE 3:
From our Pulitzer-deserving Brit in the comments, a follow up to Update 2:
Yes, that famous Spoonerism Hunt the Culture Minister - has just confirmed what we all know....
David had 26 meetings with NI over the last 16 months:
But the timing is important. David Cameron avoided Murdoch till 2007 when he recruited, thanks to Osbourne and Brooks (then Wade) David Coulson
In 2009 a month before James Murdoch his notorious McTaggart lecture laying into Ofcom and the BBC in tandem with the BSkyB bid.
1. . The then leader of the opposition spoke about making a 'bonfire on the quangos'. First of the quangos he wanted to incinerate? Ofcom
2. I spoke to a couple of Tory advisors in June 2010 (along with a well known NI journalist but Chatham House rules applied). They confirmed that they wanted to see the BBC vastly reduced in size - exactly the main thrust of JM's lecture.
3. On taking up office at Number 10, Cameron reduced the BBC's budget by 16% by funding the World Service through the license fee, rather than the Foreign Office.
4. Vince Cable supervised the quasi judicial takeover process of the BSkyB, but the Conservatives (unlike Labour) refused to refer it to the competition authority, and instead when down the much weaker plurality route.
It was also James Murdoch's McTaggart lecture which caused the rift with Gordon Brown according to Isabel Oakeshott in the Sunday Times.
It was a stringent critique of the BBC and Ofcom, the media regulator. Brown hated every word.
Inside Downing Street, he pored over the text, line by line. "I can't overstate how important that speech was," said a former Labour strategist who was with Brown at the time. "It changed everything. He saw it as very rightwing and a direct attack on what we were doing. He felt the Murdochs didn't share any of our values."
So within a year of James Murdoch's speech, Cameron had given the Murdochs all they asked for. Then, two days after he was installed in No 10, Cameron invited Murdoch over to - in Rupert's words - "Thank him for the help in the campaign."
Please remember than in ALL these instances above the Tory Party were about to grant Murdoch a cross platform monopoly (let alone a Pay TV monopoly) which would have given Murdoch more power than any single media owner in any developed country (Italy included)
UPDATE 4:
(h/t cleduc2)
9/11 families will meet with Attorney General Eric Holder AND FBI Director Robert Mueller regarding possible hacking.
Relatives of 9/11 victims will meet with the FBI's director and the U.S. attorney general to discuss allegations that a newspaper owned by News Corp. targeted phone conversations and voice mails of victims of the 2001 terrorist attack, a lawyer representing family members said.
http://edition.cnn.com/...
UPDATE 5:
From Brit:
Major shareholder turns up heat on embattled Rupert Murdoch
Rupert Murdoch's position as News Corporation boss came under fierce attack today after one of the world's biggest pension funds blasted the "corrupt" governance structure and demanded reform.
Calpers, the California Public Employers Retirement System, said: "Calpers sees the voting structure in a company as critical.
"The situation is very serious and we're considering our options. We don't intend to be spectators - we're owners,"...
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/...
UPDATE 6:
From the Guardian, PM Cameron now wants the investigation widened to include the BBC and social media!:
David Cameron has broadened the terms of the inquiry into the conduct of the media to include the BBC and social media.
The prime minister was setting out the formal terms of reference of the inquiry to be led by Lord Justice Leveson, an appeal court judge. The inquiry has become something of a behemoth, leading Don Foster, the Liberal Democrat media spokesman, to assert he could not see how it could be completed within its timetable of a year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
This suggests to me that Cameron is still doing Murdoch's bidding, and will soon have to resign.
UPDATE 7:
Senators Boxer and Rockefeller are zeroing in on Les Hinton's role:
Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and John Rockefeller of West Virginia, who were first out of the gate last week to ask for agencies to look at News of the World’s possible lawbreaking in the U.S., have now called on Dow Jones’s special committee to look at what former Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton knew about the hacking that took place when he was in charge of News International.
The letter cites the July 20 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report on the hacking, which said that “it is almost impossible to escape the conclusion ... that [News International] were deliberately trying to thwart criminal investigation” during Hinton’s tenure as executive chairman, and calls this condemnation “very troubling.”
It goes on to say that “evidence has recently been discovered that raises questions about” the testimony about the hacking that Hinton gave before Parliament in 2007 and 2009.
http://www.politico.com/...
UPDATE 8:
James Murdoch caught in a lie from yesterday! From The Guardian, and with a big hat tip to cleduc2:
James Murdoch appears to have given misleading parliamentary testimony about a key phone-hacking cover-up, according to evidence obtained by the Guardian.
Rupert Murdoch's son sought to deny that "astronomic sums" had been secretly paid out to a hacking victim as hush-money. He told MPs the company's legal advice was that the likely award of damages was £250,000, and that this explained the size of a confidential payout he agreed could be paid in 2008 to hacking victim Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the footballers' union the PFA.
But full details of the legal negotiations obtained by the Guardian show that in fact Murdoch's company executives paid far more than that to buy Taylor's silence. After consulting James Murdoch, they eventually agreed to pay £425,000 damages, almost twice as much as the alleged likely award.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...