I am not one for overstatement. But this just-breaking scandal could lead to the fall of the house of Roger Ailes. Roger Ailes stands accused of encouraging Judith Regan to lie about her affair with Bernard Kerik to not just anyone. . . but to Federal Investigators! Amazingly, Judith Regan TAPED Roger Ailes encouraging her to lie (shades of O'Reilly/Makris, a scandal that broke just a few months earlier, If I remember correctly). So it looks like Ailes was caught dead to rights.
Lying to Federal Investigators is a crime (see Martha Stewart), and encouraging someone to lie to Federal Investigators is also a crime. This is BIG. Even if Roger Ailes is not indicted (there may be statute of limitations issues), even if he stays at the helm of Fox News, he is damaged goods. He will never rise to replace Rupert Mudoch as the head of News Corp. It's over for Roger.
It was an incendiary allegation — and a mystery of great intrigue in the media world: After the publishing powerhouse Judith Regan was fired by HarperCollins in 2006, she claimed that a senior executive at its parent company, News Corporation, had encouraged her to lie to federal investigators two years before.
The investigators had been vetting Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who had been nominated to become homeland security secretary and who had had an affair with Ms. Regan.
The goal of the News Corporation executive, according to Ms. Regan, was to keep the affair quiet and protect the then-nascent presidential aspirations of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik’s mentor and supporter.
But Ms. Regan never revealed the identity of the executive, even as her allegation made headlines and she brought a wrongful termination suit against HarperCollins and News Corporation.
But now, affidavits filed in a separate lawsuit reveal the identity of the previously unnamed executive: Roger E. Ailes, chairman of Fox News.
http://www.nytimes.com/...