Phone hacking: four admit to plots in Brooks and Coulson eras Three former news editors from the News of the World have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hack mobile phones during a six-year period when Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were editing the Sunday title, it was disclosed in court. The two high-flying tabloid journalists were accused of knowing about voicemail interception at the newspaper, of plotting to pay money to corrupt public officials – and, in the case of Brooks, participating in a cover-up when concerns about hacking became public in 2011. Opening the Old Bailey trial of Brooks, Coulson and six others, crown counsel Andrew Edis QC said the guilty pleas meant that the original claim made by the tabloids publisher, News International, that the hacking was the work of just one reporter, Clive Goodman, was demonstrably incorrect. The three former News of the World news editors who had pleaded guilty to the interception of voicemails were Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup. Edis told the jury that the papers specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, had separately admitted intercepting the messages of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. There is no doubt that initially News International was keen to say that phone hacking in the News of the World was really limited to Mr Goodman but this inquiry has proved conclusively that that is not true, Edis told the jury in his opening statement at the start of a high-profile trial that is expected to last up to six months. Among the victims of phone hacking, Edis said, were Lord Frederick Windsor, 13 of whose voicemail messages were found on recordings in Mulcaires office, Sir Paul McCartney, Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Will Young, Lord Prescott and David Blunkett. The prosecuting counsel said that the management of the paper, including Brooks and Coulson, must have known about the hacking. He told the jury that Brooks and Coulson had been part of the conspiracy to hack phones between October 2000 and August 2006. Brooks edited the News of the World between May 2000 and January 2003, before moving on to edit the Sun. Coulson, her deputy, was then editor until January 2006. Brooks and Coulson deny all the charges. Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World, leaves the Old Bailey with her husband Charlie after the first day of their trial, which is expected to last until April. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA The prosecutor said that the jurors must ask whether these people were doing their jobs properly, in which case we say that they must have known what they were spending their money on, they must have known where some of these stories came from. Either they were doing their jobs properly, or at least three – and we say four – of the news editors were running this operation with Glenn Mulcaire – a great deal of phone hacking – and the management never even noticed. Mulcaire, the prosecutor said, was very good at hacking peoples phones - obviously a very useful talent if you are a newspaper wanting to publish things about people that they would like to keep private. Hacking happened under both Brooks and Coulson, Edis told the jury. There was phone hacking done for the benefit of the News of the World and at its expense. It started when Mrs Brooks was the editor and continued after Mr Coulson took over. He added: You will have to decide whether this could happen without the editor knowing. Edis said: The News of the World was a Sunday newspaper. That means it published once a week, at most 52 times a year. It wasnt War and Peace. It wasnt an enormous document. It was the sort of publication if you were its editor you could take an interest in its contents without too much trouble. The News of the Worlds former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, and former news editor, Ian Edmondson, also deny conspiracy to hack phones. Setting out the broad themes of the indictment, Edis went on to say that Brooks and Coulson had also conspired to pay money to corrupt public officials during more than a decade of alleged criminality at the News of the World and the Sun. Brooks, he said, had personally authorised payments of £40,000 to a senior official from the Ministry of Defence. Coulson, he told the jury, had written emails agreeing to pay a Palace police officer for royal telephone directories that could be used to assist hacking. These were not whistleblowers, Edis said. There may be a degree of integrity in that kind of behaviour. We are talking about people who sold stories about peoples private lives. As editor of the Sun, according to the prosecution, Rebekah Brooks had authorised payments to a member of the armed forces and his spouse and to a senior Ministry of Defence official who had been paid a total of £40,000 for stories. The official had been vetted to see secret material and was particularly trusted, he said, but over a long period of time she sold an awful lot of information for an awful lot of money. Coulson, he told the jury, as editor of the News of the World, had twice exchanged emails with Clive Goodman, the papers former royal editor, agreeing to pay an unidentified Palace police officer for royal telephone directories. Fifteen such directories had been found in Goodmans home, including two that matched the timeframe of the email exchanges. Goodman denies conspiring with Coulson to pay the Palace police officer. The trial, which is scheduled to last until next April, is the result of three police operations that have been working for a total of 33 months. On Tuesday, the judge, Mr Justice Saunders, told the jury that it was not only the defendants but also British justice that was going on trial. On Wednesday, Edis also suggested that the police and press had questions to answer. He said police had first investigated the hacking in 2006, securing the convictions of Mulcaire and Goodman, but he added: That inquiry turned out to be quite restricted. This inquiry has revealed a lot more than that one. Edis told the jury that Brooks and others were accused of plotting to pervert the course of justice – a cover-up, as he put it. Brooks and her former personal assistant Cheryl Carter had removed seven boxes of Brooks journalistic notebooks from the News International archive, Edis said. They had done this in July 2011 in the aftermath of the Milly Dowler story. It was quite obvious to everybody that this was not going away, that the police were going to find out how much phone hacking had been going on, Edis said. The notebooks had never been found. We will never know what they contained because they have gone. That is a classic perversion of the course of justice. That same month, he said, Brooks, her husband and her head of security had conspired to remove computers and other records from the Brooks two homes to prevent police finding them. This had been a complicated little operation which had been discovered by police as a result of an accident that was rather bad luck for those involved. Brooks also denies perverting the course of justice by destroying notebooks and concealing computers from the police inquiry. Her husband, Charlie Brooks, Carter and her head of security, Mark Hanna, deny assisting her to destroy or conceal evidence. Edis confronted the link between crime and journalism: This prosecution is not an attack on the freedom of the press or the process of journalism. The prosecution accepts that its important in a free country that there is a free press, but the prosecution says that journalists are no more entitled to break the law than anybody else. The criminal law applies to all of us equally. The crown is due to continue its opening on Thursday.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 08:07:44 +0000
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