the "If you're going to run a conspiracy, it's best to make sure your co-conspirators aren't wearing red false noses and overlength shoes" piece.
We're winding down to the last24 hours till the Sun on Sunday,Ruperts replacement for the discredited News of the world starts to hit peoples doormats, On the face of it a snap decision showing proprietorial strength and confidence. However underlying this is an attempt to re-sieze the agenda and the reporting on the story, but even at the most positive view for him, this isn't really happening
So what has been happening in the second half of this week ?
(first half of the week here http://www.dailykos.com/... )
Firstly the bad news, The final one of the initial batch of test cases folded and took the Money. Charlotte Church, the singer who had been insisting on a trial decided to take the money
Judge keeps pressure on Rupert Murdoch - World - NZ Herald News
It can also be revealed that fears for her mother's health forced Church to settle her hacking claim against News International out of court, in the face of hardball tactics by Murdoch's lawyers which would have made Maria Church a focus of an impending trial.
This coming Monday in the High Court, News International's senior counsel Michael Silverleaf will quickly accept liability for a litany of wrongdoing on behalf of the News of the World that came close to destroying the Church family.
The settlement, including costs, is likely to be in the region of £500,000
however Lawyers for the News of theworld hardly had time to breath out and think they had secured a clear weekend for the launch of their masters new pet project when Lord Vos, the trial judge sitting on the NOTW cases announced that a trial date for the next batch of cases will be announced next week. The second batch that includes Cherie Blair, wife of the former prime minister is reported to be three times the size of the original batch of Claimants.
Lord Vos also ordered that all the claim documents be released to the media, and if what the claimants allege is true then they make the Nixon cover up look like a work of staggering genius.
The daily telegraph, (A leading Conservative supporting broadsheet) has published 18 pages of these claim documents. these pages are anonymised, names of individual people are placed in seperate confidential annexes and people throughout are refered to as "Journalist A" etc.
Phone hacking: News of the World bosses ordered emails to be deleted - Telegraph
However it is details surrounding the cover-up which are the most damning.
The papers state that from 2008 on, the News of the World had a legal obligation to “preserve all relevant evidence” of phone hacking because it had been notified of civil claims that were pending.
But in Nov 2009 it created the “Email Deletion Policy” to “eliminate in a consistent manner across News International (subject to compliance with legal and regulatory requirements) emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which an NI company is a defendant”.
The document includes emails sent from a senior executive which says that all emails prior to January 2010 would be deleted.
A further email to a lawyer at News International asks “how are we doing with the…email deletion policy?”
Brit and I spent a while going over them and discussing them, (and another block have been released since which we have yet to look at) but the first 18 pages would I suggest say
1) Hacking was aproved at Editorial Level, now unless they are counting deputy editors and departmental editors as editorial level, (which I wouldn't think is implied) then the fact that the claim documents refers to Individuals when describing the contents of the appendix containing these people would suggest that Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks are both evidentially linked to aproving phone hacking.
2) Clive Goodman spoke about Hacking phones at editorial meetings, and says every story he wrote for the last two years he served at the NOTW were based on phone hacks.
3) Email deletion carried on right up to September 2011, emails were deleted and computers destroyed after Claimants lawyers had recieved legal orders that would force NI to hand over copies of all relevent documents and computer files as evidence
4) emails from the companies lawyers seem to show that at the time they knew that this deletion of emails was Illegal
Theres another 20 pages to read and there will no doubt need to be an update when I've read and thought about those.
(updates)
5) Journalist A "instructed the second defendant to intercept voice mails on at least 1,453 occasions" Journalist B "303" Journalist C "252" and Journalist D "135" and none of these is Clive Goodman, he's down for only 36
6)one paragraph of what Mulcaire is supposedly providing is described in the papers is "Information about location and movement..." this maybe suggests that Mulcaire was able to perform pinging, this is something that should only be available to police and phone company technical people, and maybe suggests Mulcaire had a person on the inside.
7) Theres an awful ammount redacted in what News International is actually admitting including what appears to be nine more unnamed cases which is admitting to.
(back to the original post)
The Columbia Journalism review has an article about this which is worth reading
The Keystone Kops of Koverups : CJR
The Telegraph has abig scoop on the hacking scandal, reporting new details of how News Corporation deleted emails and destroyed reporters’ computers that “could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation.”
This might merely be skeevy were it not for the fact that existing (not “future”) litigation was already underway against subsidiary News International. Now it’s a real legal problem.
The documents, which are in claims by plaintiffs’s attorneys, say that beginning in 2008, News Corp. knew it had an obligation to preserve evidence. In September 2010 lawyers for Sienna Miller sent News International a letter demanding that they preserve evidence. That appears to have lit a fire under executives:
It's evidence like this that should provide a big boot to kick your Justice department into gear to start applying the FCPA to the murdock organisation with predjudice
Finally this evening the Police have announced that There have been two further arrests made as part of Operation Tuletta, although these are not journalists , or people which were acting under their direction according to the police spokesman. which is a thoroughly intriguing statement. On top of that there has been an announcement that The Independent Police complaints authority is investigating a senior officer for handing information to a News International Executive during the recent investigation. The Independent claims that that executive is Rebekah Brooks.
As it is the last weekend before The Leveson Inquiry starts module 2 "The Police and the Press" then I'd think it was a fairly good bet that we will see more arrests by the end of the weekend, as the Met will want to be looking eficient and effective before this starts.
Sat Feb 25, 2012 at 2:40 AM PT: Overnight there has been a release about possible hacking in the US
Zelo Street: Murdoch Is Served (67)
While Rupe’s downmarket troops prepare for the launch of the Sunday Sun, the news from the USA is not so good: followingthe suspicion of illegality about the story run by the Screws over Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston’s marriage breakdown, and the suggestion that Jude Lawhad his phone accessed on US soil, comes news of another potential victim, this time from the West Coast.
Deadline Hollywoodhas revealed that the Met has advised Hollywood music agent Julie Colbert that her phone may have been hacked. Ms Colbert may not have been of interest to Rupe’s troops, but one of her clients – singer Charlotte Church, whohas just settled out of court for a sum rumoured to be not unadjacent to £500,000 – certainly was.
Ms Church had stayed at the Colbert house for some months as a means of putting some distance between herself and the pack of hacks and snappers that had been in constant pursuit back in the UK. Ms Colbert had travelled extensively between Los Angeles and London, so it’s possible that her phone was hacked in the UK. But Mulcaire’s notes apparently contain several US numbers.