Douglas Caddy

In selecting highlights from Mr. Draper's book review, I should have included his more complete statement, which follows: “Particularly jolting is Mr. Caro’s laudatory treatment of the Warren Commission charged by Johnson to report on the Kennedy assassination. Rather than deploy the historian’s benefit of hindsight and point out its serious investigative lapses in the apparent interest of putting the whole shady matter to rest, he praises the now widely ridiculed commission (on which my grandfather served, I should disclose) as one that helped a nation ‘build confidence’ in the new president. (While conspiracy buffs will be riled by Mr. Caro’s statement that ‘nothing I have found in my research leads me to believe that whatever the full story of the assassination may be, Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it,’ most of us will probably be relieved that the narrative doesn’t wallow in innuendo.) In this single instance, it feels as if Mr. Caro found himself on a narrative roll and wouldn’t let LBJ’s expeditious but hardly heroic commission slow his story’s locomotion.”

April 27, 2012, 8:40 pm Murdoch’s Denials of Political Favors Hard to Swallow in New York By JENNIFER PRESTON The New York Times Former Mayor Edward I. Koch said he was in his West Village apartment early one morning in 1977 when the phone rang and the man on the other end of the line said, “Good morning, Congressman. It’s Rupert.” “I say to myself: ‘Rupert? That’s not a Jewish name. Who could be calling me named Rupert?’ ” Then, Mr. Koch said, he recognized an Australian accent. It was Rupert Murdoch, the new owner of The New York Post. “ ‘I don’t know if it will help, but we are endorsing you on the front page of The New York Post,’ ” Mr. Koch recalls Mr. Murdoch telling him. “I said, ‘Rupert, you have just elected me.’ ” Mr. Murdoch’s relationships with British politicians from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron were dissected this week during his two days of testimony before a judicial inquiry in London looking into the phone hacking scandal that has shaken the media mogul’s $60 billion News Corporation. Throughout his testimony, Mr. Murdoch adamantly denied ever using his considerable political influence to win favor for his business interests. So what about Mr. Murdoch’s relationships with politicians here in New York City, where he bought The New York Post in 1976, founded the Fox News Channel in 1996 and purchased The Wall Street Journal in 2007? Without question, Mr. Koch said in an interview on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch’s decision to use The New York Post to throw its support behind his candidacy helped him defeat Mario Cuomo in the 1977 Democratic mayoral primary, the runoff and then in the general election. “That made the difference between winning and losing, and I am very grateful,” Mr. Koch said about the endorsement. Lawrence Jackson/Associated PressRupert Murdoch with Rudolph W. Giuliani in 2007. What did Rupert want in return? “He never, ever in the course of the 12 years that I was there asked me for a single thing, except one small thing,” Mr. Koch recalled. Mr. Koch said he remembered getting a request from a representative of The New York Post to temporarily lift the ban on trucks using the West Side and East Side Highways so The Post could get its newspapers out more quickly during a newspaper strike. “I said, sure,” Mr. Koch said. But things were different with Rudolph W. Giuliani’s administration. In 1989, Mr. Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed Mr. Giuliani over David N. Dinkins, who became the city’s first African-American mayor. Mr. Giuliani’s media adviser, as it turns out, was Roger E. Ailes, who would go on to start and run Fox News. In 1993, Mr. Giuliani defeated Mr. Dinkins’s bid for a second term, becoming mayor in 1994. Two years later, Mr. Ailes was the founding chief executive officer of Fox News, a subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation. Mr. Murdoch said in London that he did not use his political ties for his business interests, but he and his executives did turn to Mayor Giuliani for help after the Time Warner Cable New York City Group rejected their request for Fox News to have a channel, according to court records and news accounts at the time. In an interview on Thursday, Richard Aurelio, then the president of Time Warner Cable New York City Group, said there were only 80 channels in the city when the Fox News 24-hour channel began in the fall of 1996 and wanted access to Time Warner’s 1.1 million New York City cable customers. Mr. Aurelio, a former deputy mayor for John Lindsay, said he told Fox News that he would not have a channel to give them until more channels became available when they went digital. Fox News did not want to wait. My colleague Clifford Levy reported in 1996 that Mr. Ailes contacted Mr. Giuliani to try to persuade Time Warner to change its position. Then, on Oct. 1, 1996, at a launch party for the new Fox News Channel, Mr. Murdoch himself expressed concern about the situation to some of New York’s leading politicians who attended, including Mr. Giuliani, Gov. George E. Pataki and Dennis C. Vacco, the state attorney general. “He complained to them at the party that I was the big bottleneck, and that I refused to carry Fox News,” Mr. Aurelio said. “They tried to put pressure on me. I said, ‘I can’t help you right now.’ ” Mr. Aurelio also got a call from Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato. “Both Pataki and D’Amato were pretty pleasant about it,” he said. “They didn’t twist any arms. They were unhappy. But, it seemed to me, in their case, they were doing it because they were asked to do it by Murdoch.” Mr. Aurelio said Mr. Giuliani and his staff took a different approach. “He summoned us down to City Hall, and had one of his advisers try to browbeat me.” Then, the Giuliani administration decided to help Fox News by turning over one of the city’s five municipal channels, as Mr. Levy reported. “This was illegal,” Mr. Aurelio said. “We got an injunction and the court agreed.” To “Time Warner executives,” Mr. Levy reported, “the contacts demonstrate that Mr. Murdoch, a prominent conservative who also owns The New York Post, wields excessive influence over the mayor.” Mr. Giuliani was unavailable to comment on Friday, according to an aide. A spokeswoman for Mr. Ailes did not immediately respond to a request to speak to him. There are other examples of a cozy relationship between the News Corporation and the Giuliani administration, as the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett described in The Daily Beast last year. In 1996, Mr. Giuliani and his aides fiercely defended their conversations with the News Corporation. They emphasized that their interest was in protecting local jobs. Protecting jobs prompts elected officials to do a lot on behalf of business owners, even when they don’t benefit from Mr. Murdoch’s media empire. Mr. Murdoch did not endorse former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo during the 1977 mayoral race and urged Mayor Koch to run for governor against him in the 1980s. But Mr. Cuomo recalled in an interview on Friday that he helped Mr. Murdoch on multiple occasions, including winning a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission so that Mr. Murdoch could run The New York Post. “The paper beat me to a pulp, but my feeling was that 800 jobs or so were on the line,” he said. Finally, after Mr. Aurelio retired in July 1997, Mr. Murdoch got the channel for Fox News on Time Warner’s cable system in New York City. At the same time, another New York City media mogul got a channel on Time Warner for his cable programming. The Giuliani administration was looking to help him, as well. That mogul’s name was Michael R. Bloomberg. What did Mr. Murdoch have to say about Mr. Bloomberg during his testimony in London this week? In response to a question about the perception that he trades political support for favors, Mr. Murdoch cited Mr. Bloomberg as proof that was not the case. “I think it’s a myth,” he said about political influence. “And everything I do every day, I think, proves it to be such. Have a look at — well, it’s not relevant, but how I treat Mayor Bloomberg in New York. Sends him crazy. But we support him every time he runs for re-election.” This post has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 28, 2012 An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Roger E. Ailes's role in Rudolph W. Giuliani's campaign in 1989. Mr. Ailes was his media adviser, not his campaign manager.

Going all the way with LBJ By George F. Will, Washington Post April 28, 2012 Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president’s casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy’s kept historian, convened a lunch at Washington’s Occidental restaurant with some other administration liberals. Their purpose was to discuss how to deny the 1964 Democratic presidential nomination to the new incumbent, Lyndon Johnson, and instead run a ticket of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Sen. Hubert Humphrey. This example of the malignant malice of some liberals against the president who became 20th-century liberalism’s most consequential adherent is described in Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” the fourth and, he insists, penultimate volume in his “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” which when completed will rank as America’s most ambitiously conceived, assiduously researched and compulsively readable political biography. The new volume arrives 30 years after the first, and its timing is serendipitous: Are you seeking an antidote to current lamentations about the decline of political civility? Immerse yourself in Caro’s cringe-inducing catalogue of humiliations, gross and petty, inflicted on Johnson by many New Frontiersmen and, with obsessive hatred, by Robert Kennedy. Caro demonstrates that when, at the Democrats’ 1960 Los Angeles convention, John Kennedy selected Johnson, an opponent for the nomination, as his running mate, Robert Kennedy worked with furious dishonesty against his brother, trying to persuade Johnson to decline. Had Robert succeeded, his brother almost certainly would have lost Texas, and perhaps both Carolinas and Louisiana — President Eisenhower had carried five of the 11 Confederate states in 1956 — and the election. Johnson, one of the few presidents who spent most of their adult lives in Washington, had no idea how to win the presidency. Convinced that the country was as mesmerized as Washington is by the Senate, Johnson did not formally announce his candidacy until six days before the 1960 convention. Johnson did, however, know how to use the presidency. Almost half the book covers the 47 days between the assassination and Johnson’s Jan. 8 State of the Union address. In that span he began breaking the congressional logjam against liberal legislation that had existed since 1938 when the nation, recoiling against Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to “pack” the Supreme Court, produced a durable congressional coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. Caro is properly enthralled by Johnson putting the power of the presidency behind a discharge petition that, by advancing, compelled a Southern committee chairman to allow what became the 1964 Civil Rights Act to get to the Senate, where Johnson’s meticulous cultivation of another Southern chairman prevented tax cut legislation from becoming hostage to the civil rights filibuster. By taking such arcana seriously, and celebrating Johnson’s virtuosity regarding them, Caro honors the seriousness of his readers, who should reciprocate the compliment. Caro astringently examines Johnson’s repulsive venality (regarding his Texas broadcasting properties) and bullying (notably of Texas journalists, through their employers) but devotes ample pages to honoring Johnson as the most exemplary political leader since Lincoln regarding race. As vice president, he refused to attend the 400th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, Fla., unless the banquet would be integrated — and not, he insisted, with a “Negro table” off to the side. He said civil rights legislation would “say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly.” Caro never loses sight of the humiliations and insecurities that were never far from Johnson’s mind. Caro is a conventional liberal of the Great Society sort (“Unless Congress extended federal rent-control laws — the only protection against exorbitant rents for millions of families . . . .”) but is also a valuable anachronism, a historian who rejects the academic penchant for history “with the politics left out.” These historians consider it elitist and anti-democratic to focus on event-making individuals; they deny that a preeminent few have disproportionate impact on the destinies of the many; they present political events as “epiphenomena,” reflections of social “structures” and results of impersonal forces. Caro’s event-making Johnson is a very personal force. Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” that no one ever wished it longer. Not so Caro’s great work, which already fills 3,388 pages. When his fifth volume, treating the Great Society and Vietnam, arrives, readers’ gratitude will be exceeded only by their regret that there will not be a sixth. georgewill@washpost.com

