Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Peter Lemkin]

So why arrest her now?

Because,she is to testify Tuesday,and now she can claim "no comment"to questions because she is involved in an ongoing criminal investigation.........

The joke is on us. :what:

Its likely worse than that. Very likely soon will have proof that they told her in advance [about three days before] she'd be arrested, so best to 'resign' and get things settled up first.......cozy! :curtain: Cute!

[Peter Lemkin]

Stephenson Resigns!...... :phone: The Sky is Falling!....hock: Who will be left standing, when the 'music' stops?! :nono:

[Jan Klimkowski]

Stephenson's position was untenable after this yesterday.

Scotland Yard's top cop, Sir Paul Stephenson, is now in big trouble, after the latest revelations in the NYT.

18 meals with NI, including 8 with Wolfman Wallis whilst he was still at NOTW.

Shameful.

Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a "revolving door" between the police and News International, which included a former top editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.

On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.

Executives and others at the company also enjoyed close social ties to Scotland Yard's top officials. Since the hacking scandal began in 2006, Mr. Yates and others regularly dined with editors from News International papers, records show. Sir Paul Stephenson, the police commissioner, met for meals 18 times with company executives and editors during the investigation, including on eight occasions with Mr. Wallis while he was still working at The News of the World.

Senior police officials declined several requests to be interviewed for this article.

The police have continually asserted that the original investigation was limited because the counterterrorism unit, which was in charge of the case, was preoccupied with more pressing demands. At the parliamentary committee hearing last week, the three officials said they were working on 70 terrorist investigations.

Yet the Metropolitan Police unit that deals with special crimes, and which had more resources and time available, could have taken over the case, said four former senior investigators. One said it was "utter nonsense" to argue that the department did not have enough resources.

[Jan Klimkowski]

So why arrest her now?

Because,she is to testify Tuesday,and now she can claim "no comment"to questions because she is involved in an ongoing criminal investigation.........

The joke is on us. :what:

Keith - this is my suspicion too.

Another reason being put forward for Rebekah's arrest was for the police to protect the Metropolitan Chief Commissioner (the top top cop), Sir Paul Stephenson, by turning the attention back on Brooks. However, Stephenson has now resigned - so either he was out of the loop or simply decided his position was untenable.

NB Brooks/Wade was arrested not just on suspicion of knowledge of phone hacking, but on suspicion of having knowledge of corrupt payments to police officers.

Here's the relevant part of Scotland Yard's official statement.

"At approximately 12.00 a 43-year-old woman was arrested by appointment at a London police station by officers from Operation Weeting [phone hacking investigation] together with officers from Operation Elveden [bribing of police officers investigation]. She is currently in custody.

"She was arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to Section1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977 and on suspicion of corruption allegations contrary to Section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906.

"The Operation Weeting team is conducting the new investigation into phone hacking.

"Operation Elveden is the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police. This investigation is being supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.

[Jan Klimkowski]

This Sunday morning, The Observer (sister paper of The Guardian) published the suggested questions below for the Select Committee to ask Rupert & James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

That Committee has now been overtaken by events, but fwiw here are those suggested questions:

MPs on the culture, media and sport select committee are likely to follow two main tracks in their questioning on Tuesday of Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks: did you have knowledge of illegal activity; and are you now genuinely committed to exposing it? For the MPs, the task is not simply to ask questions, but to confront the witnesses with the evidence which is already available. Here are some possible questions.

Rupert Murdoch
In the apology you published in national newspapers on Friday, you said that you regretted not "sorting things out" faster. But you don't say why it took you so long. Are you saying that you didn't know that:


In September 2002 the Guardian published a detailed 3,000-word story describing how the News of the World and other papers had been buying confidential information from a network of corrupt police officers run by a private investigator called Jonathan Rees.

In March 2003, Rebekah Brooks, who had just spent three years editing the News of the World, told the culture committee that "we have paid the police for information in the past".

In April 2005, the News of the World was identified in open court as a prime customer of the private investigator Steve Whittamore, when he pleaded guilty to paying a civilian police worker to illegally obtain confidential information from the police national computer.

