By Keith Olbermann for Daily Kos
I’m cross-posting this from our Current website because, well, because.
And because the Murdoch Phone-Hacking Scandal may have just metastasized.
The so-called “Climate-Gate” controversy – in which e-mails about Global Warming were stolen from researchers at Britain’s University of East Anglia in November, 2009 – now turns out to bear the stamp of Neil Wallis, one of the key figures in Murdoch’s hacking of the phones, voicemails, and other electronic communications of thousands of people.
Wallis is unique in this scandal. He had been the Executive Editor of Murdoch’s “News Of The World” when hacking was at its peak. Yet in 2009 he wound up being hired by the police as a public relations consultant, while the police investigated the hacking scandal – and he wound up spying for Murdoch’s people on what Scotland Yard was investigating.
Wallis was, as the New York Times put it:
“…reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.”
More over, while Wallis was keeping Murdoch’s organization apprized of what and whom the police were investigating, the police were trying to convince other news organizations not to cover the story – a suppression of evidence that benefited both the police and Rupert Murdoch.
As the British newspaper The Guardian reported last Friday:
“Scotland Yard’s most senior officers tried to convince the Guardian during two private meetings that its coverage of phone hacking was exaggerated and incorrect without revealing they had hired Neil Wallis…”
It was neither exaggerated nor incorrect. Last Thursday, Neil Wallis was arrested.
Last night, it was revealed that while acting as a double-agent for Scotland Yard and Murdoch, Wallis was also consulting Conservative Party Leader David Cameron during the 2010 election that saw Cameron rise to become the nation’s Prime Minister.
Now, as chronicled by the good work of Joe Romm at Climate Progress, bobbing up to the surface through this vast ocean of ethical filth, comes Neil Wallis’s role in “Climate-Gate.”