The Wall Street Journal of April 28-29, 2012 contains a lengthy review by Robert Draper of Robert Caro’s new book, “The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power.” Here are some highlights of the book review: “…Mr. Caro’s almost monastic 36-year-long dedication to his subject has succeeded in winning over virtually all of his critics, including almost every Johnson confidant.” “…Mr. Caro has revealed that Johnson had accepted the ignominy of the vice presidency in large part because (as he told Ed Clark, a key consigliere[sic] and later a key Caro source) ‘seven of them got to be president without even being elected.’” “What commands the most attention in ‘The Passage of Power” is an unforgettable 65-page elaboration of November 22, 1963, the day of infamy on which the assassin’s bullet elevated Johnson to the presidency.” “(While conspiracy buffs will be riled by Mr. Caro’s statement that ‘nothing I have found in my research leads me to believe that whatever the full story of the assassination may be, Lyndon Johnson had anything to do with it,’ most of us will probably be relieved that the narrative doesn’t wallow in innuendo.”)

Jeremy Hunt to hand over all relevant BSkyB emails and texts Culture secretary to give messages he sent to Adam Smith and News Corp executives about takeover bid to Leveson inquiry. By Josh Halliday, Patrick Wintour and Shiv Malik guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 April 2012 07.37 EDT Jeremy Hunt said he was confident the emails would 'vindicate that I handled the BSkyB merger process with total propriety'. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters Jeremy Hunt, the embattled culture secretary, is to disclose all his private correspondence over the BSkyB takeover deal to the Leveson inquiry. Hunt will disclose any "relevant" emails and text messages to News Corporation executives and his former special adviser Adam Smith over the controversial takeover bid, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has confirmed. Earlier on Friday, Hunt said he would disclose messages sent to Smith as Lord Oakeshott, the senior Liberal Democrat peer, joined the call by his party colleague Simon Hughes for David Cameron to refer the culture secretary to the independent adviser on the ministerial code, Sir Alex Allan. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, accused the prime minister of "organising a cover-up" over the affair. Smith resigned on Wednesday after admitting that his communications with a News Corp lobbyist while the company was trying to take full control of BSkyB "at times went too far". Hunt said on Friday: "I will be handing over all my private texts and emails to my special adviser to the Leveson inquiry and I am confident they will vindicate that I handled the BSkyB merger process with total propriety." The DCMS later confirmed that Hunt would pass "all relevant information" on the matter – not just messages to Smith – to the inquiry. A department spokesman said: "The secretary of state gave a statement to parliament this week in which he made it clear that he would be co-operating fully with the inquiry and submitting evidence in due course. He feels strongly that the inquiry is the right forum for this to be discussed, and this is the clear wish of the judge himself too. This is the right process for addressing these issues." The culture secretary has faced mounting pressure since Tuesday, when the Leveson inquiry published more than 160 pages of emails between News Corp's European public affairs director, Frédéric Michel, and his boss, James Murdoch, detailing apparently extensive contact between Hunt's office and the lobbyist at a time when Hunt was considering the company's £8bn bid for the 60.9% of BSkyB it did not already own. Hughes, deputy leader of the Lib Dems, refused on Thursday night to back Hunt over the BSkyB affair. Appearing on BBC1's Question Time, Hughes said he could not understand why the prime minister had not referred the case for examination under the ministerial code of conduct. Oakeshott said on Thursday night that Hughes "speaks for all Lib Dems. We all agree with him." But Liberal Democrat officials representing Nick Clegg were less emphatic, saying: "Nick shares Simon's desire to get to the truth. Whether through Leveson or another route is a question of process." The Conservatives argue that Leveson may not be able to rule on whether there has been a breach of the ministerial code since that is beyond the inquiry's terms of reference, but it can look at the evidence with which a judgment could be made. Miliband said on Friday: "Every day David Cameron looks more like a prime minister organising a cover-up rather than standing up for the public. First he refuses to sack Jeremy Hunt despite the weight of evidence against him. Now, despite all-party calls to do so, he refuses even to ask the independent adviser on ministerial interests to examine whether Mr Hunt broke the ministerial code." The shadow culture secretary, Harriet Harman, said Hunt should release the texts and emails to parliament and not just the Leveson inquiry. Harman accused the government of using the inquiry as "a big carpet under which they can sweep everything". She accused the prime minister of doing everything in his power to avoid an investigation: "Lord Leveson's inquiry is of huge importance, but it is not in its terms of reference to look into breaches of the ministerial code. "That is the job of the independent adviser, and the prime minister will not allow him to look into this." Cameron's spokesman has acknowledged that Leveson's terms of reference do not allow the inquiry to examine breaches of the ministerial code but says Cameron sees no reason to refer the issue to Allan. On Thursday, Hunt's most senior civil servant, Jonathan Stephens, refused 10 times before a parliamentary committee to either confirm or deny his alleged role in allowing Smith to speak to Michel. The DCMS issued a statement late on Thursday night saying Stephens was "content" with the role played by Smith. Miliband has claimed it was not credible to say Smith acted as "a lone wolf" without the knowledge of Hunt in repeatedly briefing News Corp on how the culture secretary wanted to help the company in its bid for BSkyB. Hunt has asked Leveson to allow him to give evidence to the inquiry earlier than scheduled in an attempt to head off the mounting controversy. The former leader of the Conservative party Lord Howard defended Hunt on Friday, saying he should not resign and everyone should wait for the Leveson inquiry to get "to the bottom of what happened". "The facts make it clear that Jeremy Hunt at every stage took independent advice and followed that independent advice," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "We should wait to hear every side of the story before coming to conclusion." Howard, a former home secretary, said there was a danger in arguing that politicians be kept out all quasi-judicial processes such as the BSkyB bid. "Some people have suggested that these decisions should be taken from politicians and I wouldn't dismiss that suggestion out of hand, but you've always got to remember that when you take decisions from elected politicians and give them to other people, so called independent people, you're losing an important element of accountability, and accountability is at the heart of parliamentary democracy," he said. Michael Fallon, the deputy chairman of the Conservative party, told the BBC Politics Show: "We already have an inquiry into the relationship between government and BSkyB under way, headed by a very senior judge and he himself has said the better course would be to allow that inquiry to proceed to see the evidence, to test Jeremy Hunt on the evidence, and for him to give his side of the story and later on if it transpires there has been some breach of the ministerial code, then of course that can be looked at". Tom Watson, the deputy chairman of the Labour party, countered: "The only person that does not want an independent assessor to do an independent inquiry is the prime minister. The truth about this is that everyone is running absolutely terrified because they are going to be exposed as in hock to Rupert Murdoch". He accused the Conservatives of running away from the procedure for policing ministerial code.

I am not about to get into a long, dragged out discussion with Jim about this matter (who apparently has already made up his closed mind) other than to cite as an example to back up Billie Sol's statements there exists that famous photograph that has been displayed many times of U.S. Senator John McClellan of Arkansas holding the same type of rifle used to murder Henry Marshall. The photograph was taken at the U.S. Senate committee hearing into the Marshall death. It was the Senator's way of showing how impossible it was for Marshall to have used the rifle to commit suicide as was originally concluded in the local investigation orchestrated by mastermind LBJ.

No, tom, I have no knowledge concerning Mr. Niland.