In December 2006, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) published What Price Privacy Now? in which it revealed that 23 journalists from the News of the World had been among the "customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information" by paying the network of "blaggers" run by Whittamore.

In January 2007, at the trial of the NoW's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, and the paper's full-time private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, counsel for the crown said explicitly that in hacking the voicemail of five non-royal victims who were named in court, Mulcaire's purpose was not to give the information to the royal correspondent but "to pass it on to the News of the World".

During the same trial, that counsel for Mulcaire confirmed that "this information would have been passed on not to Mr Goodman I stress the point but to the same organisation. Any material would have gone to them."

And, during the same trial, the prosecution disclosed that Mulcaire was not the only private investigator on the payroll of the News of the World and that the paper was paying other "research companies" even more than they were paying Mulcaire.

Did none of this alert you to the possibility that something might be wrong? Did you at any stage ask any questions about any of these public disclosures?

When the Guardian disclosed in July 2009 that News Group had paid more than £1m to settle legal actions brought by Gordon Taylor and two associates, you told Bloomberg News that the payments had not been made: "If that had happened, I would know about it."

Was that correct? If not, why did you say it? If it is correct that your son did not tell you that the company had made these payments, can you explain why he would choose to conceal that from you?

James Murdoch

In your statement of 7 July this year, you said: "The paper made statements to parliament without being in full possession of the facts." But isn't it also that the paper was in possession of some very significant facts which it failed to disclose to parliament?

For example, on 20 June this year, the company passed to police a collection of emails written by NoW journalists. The former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, has examined them and concluded that they contain evidence of indirect hacking of voicemail, breaches of national security and serious crime. Some of those messages were written by Goodman and Coulson, both of whom left the paper in January 2007.

Do you accept that in March 2007, when the then executive chairman of News International, Les Hinton, gave evidence to the culture committee, the company was certainly in possession of those messages and failed to mention anything at all about them? Can you explain why he failed to mention them? Could that failure reasonably be described as a "cover-up"?

Also in your statement of 7 July this year, you said: "The company paid out-of-court settlements approved by me. I now know that I did not have a complete picture when I did so. This was wrong and is a matter of serious regret."

We know that you paid out-of-court settlements in the cases of Taylor and Max Clifford. Were there other settlements which you approved before News Group publicly admitted liability in April this year?

You say you "did not have a complete picture". Do you agree that in the case of Taylor, the judge had ordered that your company be shown various items of evidence, which led you to settle the case, including:

Invoices submitted by Glenn Mulcaire to the NoW, which identified various public figures as his targets, including Tessa Jowell and John Prescott.

An email from a NoW reporter sending transcripts of 35 intercepted voicemail messages to Mulcaire for the attention of the NoW's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.

Detailed records kept by Steve Whittamore of his dealings with the NoW, which identified 23 of the paper's journalists by name that is more than half of those working for news and features commissioning several hundred potentially illegal searches relating to named targets.

It was this evidence which persuaded your company to settle the case. Was this not enough of a picture to show you clearly that your claims that Goodman had acted as a "rogue reporter" were clearly untrue; that other identifiable reporters were involved in handling illegally intercepted voicemail; and that other identifiable reporters were involved in handling illegally obtained confidential data?

Why did you not make any attempt to go back to parliament, to the Press Complaints Commission and the public to warn them that your company's previous statements were clearly false? Note that it is no excuse to say that your settlement with Taylor was confidential. That would not have prevented you revealing that you now had unspecified evidence which proved that the "rogue reporter" story was untrue.

Doesn't this pattern of behaviour look like a cover-up?


The civil actions

Why is your company paying for Mulcaire to appeal against a court ruling that he should answer questions about the hacking he did for the NoW?

Why is your company spending millions of pounds settling the civil actions being brought by public figures before evidence can be used in open court? Why not allow the facts to be disclosed in the public domain before settling?


Rebekah Brooks
When you were editor of the News of the World, were you aware that more than half of your news and feature reporters were paying Whittamore to use his network of blaggers to obtain confidential information?

Were you aware that your news editor, your features editor and your Scottish news editor were among those using this network? Do you remember using him yourself? The paperwork seized from his office by the ICO records you asking him to "convert" a mobile phone number into an owner's name and address.

