Now Attention Should Turn To The New York Post

Does anybody really believe that News Corporation employees at the New York Post did not engage in the same kinds of criminal activities that News International employees engaged in at The News of the World, The Sun, and The Times of London?

Murdoch moved his employees from Australia to Britain to New York all the time.

Could those employees who learned the "dark arts" in London - phone hacking, computer hacking, bribery, extortion, intimidation, and cover-up - have really left that activity behind in Britain when they came to New York to work at the Post?

It seems unlikely to me.

So far, the Obama administration seems to have done everything it could to NOT look into this scandal.

So far, the Brits have yet to call any major American News Corporation employee to testify in the scandal.

Indeed, Michael Wolff writes in The Guardian today that while Rupert Murdoch is effectively finished in Britain after today's Commons committee report, he still remains safe and snug in his Sixth Avenue News Corporation bunker.

But there are three strands of scandal that still burn and threaten him.

First, the Brits haven't finished with the police corruption/bribery investigation, the result of which could trigger a serious investigation of News Corporation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act here in the U.S.

Second, the allegations that News Corporation hired pirates to hack through the security of its TV satellite competitors and disperse those security codes on the Internet in order to destroy those companies are currently being investigated by Ofcom in Britain. Journalist Neil Chenoweth, who spent four years looking into the alleged piracy, says the TV piracy hacking claims, if found to be true, could cost News Corporation 50 times what the phone hacking scandal has cost the company.

Third, Mark Lewis, the British lawyer who brought successful civil suits in the hacking case against Murdoch in Britain, plans to bring at least four such cases here in the U.S. against News Corporation. Those suits threaten to expose News Corporation employees - including those at the NY Post - for engaging in the "dark arts" that so many News International employees engaged in over in Britain.

So far, Rupert Murdoch and his "fixer" Joel Klein have managed to keep these disparate strands from exploding into one big conflagration.

But the longer this scandal goes, the more we see these strands start to come together.

If Lewis can shine some light onto News Corporation's "dark arts" here in the United States, the Obama Department of Justice is going to be forced to do a serious investigation of the company rather than the perfunctory one they seem to be doing now.

In addition, if Ofcom finds the TV piracy allegations true, that puts even more pressure on the feds to bring a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case against News Corporation.

And of course News Corporation has squandered any trust it might have had by having, in the words of Labor MP Tom Watson

carried out an extensive cover-up of its rampant lawbreaking. It’s most senior executives repeatedly misled Parliament and the two men at the top, Rupert and James Murdoch – who were in charge of the company – must now answer for that.

We'll see where this goes from here.

It seems pretty certain that Murdoch will be forced to sell all or most of his take in BSkyB.

News Corporation shares rallied today on the rumor that News Corporation will sell its British newspapers.

So Murdoch is finished in Britain.

But he remains very powerful here in the U.S.

Most Americans do not know much about this scandal, or indeed, if they do know about it, don't seem to care much.

But as the various strands of the scandal flame inch closer to each other, the Sixth Avenue News Corporation bunker may not be as impervious to fire as Rupert Murdoch and his "fixer" Joel Klein think it is.

The same goes for the New York Post.

UPDATE: The NY Times looks at some other potential problems News Corporation is facing on the scandal front here.