Top civil servant refuses to back Jeremy Hunt on BSkyB Senior civil servant working for Jeremy Hunt has refused to back the Culture Secretary’s account of his dealings with the Murdoch empire in a row that threatens his career By James Kirkup, Deputy Political Editor The Telegraph 1:44PM BST 26 Apr 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9228826/Top-civil-servant-refuses-to-back-Jeremy-Hunt-on-BSkyB.html Jonathan Stephenson, the permanent secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, repeatedly declined to answer questions about the matter from a committee of MPs. Mr Hunt is facing calls for his resignation after admitting that his special adviser, Adam Smith, inappropriately supplied information to News Corporation about Mr Hunt’s decisions on the company’s bid to control BSkyB. Mr Smith resigned on Wednesday, saying he had acted without his minister’s approval. However, the fact that he was in regular contact with News Corp about Mr Hunt’s “quasi-judicial” decision has raised questions. Former Labour ministers have said it is unusual for a political aide to be given a central role in such a matter. Mr Hunt told the Commons on Wednesday that Mr Smith’s role as the main point of contact for News Corp was “agreed by the permanent secretary” in the department, Mr Stephenson. At a hearing of the Public Accounts Committee today, Mr Stephenson was repeatedly asked to confirm that he had agreed Mr Smith’s role in the BSkyB decision. Margaret Hodge, the committee chairman, asked Mr Stephenson: “Did you know that Adam Smith was acting as a channel of communication between the department and Murdoch?” The official replied: The Secretary of State made a full statement to Parliament yesterday. He has made it clear that he’s providing full written evidence and is looking forward to providing oral evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. “There was a statement by the special adviser yesterday which made it clear that he accepted that the nature and content of those contacts was not authorised by the Secretary nor by me. I think that is the right forum for those matters to be answered.” Mr Stephenson added that because the committee hearing was originally scheduled to discuss the Olympics, he was not prepared to discuss the BSkyB case. His answer was criticised by MPs, and Nick Smith, a Labour member of the committee, suggested has trying to “stonewall”. Mr Stephenson replied: “I am very sorry. These are very important matters. They are rightly the subject of interest of Parliament. That’s why the Secretary of State made a full statement yesterday and answers questions. I have come ready to speak about the Olympics. “I have made clear the position set out in various statements yesterday and I think I need to stand on that without any implications being drawn whatsoever. I was not given any notice of these questions.” In all, Mr Stephenson was asked about Mr Smith’s role ten times, but refused to give any information about his own knowledge or authorisation of that role.

Rupert Murdoch admits NoW phone-hacking cover-up Murdoch says he was 'misinformed and shielded' from events at paper and points finger at 'one or two strong characters' By Lisa O'Carroll and Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 April 2012 06.59 EDT http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/26/murdoch-admits-phone-hacking-coverup News Corp chairman admits he should have paid more attention to what was going on at the News of the World Link to this video Rupert Murdoch has admitted to the Leveson inquiry there was a "cover-up" at News International over the phone-hacking scandal. Murdoch, the News Corp chairman and chief executive, giving his second day of evidence to the inquiry in London, said he was "misinformed and shielded" from what was going on at the News of the World, adding that there was a "cover-up". Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry, said there had been a consistent theme of cover-up during the phone-hacking scandal, and asked Murdoch where he thought this emanated from. "I think from within the News of the World," he replied. Murdoch said there were "one or two very strong characters" on the now-defunct Sunday paper who, according to reported statements, had forbidden people from talking to Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch, at the time News International chief executive and chairman respectively. Murdoch said a News of the World editor was appointed – referring to Colin Myler, although he did not name him at this point – "with specific instructions to find out what was going on". "He did, I believe, put in two or three new steps of regulation but never reported back that there was more hacking than we had been told." Myler was appointed in January 2007, after the News of the World royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire admitted phone hacking and went to prison. His predecessor, Andy Coulson, denied any knowledge of phone hacking but resigned, saying he took responsibilty for what happened. Murdoch told the inquiry Myler "would not have been my choice" and that he was the choice of Les Hinton, who at the time was News International's executive chairman. He said he thought at the time there were stronger candidates from News International sister title the Sun. Jay then asked if Myler was a weak individual and wrong man for the job. "I would say that was a slight exaggeration," replied Murdoch. "I would hope Mr Myler would do what he was commissioned to do." When asked by Jay whether News Corp had managed the legal risk of phone hacking by covering it up, Murdoch replied: "No. There was no attempt either at my level or several levels below to cover it up. We set up inquiry after inquiry, we employed legal firm after legal firm. Perhaps we relied too much on the conclusions of the police. "Our response was far too defensive and worse, disrespectful of parliament." Murdoch later revealed he wished he had closed the News of the World earlier and also admitted he panicked when the phone-hacking affair blew up into a major scandal in July 2011. "When the Milly Dowler [story] was first given huge publicity, I think newspapers took the chance to make this a huge national scandal. It made people all over the country aware of this, you could feel the blast coming in the window," he told the inquiry. "I'll say it succinctly: I panicked, but I'm glad I did. And I'm sorry I didn't close it years before and put a Sun on Sunday in. I tell you what held us back: News of the World readers. Only half of them read the Sun. Only a quarter, regular." Murdoch said he also made a major mistake listening to lawyers when Goodman alleged that others on the News of the World knew about the phone hacking. "I should have thrown all the lawyers out of the place and seen Mr Goodman one on one and cross-examined him myself and made up my mind, maybe rightly or wrongly, was he telling the truth? And if I had come to the conclusion that he was telling the truth, I'd have gone in and torn the place apart and we wouldn't be here today," he added. Earlier during the hearing, Murdoch agreed with Jay that the phone-hacking scandal had forced News Corp to drop its controversial £8bn takeover bid for BSkyB in July 2011. He told the Leveson inquiry the scandal spiralled into a "great, national" issue after it emerged that the News of the World intercepted the voicemail messages of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler. News Corp withdrew its bid for BSkyB in July last year, nine days after the Guardian revealed that Dowler's phone had been hacked by the Sunday tabloid. Asked by Jay whether the Dowler claims ultimately derailed the bid, Murdoch said: "Well, I don't know whether we can put it down to the Milly Dowler misfortune, but the hacking scandal, yes." He added: "The hacking scandal was not a great national thing until the Milly Dowler disclosure, half of which - look, I'm not making any excuses for it at all, but half of which has been somewhat disowned by the police." Murdoch also said he was surprised at the extent of lobbying of the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt's office by Fred Michel, the News Corp public affairs executive, while the Sky takeover bid was under regulatory scrutiny between June 2010 and July 2011. Murdoch refused to criticise Michel, but said he may have used "a bit of exaggeration" to tell his son James about his alleged closeness to the culture secretary. Michel's activities were revealed in a series of emails between him and James Murdoch, the News Corp deputy chief operating officer, that were submitted to the Leveson inquiry and published on Monday. Hunt's special adviser who dealt with Michel during the Sky bid, Adam Smith, resigned on Wednesday. Hunt made a statement to the Commons defending his conduct over the takeover bid, but is still facing calls from Labour leader Ed Miliband to resign

Harold Evans hits back at 'comic and sad' Rupert Murdoch Former Times editor accuses News Corp boss of 'spectacular displays of imagination' in his evidence to Leveson inquiry By Ben Dowell guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 April 2012 13.21 EDT Harold Evans, the former Times and Sunday Times editor, has accused Rupert Murdoch of displaying "spectacular displays of imagination" in his evidence to the Leveson inquiry of his account of the takeover of the papers in 1981. Evans, who had led a management buyout group hoping to acquire the Sunday Times, accused the News Corporation chairman, of being disingenuous about his claims that he did not lobby then prime minister Margaret Thatcher at a lunch he attended at Chequers before he took over the papers. News of the lunch emerged in March when the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge released documents from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, including a note from her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, about the meeting. In an article posted on the Daily Beast website, which is run by his wife Tina Brown, Evans also said Murdoch's testimony reflected the traditional pattern of all "Murdoch sagas". "He responds to serious criticism by a biting wisecrack or diversionary personal attack. What is denied most sharply invariably turns out to [be] irrefutably true. As with the hacking saga, so with my charges." Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking and media standards in London on Wednesday he sacked Evans after he was told there was a rebellion at the Times against its then editor. He also recounted an incident in which he claimed Evans took him aside to demand what editorial line he should be taking. Murdoch said Evans had asked him: "'Look, tell me what you want to say and it needn't leave this room, but I will do it'." Evans said it was "comic and sad" to see Murdoch's Leveson appearance. "It was comic for me because he had to find a way of denying that he ever broke his promise to maintain the independence of the Times under my editorship. Political independence was only one of the promises he made and broke," he added. "It was sad that, having lost his memory, he compensated by spectacular displays of imagination. On the stand he invented a scene in which I came on my knees, begging him to tell me what to think, and not to tell anybody that I'd asked him." Murdoch told Leveson he did not recall the details of the lunch with Thatcher, but maintained the meeting was "quite appropriate" because it concerned the possible takeover of a "great economic asset". He also said he had never asked a prime minister for anything, including Thatcher. He added that notes by Ingham would confirm his view, saying: "I hope they will be put on the web." Evans attacked "the pretence … that Murdoch was afforded a private meeting with the prime minister so she could be briefed on the takeover battle", speaking of the lunch held on 4 January 1981. "That's absurd enough, given the coverage in the press and the responsibilities of the Department of Trade. The larger absurdity is that the prime minister's redundant "briefing" is being done by only one bidder, and by one who has an urgent interest in rubbishing his competitors," he said. "We are asked to believe that there was no mention at the lunch of the clear legal requirement for Murdoch's bid to be referred to … the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. The prime minister had a duty to remind him of the laws she had sworn to honour and enforce. Did she not emit at least a polite cough? If she did not, she was uncharacteristically negligent. "And if she did murmur something, why did Ingham choose not to record it? Sir Bernard is, alas, unable to help us with anything. He has no memory of the meeting." Evans also took issue with the wording of the note by Ingham about the meeting, which he suggested was written carefully in case it was leaked or emerged in posterity. "Ingham's 'note for the record' reeks of cover-up in triplicate," he said. "It bears some parsing." At the time of Murdoch's proposed takeover of the Times, Evans had expected that Murdoch's bid would be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission because of his ownership of the Sun and News of the World. When it was not, he and many commentators at the time suspected there had been a political fix.