Were you aware that Whittamore was submitting invoices to the NoW which explicitly requested payment for apparently illegal acts?

When you were editor of the NoW were you aware that your news editor, Greg Miskiw, was authorised to give a full-time contract of employment to Mulcaire?

When you were editor of the NoW, what did you do when you were told by three senior officials at Scotland Yard that one of your executives, Alex Marunchak, had used the paper's resources on behalf of two murder suspects to spy on the senior detective investigating their alleged crime?

The Guardian has disclosed that the surveillance of Det Supt Dave Cook involved the NoW in physically following him and his young children, "blagging" his personal details from confidential police databases, attempting to access his voicemail and that of his wife, and possibly sending a Trojan horse email to steal information from his computer. Did any of this come as a surprise to you, or were you told this by the police while you were editor?


When you were editor of the NoW, you published a story which referred to a message left by a recruitment agency on the voicemail of Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old schoolgirl, who was then missing without explanation. Did you read that story? Did it occur to you to question how your reporter could have known about this message?

Surrey police, who were investigating Milly Dowler's disappearance, were provided with information about that voicemail by the NoW. Was that done without your authority? Are you confident that Surrey police have no record of your being involved in the decision to tell them about that voicemail?


When you were editor of the Sun, you published confidential medical information about the illness being suffered by Gordon Brown's infant son. Did the Sun obtain that information directly or indirectly from a health worker? Did the Sun pay a health worker or anybody related to a health worker for that information or for a story related to that information?

[Lauren Johnson]

Could this scandal have connections with Princess Diana's death? Wasn't there something about spying going on in her case?

[Magda Hassan]

Sir Paul wants to take some others down with him. Notably cameron.

Sir Paul Stephenson turns on David Cameron

Britain's top police officer has resigned and turned on the prime minister in a dramatic escalation of the phone hacking scandal

• Vikram Dodd and Patrick Wintour
  
• The Guardian, Monday 18 July 2011
  
  
  
