After editor’s departure, Washington Post’s publisher faces questions about phone hacking stories

NEW YORK (AP) — The Washington Post’s new publisher is facing questions about whether he made efforts to conceal — in his own newspaper and elsewhere — his involvement in a British phone hacking scandal from his time working for Rupert Murdoch a decade ago.

The weeklong saga, which began with the abrupt departure of the Post’s executive editor Sunday night, offers a window into differences between approaches to journalism in Britain and the United States — and touches on delicate issues of trust in the American media community as it approaches a contentious and seismic presidential election.

The publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, has denied any wrongdoing in Britain and at the Post.

Lewis, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, arrived in January to turn around the Post, which is awash in red ink and seen its digital readership drop by a half since 2020. Lewis is also the vice chairman of The Associated Press’ board of directors.

He announced a restructuring plan on Sunday that did not include the top news executive, Sally Buzbee, who apparently was either forced out or chose not to accept a demotion. Buzbee, the former top news executive at the AP, has led the Post newsroom for three years. She has not talked about her departure.

This week, The New York Times reported that Lewis told Buzbee in a phone conversation last month that a development in litigation by Prince Harry about the phone hacking scandal did not warrant coverage in the Post.

That sprawling case involved the alleged interception of voicemails of celebrities and royals by Murdoch-owned newspapers in Britain. Plaintiffs in a civil case have alleged that Lewis was involved in efforts to tamp down trouble, in part by destroying evidence. Lewis has denied this.

The Times said Lewis told Buzbee that it would be a lapse in judgment to run the story, which was eventually published. The Post said Friday that that account was inaccurate and Lewis did not pressure Buzbee not to publish any stories. “To suggest otherwise is completely false,” the newspaper said in a statement. Buzbee did not respond to a message from the AP on Friday requesting comment on her own characterization of the conversation.

In mainstream American journalism, it’s generally considered an ethical breach for a publisher to get involved in these kinds of news decisions, particularly one that involves him.

Later Thursday, National Public Radio media reporter David Folkenflik wrote that Lewis, before he took over at the Post, “repeatedly and heatedly” offered NPR an exclusive interview about his plans — in return for Folkenflik dropping a story that he was writing about the executive’s involvement in the phone hacking case.

Folkenflik refused, and the story ran on Dec. 20, 2023.

Asked about this, Lewis called Folkenflik an activist instead of a journalist, telling the Post: “I had an off-the-record conversation with him before I joined the Post and some six months later he has dusted it down, and made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.”

https://apnews.com/article/post-publisher-phone-hacking-9fc4c12509ef8e567fe94f679506de97

It Called Itself a Yoga School. Prosecutors Say It Was a Sex Cult.

Juan Percowicz was an accountant with an unusual side hobby: teaching self-help classes around Buenos Aires with a heavy dose of ancient philosophy and New Age spiritualism. He was a hit and, with donations from his followers, he built an organization known as Buenos Aires Yoga School, or BAYS.

For more than 30 years, he ran the school, which promised spiritual salvation through lectures and self-help classes. Prosecutors say the organization exploited and drugged some of its female members, forcing them to sell their bodies and generating hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly from clients in Argentina and the United States. BAYS also ran an illicit clinic where some members were administered drugs to induce prolonged sleep, sometimes as a form of punishment, according to prosecutors.

In the 1990s, Mr. Percowicz and his school first gained notoriety after an Argentine family accused the organization of brainwashing their daughter. During the investigation, some former members talked of being forced to work as “slaves” and said the school promoted prostitution.

But that original case stalled in the courts. Argentina did not yet have laws on human trafficking or money laundering, according to investigators. The country’s justice system was still being overhauled after the end of the military dictatorship more than a decade earlier in which tens of thousands of people were killed.

A 1999 State Department report said Argentina’s judiciary was “hampered by inordinate delays, procedural logjams, changes of judges, inadequate administrative support and incompetence.”

“The people are the same, the decisions are the same, the activities are similar, but there are two very important laws now with big penalties that prohibit the core activities these people were doing,” said Ariel Lijo, a judge who oversaw the initial stages of the case. Mr. Lijo was nominated for Argentina’s Supreme Court in March by President Javier Milei.

>In the 2022 raids on BAYS, investigators said they found more than $1 million in cash, five bars of gold, stashes of pornographic films, checkbooks from American banks and dossiers on wealthy individuals, including some who live in the United States. American authorities have cooperated in the investigation, according to Argentine investigators.

The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment.

Businessman Tells Jury He Bribed Senator Menendez With a Mercedes-Benz

Until recently, Jose Uribe was an obscure New Jersey businessman who had been caught up in what prosecutors say was a sprawling and lucrative bribery scheme involving Senator Robert Menendez and others.

But after Mr. Uribe pleaded guilty in March and agreed to cooperate with the authorities, he vaulted into a more prominent position: star government witness.

On Friday, Mr. Uribe took the witness stand in Federal District Court in Manhattan and immediately admitted that he had bribed Mr. Menendez. He said that he had given the senator’s wife, Nadine Menendez, a Mercedes-Benz in exchange for gaining “the power and influence” of Mr. Menendez.

“When you bribed Robert Menendez, did you do that alone or with other people?” a prosecutor, Lara Pomerantz, asked Mr. Uribe.

“With other people,” he responded, and then named Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman who founded a New Jersey halal meat company that prosecutors say was used to funnel bribes to the senator and his wife.

Mr. Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, and his wife are charged with conspiring to accept cash, gold bullion and other bribes collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for Mr. Menendez’s agreement to direct aid to Egypt and to meddle in criminal cases in New Jersey. One of those cases involved Mr. Uribe.

Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York say Mr. Uribe, a former insurance broker who worked in the trucking industry, sought the senator’s help to stave off criminal investigations that the New Jersey attorney general’s office was conducting into two of Mr. Uribe’s associates. In return, an indictment says, Mr. Uribe helped to buy Ms. Menendez, then the senator’s girlfriend, a new Mercedes-Benz C-300 convertible worth more than $60,000.

“I knew that giving a car in return for influencing a United States senator to stop a criminal investigation was wrong,” Mr. Uribe said in court when he pleaded guilty, “and I deeply regret my actions.”

Mr. Menendez, 70, is being tried with two other New Jersey businessmen — Mr. Hana and Fred Daibes — charged in the conspiracy. Ms. Menendez, 57, was also charged, but the judge, Sidney H. Stein, postponed her trial until July because she is undergoing treatment for breast cancer. All four defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Uribe took the stand one day after the jury heard testimony from Gurbir S. Grewal. Mr. Grewal was New Jersey’s attorney general in 2019 when prosecutors say Mr. Menendez contacted him in hopes of having the investigations into Mr. Uribe’s associates quashed.

https://dnyuz.com/2024/06/07/businessman-tells-jury-he-bribed-senator-menendez-with-a-mercedes-benz

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