http://www.dailymail...on-Inquiry.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2134850/Rupert-Murdoch-sends-60k-emails-US-detectives-investigating-phone-hacking.html

Leveson: Murdoch hints that hacking crisis could spread to US Rupert Murdoch has given the biggest hint to date that the phone-hacking crisis could spread to his US interests. News Corporation Chief Executive and Chairman, Rupert Murdoch, gives evidence at the Leveson Inquiry By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter The Telegraph 12:02PM BST 25 Apr 2012 In his witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry, he discloses that “evidence of alleged or suspected illegality” by News International staff is being passed to investigators from the US Department of Justice. Earlier this month, Mark Lewis, the lawyer representing dozens of hacking victims, travelled to America where he said he was representing at least three people who believe their phones were hacked on US soil. Any criminal action against News Corporation in the US would be hugely costly both in terms of financial outlay and reputational damage. It would also bring the criminal investigations closer to Mr Murdoch’s door, as he is based in the US. Last year the FBI launched an investigation into whether any News Corporation companies accessed voicemails of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Department of Justice is looking into possible breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices ActIn his witness statement, Mr Murdoch gives details of the working of News International’s Management and Standards Committee, which was set up partly to provide police with any relevant evidence of phone-hacking. He says: “Since July 2011, the MSC, working with a legal team, has actively cooperated with the Metropolitan Police as well as with the United States Department of Justice, turning over evidence of alleged or suspected illegality, and responding to all requests for information. “This has led to the arrests of a number of NI employees. Our cooperation is continuing to date.” Mr Murdoch repeats his comment, made to the Parliamentary culture, media and sport select committee last year, that he had been “humbled by the events of the past year” and “with the wisdom of hindsight, I have learned that even experienced and long serving members of staff can fail to meet their responsibilities”. He adds: “All of us regret that some of our colleagues fell far short of what is expected of them. I feel great personal regret that we did not respond more quickly or effectively. “This company has been my life’s work, and I feel a strong sense of responsibility for everything we do and fail to do.”

Jeremy Hunt visited News Corp in US as Murdochs considered BSkyB bid James Murdoch told David Cameron News Corp would support Tories soon after Hunt's US trip in 2009, documents reveal By David Leigh and Vikram Dodd guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 25 April 2012 11.11 EDT Jeremy Hunt spent five days in the US holding meetings with News Corp at the same point Rupert and James Murdoch were first deciding whether to bid for Sky, official documents reveal. Almost immediately after Hunt's trip, James Murdoch visited David Cameron in London, and privately told him that News Corp had agreed to switch support to the Tories in the upcoming election. Hunt then became culture secretary in the victorious Tory government. Hunt's officials at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) declined to comment on what Hunt had been doing at News Corp's headquarters during the August 2009 visit, which was disclosed in the register of members' interests later that year. But the timing of the visit was thrown into focus on Tuesday when James Murdoch revealed that this was the moment his company was weighing up whether it could overcome the likely obstacles to a takeover bid for the share of Sky it did not already own. James Murdoch told the Leveson inquiry: "I remember there was a meeting in the summertime about it in Los Angeles, in sort of August, but that was sort of where it was coming – starting to come together, thinking: would it be possible to do that?" Critics of the bid are now questioning whether this could be the moment that News Corporation was given the political green light to proceed. On 30 August, Hunt, then the Tories' culture spokesman, left for New York. He declares on his register of interests that he funded the trip with £4,000 taken from donations to his office by John Lewis, a wealthy lawyer and businessman, a regular supporter. The donations paid for flights for two and accommodation. Hunt did not reveal who he saw at News Corp's headquarters. His register entry says: "Purpose of visit: to look into local media ventures. Meetings with representatives of News Corp (including Wall Street Journal), Fox Five and WNET." Hunt returned from the US on 4 September 2009. Six days later, James Murdoch, who was in charge of the as yet unannounced Sky bid, met Cameron, then leader of the opposition, at the discreet George Club in Mayfair, and gave him the news that the Sun would switch its support to the Conservatives. Labour politicians, who are calling for Hunt's resignation over his secret links with Murdoch during the bid process, are likely to see the timing of his 2009 visit to News Corp as more evidence of a link between the Sky bid and the Sun's switch of political allegiance. They are now calling on Hunt to declare whether or not he discussed the Sky bid or the likelihood of Tory support for it during his visit. The Labour MP Tom Watson, a member of the culture, media and sport select committee, said Hunt's journey to the US was suspicious: "After the James Murdoch revelations, this points the finger of suspicion at this particular trip. "What was discussed, who did Jeremy Hunt meet? "If the possibility of the BSkyB bid was discussed at any point, did Mr Hunt declare this to MPs in the chamber? Who did he go with? "Leveson will see this as a disastrous piece of timing and the inquiry is allowing people to join the dots about the web of connections spun by Rupert Murdoch's News International." In the weeks that followed Hunt's trip to visit News Corp in the US there was a flurry of activity. James Murdoch used his MacTaggart lecture on 28 August in the UK to publicise a set of demands that were in the commercial interests of News Corp's UK broadcasting interests. Without disclosing that News Corp was planning after the election to launch a bid to take over the whole of BSkyB, he called for the power of media regulators to be reduced. He said: "A radical reorientation of the regulatory approach is necessary if dynamism and innovation is going to be central to the UK media industry. Intervention should only happen on the evidence of actual and serious harm to the interests of consumers: not merely because a regulator armed with a set of prejudices and a spreadsheet believes that a bit of tinkering here and there could make the world a better place." He added that the BBC was "dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market". The next day he said the licence fee must be cut and the BBC made "much, much smaller". And in what appeared to be a deliberate piece of timing to inflict maximum damage on the then Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, the announcement of the switch was delayed until 30 September, when Brown was due to make his party conference speech. Rupert Murdoch apparently had breakfast with Cameron on that morning, according to the News Corp evidence submitted to Leveson, and he would have been able to see the Murdochs' handiwork on that morning's Sun front page. Rupert Murdoch disputed this to Leveson on Wednesday, saying: "I wasn't here on the day we came out for the Tories." A spokesman for the DCMS declined to answer questions, saying: "He [Hunt] made a statement yesterday and we're not adding to it. We're not commenting." Asked if he was prepared to take questions, the spokesman said: "No, we're not adding to the statement."

Michael Moore predicts phone-hacking scandal will spread to Fox News Documentary film-maker has 'gut feeling' investigations will reveal phone hacking at Murdoch subsidiary Fox News By Ben Child guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 11.18 BST The film-maker Michael Moore has suggested that the phone-hacking scandal at News International may spread to US subsidiary Fox News while speaking at a film festival event in New York. Moore, a long-term critic of the rightwing cable channel, said he found it hard to believe that the practice could be limited to the media conglomerate's UK businesses. UK Sunday newspaper the News of the World, which is owned by News International, was closed in July after 168 years in print after phone hacking was found to be widespread there. "I'm interested to see what happens with Fox News and phone hacking," said Moore during an onstage conversation with actor Susan Sarandon at the Tribeca film festival on Sunday. "I really can't believe it just happens in Great Britain. Because really, who cares about just hacking phones over there? "I'll make a prediction about something — I think the phone-hacking thing Murdoch is involved in ... is going to be investigated, and it will be found that it's been going on here too," said the documentary film-maker. "I just have a gut feeling." So far there is no evidence to suggest that the phone-hacking scandal has spread to News International's US businesses, and Moore did not offer any to back up his claims. British prosecutors have raised the prospect of bringing legal proceedings in the US if British citizens' phones are found to have been hacked while they were on American soil, and several US politicians have called for investigations into suggestions that the company hacked the phones of 9/11 victims. Moore and Sarandon, who is also known for her liberal leanings, both said they believed themselves to be under surveillance by US government agencies. "I've gotten my [FBI] file twice," Sarandon said. "I know my phone was tapped. If they're not surveilling you, then everyone else has cameras on phones. I was denied security clearance to go to the White House [next week], and I don't know why." Moore replied: "I never think about it. It would unwind me. I assume everything I'm saying in an email or saying on the telephone is being looked at."