  Britain's top police officer has resigned and turned on the prime minister in a dramatic escalation of the phone hacking scandal.
  In a carefully-worded resignation speech that appeared aimed directly at Downing Street, Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said the prime minister risked being "compromised" by his closeness to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.
  Number 10 stressed that David Cameron had not been pressing in private for Stephenson to stand aside. But he was caught by surprise by the attack, which came just while the prime minister was on a plane en route to South Africa.
  Stephenson denied that he was resigning over allegations that he accepted £12,000 worth of hospitality from Champney's health spa, focusing instead on his decision not to inform the prime minister that the Met had employed Coulson's former deputy Neil Wallis as a strategic adviser.
  "Once Mr Wallis's name did become associated with Operation Weeting [into phone hacking], I did not want to compromise the prime minister in any way by revealing or discussing a potential suspect who clearly had a close relationship with Mr Coulson," he said.
  "I am aware of the many political exchanges in relation to Mr Coulson's previous employment. I believe it would have been extraordinarily clumsy of me to have exposed the prime minister, or by association the home secretary, to any accusation, however unfair, as a consequence of them being in possession of operational information in this regard."
  To emphasise the point, Stephenson went on: "Unlike Mr Coulson, Mr Wallis had not resigned from the News of the World or, to the best of my knowledge been in any way associated with the original phone hacking investigation."
  The shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper seized on that issue saying: "People will wonder why different rules apply for the prime minister and the Met, especially as Sir Paul said that 'unlike Andy Coulson', Neil Wallis had not been forced to resign from the News of the World."
  Senior police sources confirmed the attack had been intentional and showed the anger at Scotland Yard that Stephenson has been willing to resign over the scandal while the political class has failed to take responsibility in the same way. An ally of Stephenson said: "The commissioner thought if the prime minister is happy employing Andy Coulson, and Neil Wallis has bid the lowest price, what reason would we have not to employ him?"
  Stephenson had been due to appear before the home affairs select committee tomorrow. His sudden exit increases the pressure on assistant commissioner John Yates, the officer who led the phone hacking inquiry, to quit.
  The crisis over hacking engulfing News Corporation began to turn toxic for Stephenson on Thursday after the arrest of Wallis, who was the News of the World's deputy editor during the period when it is alleged phone hacking was widespread at the paper. Hours after Wallis was arrested, it emerged that he had worked for the Met.
  The Guardian has learned that Scotland Yard chiefs invited Wallis to apply for a senior communications post with the force in 2009, a decision Stephenson was aware of. Wallis was approached to apply for the two day a month contract by the Met, following discussions involving the forces's most senior figures.
  A source with close knowledge of the Yard's thinking at the time said part of Wallis's attraction was his connection to former News of the World editor Coulson, who was a leading aide to Cameron, then in opposition and expected to become prime minister.
  Part of the Met's thinking was that Wallis's connections would help the force's relationship with Cameron: "One [Wallis] is a lot cheaper and gives you direct access into No 10," the source added.
  Stephenson was facing the prospect of a difficult Commons statement by Theresa May, the home secretary, and anxiety expressed by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, about confidence in the Met because of the failure to tackle the scandal.
  In his resignation statement , Stephenson stressed his integrity and dismissed weekend claims that it was compromised by accepting a free stay at a luxury health spa where Wallis had been hired as a PR consultant.
  Stephenson said: "I have taken this decision as a consequence of the ongoing speculation and accusations relating to the Met's links with News International at a senior level and in particular in relation to Mr Neil Wallis who as you know was arrested in connection with Operation Weeting last week.
  "I have heard suggestions that we must have suspected the alleged involvement of Mr Wallis in phone hacking. Let me say unequivocally that I did not and had no reason to have done so. I do not occupy a position in the world of journalism; I had no knowledge of the extent of this disgraceful practice and the repugnant nature of the selection of victims that is now emerging; nor of its apparent reach into senior levels."
  John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister who had called for Stephenson to resign, wrote on Twitter: "I always thought the Met and News International were too close and now we see how close they were. Another green bottle has fallen more to come."
  Peter Smyth, chair of the Met Police Federation, said: "I think it is a sad day for Paul and a sad day for the Met. He is a very private man, I have never had any reason to question his integrity." He has come to a decision based on what he knows about himself."
  The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who last year described the hacking issue as a load of codswallop, was also furious that he had not been informed of the payments to Wallis until after his arrest last week. He was planning to launch an inquiry into the links between the Met and News International to examine whether the Met's refusal to pursue the phone -hacking saga, and the links with News International. "We need to turn over some of these big flat rocks and find out what is underneath," Johnson said last night.
  He said he was sad about Sir Paul's resignation, but thought it was "the right call" since he was likely to be distracted by the speculation about his links with News International. Cameron said: "Sir Paul Stephenson has had a long and distinguished career in the police, and I would like to thank him for his service over many, many years. Under his leadership, the Metropolitan police made good progress in fighting crime, continued its vital work in combating terrorism, and scored notable successes such as the policing of the royal wedding."
  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/18...id-cameron
  
  
  
  

[Magda Hassan]

I find it hilarious that to get any really good meaningful coverage on this subject one has to go to Russian media. :rofl:

[Magda Hassan]

Murdoch's U.S. Tabloid Scandal

The media mogul is under fire over the London phone-hacking scandal, but here in America his New York Post has struggled with allegations that it rewarded friends and punished enemies. Howard Kurtz reports.

Jul 13, 2011 10:19 AM EDT

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Ian Spiegelman remembers how the culture of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post made him "pretty uncomfortable."




"There were people you were not supposed to mess with," says the former reporter for the gossipy Page Six, if they were "friends" of executives at the Post or its parent company, News Corp. At the same time, "word would come down through your editor, This is someone we should get, should go after.' The people high up had people they just didn't like."

Amid the mounting revelations of sleazy tactics at Murdoch's London newspapers, media analysts are questioning whether comparable misconduct may have occurred at his American news outlets. There is no evidence of anything like the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked British politics and prompted Murdoch to shutter the News of the World.

But a scandal that tarnished the Post five years ago carries echoes of a brass-knuckled style of journalism that resonates a bit louder today in the wake of the Murdoch mess across the Atlantic.

