The publisher and next editor of The Washington Post used phone and internal company records illegally obtained as a London reporter in newspaper stories, according to a former colleague, a published report by a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.
Washington Post Publisher Will Lewis was responsible for one of these articles when he was business editor of The Sunday Times in 2004. The other was written by Robert Winnett, whom Lewis recently announced as the Post's next editor-in-chief.
The use of deception, hacking and fraud was at the heart of a long-running British newspaper scandal that bankrupted major tabloids in 2010 and led to years of lawsuits by prominent figures who claimed reporters illegally obtained private documents and voicemail messages.
Lewis maintains that his only involvement in the controversy was helping to root out problematic conduct after the fact while working for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
But a former Sunday Times reporter said on Friday that Mr Lewis had personally instructed the story to be written using call records allegedly obtained through hacking in 2004.
After the story broke, a British businessman who was the subject of the article spoke publicly about his records being stolen. Reporter Peter Koenig described Mr. Lewis as a talented editor and one of the best he had worked with. But he said Mr. Lewis had changed over time.
“His ambition outweighed his ethics,” Koenig said.
The second article in 2002 was bylined by Mr Winnett and a private investigator working for The Sunday Times later publicly admitted to committing fraud to obtain the material.
Both articles were written at a time when the paper clearly acknowledged paying private investigators to obtain secret documents – a violation of the ethics rules of the Washington Post and most US news organisations. The Sunday Times has repeatedly said it has never paid anyone to do anything illegal.
The New York Times review of Mr. Lewis's background also raised new questions about his decision in 2009, while he was editor of Britain's Daily Telegraph, to pay more than £100,000 for information from a source – payments are prohibited at most U.S. news organizations.
During a November meeting with Washington Post reporters, Mr. Lewis defended the payment, saying the money was placed in an escrow account to protect the source, but a consultant who brokered the deal said in a recent interview that there was no escrow account and that he gave the money to the source himself.
A Washington Post spokesman said Lewis declined to answer a series of questions. The Post previously said, “William has very clear lines he will not cross, and his track record proves that.” In a series of conversations with Post reporters this week, Lewis said his role as publisher is to create an environment in which great journalism can flourish, and that he would never interfere.
Winnett did not answer calls or respond to questions sent by WhatsApp or email. The Washington Post referred questions to a spokesman for Winnett, who did not respond.
During a meeting with Washington Post reporters this month, Lewis praised Winnett. “He's a fantastic investigative reporter,” Lewis said. “He's going to bring more investigative rigor back to our organization.”
Together, Lewis and Winnett will lead one of the nation's most important news organizations, with a long history of providing independent oversight of government and holding those in power accountable. Amid editorial turmoil ahead of the election, journalists at the Post and beyond are questioning whether the new leaders share the same ethical foundations.
Lewis was Publisher of The Wall Street Journal from 2014 to 2020. During his tenure, the Paper maintained a reputation for high journalistic standards and won a Pulitzer Prize, among other awards, for its exposure of hush money payments made by Donald J. Trump before the 2016 election.
But the Washington Post debacle has brought new scrutiny to Mr Lewis' early career, particularly at the Sunday Times.
It is well documented that reporters at the respected newspaper used illegally obtained materials as fuel for their stories until the early 2000s.
But the scandals that followed during that period focused primarily on tabloid reporters, so Mr. Lewis and Mr. Winnett remained on the fringes of the controversy.
The Sunday Times Strategy
In 2002, Winnett got his scoop.
Mercedes was re-launching the Maybach, a German luxury car popular in the 1930s that The Sunday Times called “the Nazis' favourite limousine”. British notables were queuing up to order. Mr. Winnett had a list that included members of the House of Lords, big political donors and insurance industry leaders.
The article does not say how Winnett obtained the names, saying only that the person in question “is understood to have placed the order.”
Years later, a private investigator named John Ford publicly revealed that he had worked for The Sunday Times for many years. Ford said that he had rummaged through people's trash and secretly accessed the bank, phone and company records of British politicians and other public figures.
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Ford said he regretted writing the June 2002 article that exposed Maybach buyers. Only Winnett's article fits that description, but the original article isn't easily available online and has not been publicly linked to him.
The New York Times reviewed an article from the paid news database Factiva dated June 9, 2002.
In an interview with The Guardian, Ford said he called a Mercedes dealership and, in a fake accent, claimed to be a German key-ring manufacturer who needed a list to check the spelling of buyers' names. The caller was fired after the story was published, Ford said.
Ford, who no longer gives news interviews, declined to comment.
Lewis became business editor in 2002, a few months after the Maybach story was published, and became Winnett's boss.
Koenig said that in 2004, Lewis called another business reporter into the newsroom after a regular Tuesday editorial meeting and gave him an assignment.