NY Daily News editor Colin Myler under scrutiny over NoW allegations Allegations made that Myler, when News of the World editor, told reporters to dig for dirt on MPs investigating phone hacking By Ed Pilkington and Dominic Rushe in New York guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 09.40 EDT Colin Myler was editor of the News of the World from 2007 until it closed in July last year. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty Images Colin Myler's editorship of the New York Daily News, one of the most prominent newspapers in America, has come under renewed scrutiny following allegations that he attempted to intimidate members of the UK parliament investigating phone hacking at the News of the World at the time he led the now-defunct tabloid. Media monitoring groups and experts in journalistic ethics in America have described the allegations raised against Myler as "horrifying" and "abhorrent". New York magazine has also published a 5,000-word profile of Myler in its current issue, putting a spotlight onto Myler within the US media that he has assiduously tried to avoid – until now with relative success. Myler was the final editor of the News of the World from 2007 until it closed last July. In January he was appointed editor-in-chief of the New York Daily News, a job that puts him on the high table of American journalists. Media monitors in the US have reacted to claims that Myler attempted to bully British MPs investigating the News of the World as anathema to journalistic standards in the US. Eric Boehlert, senior fellow of the progressive watchdog Media Matters, said that the allegation "would put any American newspaper editor in a very uncomfortable position. Anything like it would be seen as completely horrifying and beyond the realm of responsible journalism". Edward Wasserman, Knight Foundation professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, said that if the allegations were correct, it was "such a transparent breach of ethics in that it's hard to imagine the very idea even being discussed in a US newsroom. Even the most politically zealous journalist would find it abhorrent." In his position as editor of the News of the World, Myler is alleged to have instructed a team of six reporters to dig for dirt on every member of the Commons culture select committee that at a time was investigating phone hacking at the British tabloid. Reporters were asked to find out if any of the members had had illicit affairs or were gay. The allegations were made last week by Tom Watson, a Labour MP who has been at the forefront of the exposure of phone hacking and other illegal activities within Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers. At the launch of his new co-authored book, Dial M for Murdoch, Watson said he had been told of Myler's attempted intimidation of MPs by Neville Thurlbeck, former chief reporter at the News of the World. Thurlbeck later confirmed that reporters had been asked to monitor committee members, but added that he had "no evidence" that it had come from the editor's office. Colin Myler declined to comment on the accusations. Mort Zuckerman, the business tycoon who owns the New York Daily News and and who brought Myler across the Atlantic to lead it, also declined to comment on whether the new allegations cast doubt on the wisdom of the appointment. In the New York magazine profile of Myler, Zuckerman tells writer Steve Fishman that he had no qualms about Myler's role in the phone-hacking scandal. "He's not involved," Zuckerman said. Watson's new book may not be the last time that Myler faces serious allegations arising from his tenure as News of the World editor. Discrepancies in his evidence to parliament over phone hacking could feature in the final report of the culture select committee that MPs are currently completing. In July 2009, when he was still News of the World editor, Myler appeared before the culture select committee and told MPs that he had personally supervised a trawl through thousands of emails and had found no evidence that phone hacking went beyond a single "rogue" reporter at the newspaper. Yet it has since been revealed that more than a year previously, in May 2008, Myler had engaged in internal correspondence with the News of the World's lawyer Tom Crone, in which Crone made clear that other reporters had also been involved in hacking and that illegal activities were far more widespread. MPs will also need to consider apparent contradictions in evidence given to the committee by Myler and Crone, on the one hand, and James Murdoch, former chairman of the UK newspaper group News International, on the other. Last November, James Murdoch openly disputed the testimony that Myler and Crone had given the committee. Murdoch told MPs that contrary to what Myler and Crone had told parliament, the pair had failed to inform him of wider illegality at the paper. "I believe their testimony was misleading and I dispute it," he said. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's project for excellence in journalism, said it was not clear how the new allegations surrounding Myler would affect his New York position. Rosenstiel said he was struck by how the phone-hacking scandal had "remained a British scandal despite the size of News Corp operations over here."

Ofcom to investigate Sky News over 'canoe man' email hacking By Mark Sweney guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 06.37 EDT Media regulator Ofcom to investigate whether Sky News broke broadcasting rules in using hacked emails for John Darwin story Sky News has already admitted that a senior executive authorised a journalist to hack 'canoe man' John Darwin’s email ‘in the public interest’. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images Ofcom is to launch an investigation into a Sky News journalist's hacking of emails belonging to John Darwin, the "canoe man" accused of faking his own death. The media regulator said that it is investigating whether Sky News has broken broadcasting rules relating to fairness and privacy after using the hacked emails as the basis of story published on the web and aired on the news channel. Earlier this month Sky News admitted that one of its senior executives had authorised a journalist to conduct email hacking on two separate occasions that it said were in the public interest – even though intercepting emails is a prima facie breach of the Computer Misuse Act, to which there is no such defence written in law. Ofcom's investigation centres on rule 8.1 of the broadcasting code, which states that broadcasters must follow a series of standards and principles to avoid the unwarranted infringement of privacy in connection with how material to be used in broadcasts is obtained. "Ofcom is investigating the fairness and privacy issues raised by Sky News' statement that it had accessed without prior authorisation private email accounts during the course of its news investigations," said a spokesman for the regulator. "We will make the outcome known in due course." A spokeswoman for the broadcaster said: "As the head of Sky News John Ryley said earlier this month, we stand by these actions as editorially justified … The Crown Prosecution Service acknowledges that there are rare occasions where it is justified for a journalist to commit an offence in the public interest. The director of public prosecutions Kier Starmer told the Leveson inquiry that 'considerable public interest weight' is given to journalistic conduct which discloses that a criminal offence has been committed and/or concealed." Sky News also pointed out that section 8.1 of the broadcasting code contains an explanation about how a broadcaster can justify a privacy infringement if it believes there is a public interest defence. Section 8.1 of the code states: "Where broadcasters wish to justify an infringement of privacy as warranted, they should be able to demonstrate why in the particular circumstances of the case, it is warranted … If the reason is that it is in the public interest, then the broadcaster should be able to demonstrate that the public interest outweighs the right to privacy. Examples of public interest would include revealing or detecting crime … " Sky News believes this defence applies in the case of John Darwin. Gerard Tubb, the broadcaster's northern England correspondent, accessed emails belonging to Darwin when his wife Anne was due to stand trial for deception in July 2008. The reporter built up a database of emails that he believed would help defeat Anne Darwin's defence. Her husband had pleaded guilty to seven charges of deception before her trial. Tubb later produced a story for the Sky News channel and website in which he quoted from emails that had been written by Darwin to his wife and to a lawyer. The broadcaster also published a voicemail message on its website, dated 19 May 2007, in which Anne Darwin is clearly heard leaving a message for her husband. Sky News has defended its actions arguing that police were made aware of the source of the material and that running the stories was justified in the public interest.