" The Post scandal carries echoes of a brass-knuckled style of journalism that resonates a bit louder today.
"

The front-page of the New York Daily News of Friday April 7, 2006, right, is juxtaposed with Page Six of the New York Post of Tuesday April 11, 2006., Richard Drew / AP Photo
"There was a kind of thuggishness," says Jared Paul Stern, a former Page Six contributor at the center of the controversy. He says Murdoch was on the phone with Post Editor in Chief Col Allan "all the time. He was down in the newsroom. I can't imagine anything of that scale could go on and him not know about it." Allan and a Post spokesman have not responded to requests for comment.

Neither Spiegelman nor Stern is a choir boy. Spiegelman was fired for sending a nasty email with antigay slurs to someone who had crossed him. Stern left after being caught asking a billionaire businessman for money in exchange for keeping negative information about him out of the paper.

But what they describe in interviews with The Daily Beast suggests that they were not just renegades but part of a newsroom environment in which some questionable practices may have been tacitly approved. And it's worth recalling that News Corp. initially tried to cover up the London hacking by blaming it on a rogue reporter acting on his own.

In a 2007 affidavit, Spiegelman said "accepting freebies, graft and other favors was not only condoned by the company but encouraged as a way to decrease the newspaper's out-of-pocket expenses…and that News Corp. attorneys had been instructed to look the other way.'" There was a policy of "favor banking," the affidavit said, "practiced on a much larger scale by Rupert Murdoch." In 2001, Spiegelman said in the document, "I was ordered to kill a Page Six story about a Chinese diplomat and a strip club that would have angered the Communist regime and endangered Murdoch's broadcasting privileges" as he was trying to get Beijing's approval for his satellite-television service.

At the time, Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for the Post, called the allegations "a tissue of lies" and a "disgrace."

The affidavit also said that in 1997 a local restaurant owner who was frequently mentioned in Page Six had $1,000 sent to Richard Johnson, then the gossip page's editor. The Post confirmed this, with Allan quoted as saying that Johnson had made "a grave mistake" and had been reprimanded.

Joe Francis, producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" video series and a fixture on Page Six, also threw a bachelor party for Johnson at his Mexican estate estimated to cost $50,000.

In the Daily Beast interview, Spiegelman said Page Six staffers were showered with so many free gifts that the leftovers were put "on a cubicle shelf behind our backs for anyone to take away." He said the money-losing Post "would go crazy" if reporters submitted expenses for, say, a visit to the Hamptons, so they would accept free trips: "Everyone knew, that was what you do."

Allan, the editor at the time, "knew all about the culture. It was his paper," Spiegelman said.

When celebrities criticized the Iraq War, Spiegelman added, he was told to remind readers of their show-business projects "in case they feel like boycotting."

In similar fashion, Stern says the troops regularly received marching orders. "For a long time the Clintons were targets," he said. "You couldn't get enough dirt on the Clintons. Then Bill Clinton made a rapprochement with Murdoch, sucked up to him in the run-up to Hillary running" for the Senate in 2000.

"Then one day it was, You can't write anything bad about the Clintons.' We had to kill stuff all the time. It filtered down from Murdoch. In the meetings we'd be told, No way, mate.'"

Some Australians who were friendly with the Murdoch family, such as actress Nicole Kidman, "had a free pass," Stern said.

It was Stern's entanglement with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle that brought many of these allegations to light, and prompted Spiegelman's affidavit.

Burkle, dubbed a "party-boy billionaire" by the tabloid, was concerned about what he regarded as unfair coverage, some of it by Stern. A meeting was arranged, Stern encouraged him to become a source for the column, and an associate bought $5,700 worth of shirts from Stern's clothing line, a sideline he had developed. Stern later sent a Burkle staffer an email saying the mogul "certainly has the means" to stop unfavorable stories, which Burkle took as an extortion threat.

Sources later confirmed that Burkle, working with federal law enforcement, had secretly videotaped Stern in subsequent meetings demanding a $100,000 payment and $10,000 monthly stipend in return for ending negative mentions of him in Page Six. Stern said he'd been set up, the Post suspended him, and a News Corp. executive called the episode "highly aberrational."

