In October, the Washington Post’s editors were told to dump the paper’s planned Kamala Harris endorsement. WaPo owner Jeff Bezos ordered it, and WaPo CEO Will Lewis carried out the order. Lewis spent years working for Rupert Murdoch’s print outlets in the UK and US, and he’s clearly trying to turn the Washington Post into some right-wing, reactionary, pseudo-tabloid in the vein of the British red-tops. Interestingly enough, Lewis was already on our radars before the bullsh-t with the Harris endorsement. In the spring, Lewis’s name cropped up multiple times in Prince Harry’s continuing legal action against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the same NGN which used to employ Will Lewis. Lewis was apparently in the muck, just like all of NGN’s higher-ups around that time. Not only that, Lewis was a big part of the coverup during and post-Leveson Inquiry. Hilariously, Will Lewis tried to order the Washington Post’s editors to ignore the stories coming out of Harry’s legal hearings. Well, now Harry’s case will head to trial next month. So what will Will Lewis do when his name is brought up in court constantly? From the Daily Beast’s “How Prince Harry is Set to Deepen Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post Perma-Crisis.”

Jeff Bezos values the long view, so here’s one: The Washington Post was founded in 1877, and successive generations of writers, editors and executives spent 146 years building its name. In the past year, Jeff Bezos has done a great deal to imperil it. Warren Buffett once described The Washington Post’s name as its most valuable asset. That name has—in the eyes of many staff and former readers—taken a number of blows this year, blows inflicted by both Bezos and Will Lewis, the energetic British CEO with a black box past whom Bezos appointed a year ago.

Bezos prevented the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris ahead of the election, causing 250,000 readers to unsubscribe and costing the paper tens of millions in revenue. It is unclear how many people have unsubscribed since. Executives severely tightened access for employees to view subscriber counts after the news broke, the Beast has learned. The perma-crisis at the top of The Post is now only set to worsen in the new year, thanks to an improbable figure: Prince Harry.

Next month, on Jan. 13, Harry is finally due to take a long-brewing lawsuit of his to trial. He is suing Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids for phone hacking—and Will Lewis is a central subject in the case. Lewis played a critical role in “cleaning up the mess” of the scandal for Murdoch, which rocked the British press when it was revealed in 2011. The impending trial was an undiscussed undercurrent of The New York Times’ DealBook summit held on Dec. 4 in New York, at which both Harry and Bezos spoke. Phone hacking is an old story, Harry conceded that day. But there is a newer story, he said, one that still remains largely untold: the cover up that followed. “That’s the thing,” Harry said, “that I think will shock the world.”

Harry’s lawyers have described Lewis of being instrumental in that cover up. Lewis stands accused of deceiving British police, perverting the course of justice and framing a former prime minister, as the Beast reported this summer. One detective who spoke with the Beast said that Lewis and a junior executive told police “a total fabrication” in 2011 as part of a corporate cover-up to spare Murdoch and his executives. “It was a poppycock story about why they had deleted millions of emails. We challenged it and asked for evidence for weeks afterwards. It never came. They’d made it up.”

Two female editors at The Post have overseen coverage of what Lewis did for Murdoch in the past year. They have now both left the company. Sally Buzbee, The Post’s former executive editor, left in June after clashing with Lewis over the Post’s reporting of preliminary hearings for the trial in London, during which Lewis was named and accused by Harry’s lawyers. The New York Times reported that Lewis told Buzbee not to cover the case. This month another senior female editor, Matea Gold, left the paper for The New York Times after being passed over by Lewis to succeed Buzbee, whose replacement he is due to announce before the end of the year. Lewis did not have her interview with Bezos. (He was forced to withdraw his initial replacement for Buzbee—a British editor from The Daily Telegraph of London, unknown in America and known as “Rat Boy” in the UK—after staff unrest this summer.)

[From The Daily Beast]

The Daily Beast says that now Matea Gold has stepped down, the Post will likely not cover Prince Harry’s trial, or they won’t cover the parts of the trial which mention the newspaper’s current CEO. If there’s one check on Lewis and WaPo, it’s other American media outlets pointing out what Lewis is doing at the Post. That’s what happened in the spring, when the New York Times did some insidery reporting on Lewis’s attempts to force Post reporters and editors to stop covering his past. Now, post-election, with so much of the American media in crisis, I do wonder if they’ll even bother to put a check on what Will Lewis is trying to do.

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