Secret Service scandal: Rising supervisor set uncovering of misconduct in motion By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura, Published: April 21, 2012 Washington Post Paula Reid, the new Secret Service boss for the South American region, was in Cartagena preparing for the president’s visit when she received an urgent report: A prostitute, upset because she had not been paid by a Secret Service agent, had created a disturbance in a nearby hotel, knocking on doors and yelling in the hallways at daybreak. With roughly 24 hours left until President Obama was due to arrive in the Colombian town, the 46-year-old Calvert County native instructed her staff to swoop into the Hotel Caribe at midday April 12 and inspect hotel registration records for all Secret Service employees. Reid, who had been staying at a nearby hotel, swiftly rounded up 11 agents and officers and ordered them out of the country. She alerted her superiors that she found early evidence of “egregious” misconduct involving prostitutes and set in motion the public uncovering of the most wide-reaching scandal at the agency in decades, according to government officials involved in the case. It fell to Reid, recently promoted to head the prestigious Miami office, to ride herd on a rowdy group of male colleagues, including two who were assigned to supervise the group, the morning after a drunken bender, according to the officials. While details about the scandal and the men who took the prostitutes to their rooms are now well documented, less is known about the role played by one of the agency’s highest-ranking African Americans in the decision, with the clock ticking, to replace them on an assignment for which there is no room for error. For Reid, the moment was not without risk, opening her to a potential internal backlash for ruining the men’s careers and, once the news became known, embarrassing an agency that prides itself on maintaining a stoic public face. Officials familiar with the probe said Reid had Director Mark Sullivan’s endorsement as she took swift steps to handle the matter, and that he gave the final decision to remove the agents. But some service members said another senior manager might have been less aggressive. Those who know Reid said the move revealed a steely resolve that has marked her 21-year rise through the ranks of an agency whose macho reputation has again come under scrutiny. Her story offers a counterbalance to critics who contend the Secret Service has been slow to clean up its act from the “Mad Men”-era days when some agents joked that their off-duty mantra was “wheels up, rings off.” Not that Reid, an intensely private person, would admit it. In an interview, she offered few new details of her role, sticking to what colleagues described as her businesslike approach. “I am confident that as an agency we’ll determine exactly what happened and take appropriate action,” she said in the interview with her and an agency spokesman. “Despite this current challenge facing the Secret Service, my job is to keep Miami personnel focused on our core protective and investigative missions. Anything less is counterproductive to the many critical functions we perform each day.” Reid is still in the thick of it, assisting in the investigation. Those who have worked with her since she joined the Secret Service in 1990 described her as well suited for the challenge. One former agent who worked with Reid in Miami during her previous stint in that bureau said she was exacting in the extreme, able to quote the agency administrative manual the way “fundamentalists quote the Bible.” This ex-colleague said that he did not always agree with her management approach but that he respected her work ethic and ability. “If every boss was Paula Reid, the Secret Service would never have a problem,” the former agent said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a former colleague. “It would be a lot more boring, but never a problem.” Reid has never married. She describes herself as very close to her siblings, including her twin sister, and her family, most of whom still live in the Maryland suburbs. Tall and lean, Reid is regularly seen at the gym at 5:30 in the morning and at her desk by 7 a.m. She is always serious when on the job, the former agent said. After growing up in Calvert County, Reid graduated from the University of Maryland. She joined the Secret Service at age 25 after visiting an NAACP job fair that sought to encourage minority applicants for law enforcement jobs. According to a promotional interview years later that Reid granted to help recruit more female agents, she studied criminal justice in college and was debating whether to go to law school or become an investigator when she chose the service. “I can’t imagine not being in law enforcement,” she said then, according to the interview, published in an online newsletter, Women for Hire. Reid’s time in the agency has not been rosy throughout. Ten years after entering the service at the bottom rung, she joined as a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that claimed the agency engaged in racial discrimination against African American personnel. She provided a declaration giving examples of ways black agents were relegated to lesser assignments. In the broader suit, some of the plaintiffs contended that senior managers had often used racial epithets to describe criminal suspects but were not reprimanded for their comments. She eventually withdrew from the case, which continues but has since dwindled to a smaller number of plaintiffs. Still, as a black woman, Reid stood out in a mostly white-male agency. “The general public is intrigued to see a black female in my position,” she said in the Women for Hire interview. “They always need to confirm that I really am a special agent. I enjoy being a role model for women and minorities.” In a 1997 USA Today interview about the Secret Service’s desire to recruit more female agents, Reid was quoted as saying that when she and male agents were working together on an assignment, their managers would usually ignore her in favor of her male counterparts. Until the perception of agents as big, bulky men changes, Reid said at the time, women have to “learn not to take it personally.” Whatever the challenges, Reid has earned a steady stream of promotions. After spending time as a special agent on the presidential protective detail, Reid joined management as a supervisor in the Miami field office in 2004, overseeing administrative duties. In 2007, she was summoned back to Washington, where she had two prominent jobs in the next four years. She was special agent in charge of the protective intelligence and assessment division, which ensures that threats to the president and other officials are identified and carefully monitored, and she was deputy special agent in charge of the presidential protective division, overseeing the White House complex and access to it in the middle of Obama’s term. That included overseeing protection for the East Wing, coordinating events and regular contact with first lady Michelle Obama and her family. Reid’s most recent promotion, this year, was to the highly coveted position of top boss of the Miami office, a division of more than 150 employees that oversees the South America region and rivals the Los Angeles and New York offices in prestige among national bureaus. Her move prompted grumbling among some longer-serving white supervisors that she was unqualified, according to people with knowledge of the situation, including a former agent who left recently. A lot of the “good old boys” were not happy, said the former agent, who, because of the sensitive nature of personnel decisions, asked not to be identified. This month, Reid headed to Cartagena to serve as liaison between the dozens of agents and officers representing several divisions of the Secret Service and the other local governments and U.S. agencies involved in preparing for the president’s visit, Secret Service officials said. Even under ideal circumstances, such a job is a headache of tight scheduling within a vast operation that includes several hundred personnel in a foreign country. But some said they could have predicted — before Reid took the call that set in motion the frantic chain of events ahead of Obama’s arrival in Cartagena — that this is how she would have performed. “She’s the ultimate boss for that whole region,” one agent said. “You did it in her house, so you better know she’s going to come down hard.” Staff writer Ed O’Keefe and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Chuck Colson dies at 80: Nixon aide, Watergate scandal figure became an evangelist By Michael Dobbs, Washington Post April 21, 2012 Charles W. Colson, the Republican political operative who boasted he would “walk over my own grandmother” to ensure the reelection of President Richard M. Nixon and went on to found a worldwide prison fellowship ministry after his conversion to evangelical Christianity, died April 21 Inova Fairfax Hospital. He was 80. The death, after a brain hemorrhage earlier this month, was confirmed by a family spokeswoman, Michelle Farmer. Mr. Colson was a resident of Naples, Fla., but maintained an apartment in the Leesburg area. Mr. Colson’s reputation as a “dirty tricks artist” overshadowed his achievements as a darkly brilliant political strategist. He had helped lay the groundwork for the Nixon landslide of November 1972 by appealing to disgruntled Democrats and blue-collar minority voters. A self-described “hatchet man” for Nixon, Mr. Colson compiled the notorious “enemies list” of politicians, journalists and activists perceived as threats to the White House. And most fatefully, he helped orchestrate illegal activities to discredit former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg, who was suspected of leaking a top-secret history of the Vietnam War to the New York Times and The Washington Post. It was the targeting of Ellsberg — rather than Mr. Colson’s peripheral involvement in the growing Watergate break-in scandal — that eventually led to his conviction for obstruction of justice. In the midst of this crisis, Mr. Colson said he underwent a profound religious transformation in August 1973. Acting against the advice of his lawyers, Mr. Colson pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, a step that he depicted as “a price I had to pay to complete the shedding of my old life and to be free to live the new.” Released from prison on parole in January 1975, after seven months in a minimum-security facility, Mr. Colson became a leading voice in the evangelical movement and advocate for prison reform. The need for such work, he said, was drawn from what he called his frightening experience in confinement. Prison, he said, was filled with embittered inmates who contemplated escape and revenge at every turn. “He transferred his huge drive, intellect and maniacal energy from the service of Richard Nixon to the service of Jesus Christ,” said his biographer, Jonathan Aitken, a former British government minister who endured a similar journey of political disgrace and personal redemption following a 1999 conviction for perjury. Mr. Colson’s autobiography, “Born Again,” first published in 1976, sold millions of copies over the years. In 1993, he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize, worth more than $1 million, which is given each year to the person who has done the most to advance the cause of religion. Outwardly, Mr. Colson remained recognizably the same person before and after his conversion. Even toward the end of his life, he retained the same amused expression in his heavily wrinkled face. His crumpled look, fondness for blazers and striped ties, and talent for incisive repartee gave him the appearance of an overgrown New England prep-school boy, but also masked one of the traits he shared with Nixon: an outsider self-image. Delighted in defying convention Born Oct. 16, 1931, in Boston, Charles Wendell Colson was the only child of Wendell Colson and Inez “Dizzy” Colson. Hard work and upward striving were central to the family ethic. His father got a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission by attending law school at night, which in turn made it possible to send their son Chuck to attend the Browne & Nichols prep school in Cambridge. Although he was educated alongside the children of the New England elite, the young Charles Colson took delight in defying convention. He claimed he refused a full scholarship to Harvard, a decision an admissions officer told him no one had ever made before. He went to Brown University, where he became a champion debater and leader of the Young Republicans, and later earned a law degree from George Washington University. In June 1953, immediately after graduating with distinction from Brown, Mr. Colson joined the Marine Corps and married Nancy Billings. They divorced in 1963, leaving her with custody of the two younger children, Christian and Emily. The eldest child, Wendell, stayed with Mr. Colson. In 1964, Mr. Colson married Patricia Ann Hughes, a secretary on the staff of Leverett Saltonstall, the senior senator for Massachusetts. There were no children from this marriage, which lasted until Mr. Colson’s death. Besides his wife, survivors include his three children and five grandchildren. A moderate Republican, Saltonstall gave Mr. Colson his first big break in politics, hiring the young lawyer as his administrative assistant in 1956. Working for Saltonstall provided Mr. Colson with opportunities to meet then-Vice President Nixon. In an oral history interview for the Nixon library, Mr. Colson said he was impressed by Nixon’s conservative ideals and “wonderful mind.” “I was dazzled by the man,” he said. The rising political operative was also in regular touch with the Massachusetts junior senator, John F. Kennedy, who “showed me some of the tricks of the trade.” During the 1960 election, Mr. Colson set up a bogus committee that urged voters to elect “Kennedy and Saltonstall,” rather than the Republican ticket of “Nixon and Saltonstall.” It proved to be an effective strategy: After starting way behind, Saltonstall was reelected. “We mailed every Irish name we could find in the phone book,” Mr. Colson recalled. “That was my introduction to politics. It was baptism by fire.” He switched his allegiance back to Nixon in 1964, writing a long memo that described how the defeated Republican candidate of 1960 could make a political comeback. Nixon responded by inviting Mr. Colson to New York for a strategy session. Although he eventually decided not to run in 1964, he viewed Mr. Colson as “fresh blood” and invited him to join the 1968 campaign. ‘I was the loose cannon’ Mr. Colson moved to the White House after Nixon’s election victory as special counsel to the president and a counterweight to the “Berlin Wall” of H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Mr. Colson’s primary job was to form ties with outside groups, going around the mainstream media to assemble a “new populist majority,” but Nixon came to rely on the former Marine captain to cut through the bureaucracy and get things done. “I was the loose cannon,” Mr. Colson recalled, adding that the president “would give me things to do, and Haldeman would never know it. He was threatened.” In his autobiography, “The Ends of Power,” Haldeman wrote that Mr. Colson “encouraged the dark impulses in Nixon’s mind and acted on those impulses instead of ignoring them and letting them die.” Former press secretary Ron Ziegler complained that Mr. Colson “would take an off-the-cuff Nixon instruction literally and implement it.” Mr. Colson was proud of his reputation for political ruthlessness, summed up by a Green Beret slogan that he affixed to the den of his McLean house: “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” Eager to demonstrate his loyalty to Nixon, he confirmed the accuracy of the “walk over my grandmother” quote in an August 1972 memo to his staff that was quickly leaked to the press. In his August 2007 Nixon library interview, Mr. Colson recalled that Nixon once described him as the son he never had, and added, “I felt the same emotional bond with him.” “There were other times I brought out the dark side of Nixon,” he acknowledged. “You did not have to work very hard to bring it out. It was always close to the surface. . . . His first reaction was to fight back, to get even with people.” But he insisted that Haldeman and others shared the blame. “What [Nixon] needed was people who would give him a more measured reaction.” Missions that Mr. Colson undertook for the president ranged from leaking damaging and untrue rumors about Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns to tracking down a photograph of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) dancing with a starlet in Paris. Most fatefully of all, he eagerly agreed to Nixon’s order to blacken the reputation of former Pentagon official Ellsberg, who was suspected of the Pentagon Papers leak. “Get Colson in,” Nixon instructed his chief of staff in a taped meeting in the Oval Office on June 17, 1971. “He’s the best. It’s the Colson type of man that you need.” To assist him in the job of “nailing” Ellsberg, Mr. Colson recruited a retired CIA operative and novelist named E. Howard Hunt, a former Brown University classmate. Hunt teamed up with former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy and a group of right-wing Cuban emigres to burglarize the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and plan a fire at the Brookings Institution in Washington as a decoy for recovering leaked government documents. The same team broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington in June 1972, triggering the scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation two years later. On this occasion, however, Mr. Colson’s involvement was tangential. He had phoned the Committee to Re-elect the President in February 1972, urging approval for an unspecified “intelligence program” proposed by Liddy and Hunt but did not have an operational role in the Watergate break-in. “He was too smart to do anything as silly as Watergate, although he was responsible for the initial hiring of Hunt,” said Aitken. Nevertheless, Mr. Colson’s reputation as a “dirty tricks” specialist led to his resignation from the White House staff in March 1973. Conversion to evangelical Christianity In June 1974, Mr. Colson pled guilty to a single charge of “disseminating derogatory information to the press” about Ellsberg while he was a criminal defendant. He was sentenced to one to three years imprisonment. Mr. Colson attributed his guilty plea to his conversion to evangelical Christianity on the night of Aug. 12, 1973, by a close friend, Thomas L. Phillips, then-chairman of the defense contractor Raytheon, and the powerful influence of a book by C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity.” Mr. Colson said another turning point in his faith was a probing interview in May 1974 conducted by Mike Wallace of the CBS News program “60 Minutes.” Wallace asked about the “morality” of working for a White House engaged in intimidation and smear campaigns and asked whether Mr. Colson was truly living up his Christian beliefs. Mr. Colson later described feeling gradually “stripped and broken” of his old combative habits and decided not to fight the criminal charges any longer, despite urging by his family to beat the lawsuit and return to a “normal” life. “Hubris became the mark of the Nixon man because hubris was the quality Nixon admired most,” Mr. Colson wrote in “Born Again.” He added that he “was willing at times to blink at certain ethical standards” because “ ‘Chuck will get it done’ was the phrase I so loved to hear in the White House.” News of his rebirth was greeted with skepticism and even hilarity by many columnists, including the humorist Art Buchwald, who imagined a prayer session between Mr. Colson and the grandmother he once vowed to run over in the process of helping Nixon. “Shall we kneel together?” Mr. Colson asked. “Not me,” his grandmother replied. “I haven’t been able to kneel since you screamed at me, ‘Four more years’ and then put your Oldsmobile into drive.” According to Aitken, doubts about the sincerity of Mr. Colson’s conversion were put to rest by his subsequent actions on behalf of prisoners around the world. The Prison Fellowship Ministries founded by Mr. Colson in the United States in 1976 grew into a worldwide movement with branches in more than 110 different countries. It is now based in the Loudoun County community of Lansdowne. “Look at the incredible good he has done,” said Aitken. “He completely changed the face of faith-based caring for prisoners and offenders, not just in America, but across the world.” In addition to befriending prisoners and converting them to Christianity, Mr. Colson established a rehabilitation program that aimed to cut the recidivism rate. He publicly opposed the death penalty and called for alternatives to incarceration, particularly for non-violent offenders, who make up a significant portion of the prison population. Leading Republican politicians including President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain of Arizona cited Mr. Colson’s work with prisoners as evidence that faith-based initiatives can help to solve America’s most intractable problems. Bush invited Mr. Colson to the White House in June 2003 to present the results of a scientific study by a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Byron Johnson, that concluded that participants in Prison Fellowship programs were much less likely to return to prison than other former inmates. Other experts have questioned the validity of such studies and caution against drawing sweeping conclusions. “There is a self-selection problem,” said Allen Beck, a criminologist who has served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Justice and several state prison systems. “The inmates who sign up for such programs tend to people who are a relatively good risk in the first place. Trying to ascertain cause and effect is very difficult.” Mr. Colson remained on good terms with Nixon and visited him at the president’s home in San Clemente, Calif., following his release from prison. He recalled that Nixon seemed unaware why he had gone to prison. When Mr. Colson explained that he had been convicted for distributing derogatory information about Ellsberg, Nixon interjected, “but I told you to do that.” Both men roared with laughter. Asked whether he felt “disappointment” with Nixon, Mr. Colson replied: “Sure, of course, but I also understood the man. Families disappoint one another sometimes, but you are still family.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2132229/Last-surviving-FBI-agent-JFK-autopsy-did-believe-single-bullet-theory-dies.html