When prosecutors declined to bring charges, a spokesman for Burkle said he had "followed the government's instructions" in an effort to "stop the publication of false reports" about him. Burkle did not respond to an email Tuesday.

"I walked into the trap that he set," Stern says now. "He wanted to get back at Murdoch and the Post and found a way to do it through me. I kind of took a bullet for all this stuff."

None of this, of course, reaches the level of hacking people's phones. But with Sen. Jay Rockefeller now urging the FBI to investigate possible News Corp. misconduct in the United States, the spotlight is certain to fall on some of Murdoch's American media properties.

Spiegelman offered a rumination about Murdoch's company in a follow-up email:

"It's interesting that so many of Rupert's top editors and VPs are not citizens of the countries to which he dispatches them helter skelter. You need not be a xenophobe to pause at the fact that so many of his papers and cable news outlets in London, NY and, now, DC, are largely run and organized by strangers from strange landsSouth Africa, Australia, New Zealand...

"News Corp VPs are nationless. It doesn't matter where you put themthey are plugged into their own, floating nation…namely News Corp. You don't always see them, but they are always hovering between the editor-in-chief and Rupert, and their loyalties remain not with any country or system of laws. Imagine the kind of pressure such a misty, loyalty-free menace could put on a reporter who actually lives where he lives and whose life is there. You want to know if this London poison is likely to have spread to New York? Yeah. But don't blame London."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...-post.html

[Magda Hassan]

Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper has claimed that a special bunker, requiring security clearance for access was created at the company's headquarters to conduct "counterintelligence" including snooping on phone records.

Mmmmm.....all over red rover.

Fmr. Fox News Executive: Americans' Phones Were Hacked

Former Fox News executive Dan Cooper has claimed that a special bunker, requiring security clearance for access was created at the company's headquarters to conduct "counterintelligence" including snooping on phone records:

"Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls?"That's how Portfolio.com began a post back in 2008, when a former Fox News executive charged that Ailes had outfitted a highly secured "brain room" in Fox's New York headquarters for "counterintelligence" and may have used it to hack into private phone records.

After helping chairman Roger Ailes create the Fox News channel in 1996, Cooper was fired for doing an anonymous interview with New York Magazine:

"I'm frightened right now," said a former Fox employee, noting the vast array of powerful connections Ailes maintains throughout the political and media worlds. "I've been told that if Ailes figures out I talked to you, he'll hunt me down and kill me."Negotiating the ground rules for an off-the-record meeting, Ailes came on like an Edward G. Robinson character in a B movie. "Three people in the world hate me," he blustered. "You're not going to get to them, and everyone else is too scared.... Take your best shot at me, and I'll have the rest of my life to go after you."

Cooper says that Ailes discovered he was the source by gaining access to his phone recordsthrough Fox's "brain room".

Cooper claims that his talent agent, Richard Leibner, told him he had received a call from Ailes, who identified Cooper as a source, and insisted that Leibner drop him as a client--or any client reels Leibner sent Fox would pile up in a corner and gather dust. Cooper continued: "I made the connections. Ailes knew I had given Brock the interview. Certainly Brock didn't tell him. Of course. Fox News had gotten Brock's telephone records from the phone company, and my phone number was on the list. Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation's New York headquarters, was what Roger called the Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie."

In a Rolling Stone piece, Tim Dickenson corroborates Cooper's account of a "black-ops" room deep within Fox HQ:

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes also housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and an endless cube farm along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit known at Fox News as the "brain room" that requires special security clearance to gain access. "The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from," says Cooper, who helped design its specs. "It's where the evil resides."If that sounds paranoid, consider the man Ailes brought in to run the brain room: Scott Ehrlich, a top lieutenant from his political-*consulting firm. Ehrlich referred to by some as "Baby Rush" had taken over the lead on Big Tobacco's campaign to crush health care reform when Ailes signed on with CNBC. According to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Ehrlich gravitated to the dark side: In a strategy labeled "Underground Attack," he advised the tobacco giants to "hit hard" at key lawmakers "through their soft underbelly" by quietly influencing local media a tactic that would help the firms "stay under the radar of the national news media."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/17...ia=siderec