Koenig, in an interview with The New York Times, said Lewis had asked him to look into conversations between two businessmen involved in the sale of the retail chain. Koenig said he was given copies of the phone records, which he believes were provided to him by Lewis himself.
“My understanding at the time was that it had been hacked,” Koenig said.
With the records in hand, Koenig said he persuaded one of the businessmen, Stuart Rose, who was then chief executive of retail giant Marks & Spencer and is now a member of the House of Lords, to give an interview to explain the phone call.
Koenig's article, written in June 2004, details the Rose phone conversation in minute detail, without saying where the information came from.
Koenig said he was almost certain that Lewis had edited the article himself, saying it was highly unusual for a business article to be peer-reviewed by another senior editor.
Lewis himself wrote a first-person account that day about Rose's role in the potential Marks & Spencer deal, in which he described receiving information to personally investigate the deal and the phone calls that took place: “I'm told that on Friday 7th May, Mr Rose called his PR adviser,” Lewis wrote.
Additionally, in another article written and published by Lewis that day, he detailed the exact timing of another call.
A few days later, Marks & Spencer said Mr Rose's phone records had been hacked.
“Dark Arts”
The identity of who obtained the phone records in the Marks & Spencer case has not previously been made public, although it was widely reported at the time that someone had contacted phone companies and posed as Mr Rose, asking for his records.
This kind of deception, known in Britain as blagging, became central to a scandal that engulfed Murdoch's British media empire a few years later, exposing tactics he and other Fleet Street tabloid reporters used to invade the privacy of people they wrote about.
The word “hacking” is often used as shorthand for a variety of tactics, including blagging, which has become known as the “dark art” of British journalism. Such techniques are generally illegal, but British law makes an exception for blagging if the information is obtained in the public interest.
After the Guardian and then The New York Times exposed the practices at the News of the World in 2010, the controversy forced Murdoch to close the paper.
Litigation ensued but focused mainly on the actions of the tabloids – tabloids like the Sunday Times largely escaped the fray, and details only emerged publicly for years.
“Every senior editor and most of our journalists at The Sunday Times knew that I was obtaining illegal phone bill data and bank account transactions for my stories on an almost weekly basis,” Ford told British news site Byline Investigates in a 2018 interview.
In an interview, Mr. Ford said he was paid up to 40,000 pounds (about $72,000 at the time) a year. Mr. Lewis's boss, John Witherow, who was the paper's editor-in-chief at the time, acknowledged that the paper had employed Mr. Ford as an informant for various investigations.
“He was hired because of his impersonation skills, right?” Witherow was asked during a 2012 government investigation.
“That's true,” the editor replied.
In a subsequent article, Ford wrote that he also considered Winnett a close friend, and noted that the Sunday Times paid for his defence after he was arrested on bragging-related fraud charges in 2010. Winnett was “intimately involved in arranging my defence,” Ford wrote.
Ford eventually received a formal warning over the incident but was not convicted.
Paying for Information
Lewis has spoken little about the wiretapping scandal over the years, and when he has, he has portrayed himself as someone who cooperated with authorities and helped News Corp root out any wrongdoing.
“My role was to put things right, and I have done that,” he told the BBC in 2020.
The hacking scandal recently resurfaced in Mr. Lewis' life as he works to restructure the Post's editorial department. His editor-in-chief, Sally Busbee, resigned over the plan. Days later, The New York Times reported that Mr. Lewis had reprimanded her for reporting on developments in a British phone-hacking lawsuit in which he was named. Mr. Lewis has denied pressuring Ms. Busbee.
An NPR reporter later revealed that Lewis had offered to give an exclusive interview if he promised not to write about the phone-tapping scandal.
Lewis is also facing questions about another scoop that he and Winnette broke in a way that would not be considered ethical by most American news organizations.
In 2009, when Lewis was editor of the Daily Telegraph, Winnett published an exposé about politicians' lavish spending at government expense, which sparked a major political scandal.
The article was based on records purchased by the Telegraph from a security consultant for more than $120,000.
When he met with Washington Post reporters in November, Lewis defended his story. He told staff that the Telegraph had invested money to protect its sources. “We agreed to put funds in escrow for legal protection,” he told The Post.
In an interview with The New York Times last week, the security consultant described a much more informal arrangement.
“It wasn't an escrow account,” said consultant John Wick, who said he raised the money himself on behalf of his sources. “I kept it and paid it out when and how I needed it.”
Mr Wick said he had worked out a deal with Mr Winnett – paying £10,000 for the opportunity to review the information and a further £100,000 for exclusivity.
Wick said he had not told either Winnett or Lewis how he spent the money.
Kitty Bennett and Julie Tate contributed to the research.