Leveson inquiry: Rupert and James Murdoch to give evidence next week News Corp chairman will face phone hacking questions on Wednesday, while his son will appear on Tuesday By Jason Deans guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 11.40 EDT Rupert Murdoch is to give evidence to the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics next week, with a day and a half set aside for the News Corporation founder. Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp, is due to give evidence on Wednesday, continuing on Thursday morning if necessary. His son James, the News Corp deputy chief operating officer and former chairman of the company's UK newspaper business News International, has been allocated a full day on Tuesday for his witness appearance. Murdoch and his son are based in New York, where News Corp has its headquarters, but will be travelling to London to answer questions from Lord Justice Leveson and his legal team in court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice. The Leveson inquiry, set up by prime minister David Cameron following the phone-hacking scandal that led to the closure of the News of the World in July 2011, has heard from more than 100 witnesses since evidence hearings began in November. Witnesses have included victims of alleged press intrusion, journalists, editors, media executives, police officers and chief constables. However, up to now none have been given a full day, or more, to give evidence by Leveson. The Murdochs appeared together before MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee to answer questions about News of the World phone-hacking at the height of the scandal in July last year. That grilling lasted about three hours, including an unscheduled break after a UK Uncut activist threw a paper plate of shaving foam at Rupert Murdoch. Also giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry next week, on Monday, will be Aidan Barclay, chairman of Daily Telegraph publisher Telegraph Media Group, and Evgeny Lebedev, the son of Russian businessman Alexander Lebedev, who runs his London-based papers the Independent and London Evening Standard

Phone hacking: News International faces nearly 50 new claims Civil claimants now include Sir John Major's former daughter-in-law, Lord Blencathra and former union leader Andy Gilchrist By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk,Friday 20 April 2012 07.31 EDT The number of new civil claims for damages over alleged News of the World phone hacking faced by Rupert Murdoch's News International has reached nearly 50, including Sir John Major's former daughter-in-law Emma Noble, the high court has heard. Others seeking damages for alleged invasion of privacy from News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that published the now-closed Sunday tabloid, include former Conservative cabinet minister and chief whip Lord Blencathra and former Fire Brigades Union general secretary Andy Gilchrist. At a case management conference at the high court in London on Friday, Hugh Tomlinson, QC, representing victims of alleged phone hacking, told Mr Justice Vos that he had 44 new cases filed while two others had submitted their claims via another legal representative. It is expected that up to 200 new claims will be filed over the coming months, Tomlinson told the court in a previous hearing. The cases are part of a second wave of civil actions which Vos is managing following the settlement of more than 50 cases earlier this year including claims by Jude Law, Charlotte Church and Lord Prescott. Tomlinson did not disclose the names of the claimants, but court papers show that new cases submitted to the high court in the past week include claims by Noble, the model and actor who was married to Major's son James for five years up to 2004. Tomlinson told the court that News International had received 100 requests for discovery of preliminary disclosure. He said there were 4,791 potential phone-hacking victims, of which 1,892 had been contacted by the police. The police believed 1,174 were "likely victims". Court 30 in the Rolls Building of the high court was packed, with more than 50 law firms acting for victims. Vos said there were 58 firms of solicitors representing only 100 victims, which he told Tomlinson was "unbelievable". The judge added that he wanted to ensure costs are reduced for claimants. "Many of them have seen the light and have instructed lawyers who have specialist knowledge of this case," said Vos. He suggested possible tariffs of costs for each element of the legal action. This would mean fresh claimants could access to information relating to the News of the World's phone-hacking activity already produced on discovery in earlier cases, without incurring the costs associated with a full action. "I will have no sympathy for outrageous cost estimates," he said. Public figures including Cherie Blair, the wife of the former Labour prime minister, Alex Best, the wife of the ex-Manchester United footballer George Best, have already filed lawsuits, and the man wrongly accused of murdering Rachel Nickell, Colin Stagg. Others who have filed claims include comedian Bobby Davro, actor Tina Hobley, TV personalities Jamie Theakston and Jeff Brazier, former boxer Chris Eubank, and footballers Peter Crouch, Kieron Dyer and Jermaine Jenas.

Don't fail to listen to George McGovern's audio on right side of the first page that comes up when the link is clicked.

Phone Hacking Charges May Be Brought Against News Corp. In U.S. Posted: 04/19/2012 5:20 pm Updated: 04/19/2012 7:41 pm Huffingtonpost.com NEW YORK -- The News of the World phone-hacking scandal that exploded in England last summer with a spate of arrests, resignations and several ongoing investigations has remained mostly on that side of the Atlantic. But that could change if Mark Lewis, the British lawyer who has represented several phone hacking victims in the U.K. and who recently teamed up with two Manhattan-based attorneys, decides to file suits stateside on behalf of clients who believe their phones were hacked while on U.S. soil. On Thursday, Lewis, sitting alongside New York attorneys Norman Siegel and Steve Hyman, discussed the possibility of bringing hacking-related suits against Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. in the U.S., the headquarters of a worldwide media juggernaut. Lewis, who gained prominence for his pursuit of high-profile hacking cases across the pond, arrived in the U.S. for the Monday meeting with Siegel amid some media fanfare, including a New York Times profile. As a result of that meeting, Siegel said Thursday that there's "a reasonable basis for the proposition that three of [Lewis's] clients may have been victims of telephone hacking while they were in the United States." Lewis later confirmed he has a fourth client who may also opt to file suit in the U.S. "It's inevitable that people in America would contact people in England and people in England would contact people in America," Lewis told reporters. "It's therefore the case that amongst the victims of the English phone hacking that there will be some, either American victims or people who are European who were in America at the time that they were hacked." Siegel stressed that Thursday's meeting, which included roughly two-dozen reporters and several cameramen, was a press availability rather than a formal news conference -- an important distinction, given that the lawyers weren't willing to divulge several details of possible U.S. hacking suits. Indeed, Lewis declined to name his clients and Siegel said he wouldn't set any timeline for filing since such deadlines are "arbitrary" and only add "unnecessary stress and pressure." Currently, the lawyers say they are investigating to determine which side of the Atlantic would be best for each of Lewis' four clients, one of whom is known to be a U.S. citizen, to pursue legal action. Lewis said important factors to consider include whether it's more convenient to pursue cases in a client's home country or if there's an advantage to filing in the U.S. in terms of obtaining evidence. For instance, Lewis said that if it is deemed necessary to seek information from News Corp. deputy chief operating officer James Murdoch -- the one-time heir apparent who lost much of his clout in the fallout and has since moved from London to New York City -- it could make more sense to pursue cases in the United States. So far, there have been no allegations of phone hacking against Murdoch's U.S. media outlets, such as the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. But since arriving this week, Lewis said he has heard unproven allegations "which raise issues against other [Murdoch] titles or perhaps against Fox News that raise suggestions, not necessarily about hacking, but about untoward dark arts to obtain information that should be private information." Siegel said that he's received calls from six people with claims of hacking in just the past few days and suggested that more people will come forward as the investigation progresses. "What you have to understand is that when this all started in England, this was one person with one case," Lewis said. "And you look at where it is now. So when it starts in America with three cases, it seems natural that you might find there are more than three." A News Corp. spokesperson declined to comment on the lawyers' meeting with the press. But surely the company is paying attention. Lewis has been one of the pivotal figures throughout the entire phone hacking saga, which has lasted nearly six years. He represented soccer executive Gordon Taylor in a 2007 civil suit against News International, the corporation's British newspaper arm, that resulted a record $1.1 million settlement and led to the further unraveling of News Corp's claims that phone hacking at the News of the World was done by only a rogue reporter and private investigator. In pursuing the case against News International, Lewis ended up suing London's Metropolitan Police. In so doing, he obtained the "for Neville" email, a document revealing that hacking spread beyond the reporter, Clive Goodman, and the investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. In 2009, the Guardian reported on the huge Taylor settlement, leading to more questions about what top News Corp. executives, including James Murdoch, knew about the scale of the hacking and coverup. Last summer, the Guardian broke the news that News of the World journalists had hacked the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, a revelation that sparked a national outcry. Lewis won several million dollars for the Dowler family. So far, police have questioned over two-dozen past and present News International employees. The phone hacking scandal, along with subsequent probes into police bribery and computer hacking, has led to the arrests of 43 people, according to the AP. The investigations have also ensnared Murdoch's daily Sun tabloid and his more upmarket Times of London. On Wednesday, Keir Starmer, who serves as Britain's chief prosecutor, said criminal charges are being considered against 11 people. The group, the AP reported, includes "four journalists, one police officer and six other people." As criminal charges appear to be looming on the horizon, News Corp. continues to pay for the phone hacking scandal, which has already cost the company $379 million -- a figure that could rise to $1 billion following more settlements, according to The New York Times. Given Lewis' success in the U.K., Murdoch watchers are looking closely to see if any suits develop in the U.S. London-based media analyst Claire Enders told the Daily Beast last week that "Lewis launching these lawsuits in the U.S. brings the issue of phone hacking into News Corp.’s backyard, where they have the potential for significant embarrassment." Lawsuits aside, the company is still dealing with other U.S. investigations stemming from the phone hacking scandal. Siegel and Hynam, who also represent family members of 9/11 victims, met with both U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and members of the FBI, following an unverified report that the phones of 9/11 victims and their families may have been hacked by employees of News Of The World. There have also been allegations that reporters bribed British police, an act that could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Siegel said that both the FBI and DOJ investigation are ongoing. And back in the U.K., questions remain about who knew what and when. Both Rupert and James Murdoch will give evidence next week before the Leveson inquiry that will address phone hacking and wider media ethics issues

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/22/magazine/winogrand-look.html?hp

Tom Watson: News Corp operated like 'shadow state' Labour MP who led campaign against phone hacking also says News of the World aimed to investigate MPs' private lives By Dan Sabbagh and Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 06.59 EDT News Corporation is a "toxic institution" that operated like a "shadow state" in British society, according to a Labour MP who is the co-author of a new book about the phone-hacking scandal. Tom Watson, joint writer of Dial M for Murdoch, said that the book also featured allegations that Murdoch's News of the World set out to search for "secret lovers" or "extramarital affairs" of MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee in 2009. At a packed press conference, Watson, a member of the Commons culture select committee, said that the surveillance revelation – passed onto him by former News of the World chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck – demonstrated how the Murdoch organisation tried to intimidate parliament. Thurlbeck gave Watson an on-the-record interview, with a witness present, in which he said the then News of the World editor, Colin Myler, told journalists on the Sunday tabloid to "find out everything you can about every single member". At the time the select committee was conducting its second inquiry into phone hacking, in the wake of revelations in the Guardian that the practice went beyond a single "rogue reporter" at the tabloid. The aim was to discover "who was gay, who had affairs, anything we can use," according to Thurlbeck, as quoted in the book. "Each reporter was given two members [MPs] and there were six reporters that went on for around 10 days." Thurlbeck told Watson that the investigations eventually "fell by the wayside" and that "even Ian Edmondson", the then news editor, "realised that there was something quite horrible about doing this". Watson, and his co-author Martin Hickman, an Independent journalist, said that they believed that pressure on MPs at the time influenced the decision not to compel Rebekah Brooks, who was then News International's chief executive, to give evidence before the committee.