Fox News Knocks Down 'Brain Room' Claim

Has Roger Ailes been keeping tabs on your phone calls? A disgrunted former Fox News producer claims he has the capability thanks to a secret "brain room" that the network uses for "counterintelligence and black ops."

Actually, "disgruntled" is an understatement. Dan Cooper, who was fired from the Rupert Murdoch-owned channel shortly after its 1996 launch, has an ax the size of Paul Bunyan's to grind. And grind it he does in a blog post that Jossip says doubles as a book proposal.

Potentially the most explosive among Cooper's many lurid claims, assuming anyone believes them, arises from his account of how his agent, Richard Leibner, dropped him as a client. Leibner did so, asserts Cooper, under pressure from Ailes, who had discovered that Cooper was an anonymous source for a New York magazine story about him, written by ex-Republican David Brock.

And how did Ailes learn that?

Certainly Brock didn't tell him. Of course. Fox News had gotten Brock's telephone records from the phone company, and my phone number was on the list. Deep in the bowels of 1211 Avenue of the Americas, News Corporation's New York headquarters, was what Roger called The Brain Room. Most people thought it was simply the research department of Fox News. But unlike virtually everybody else, because I had to design and build the Brain Room, I knew it also housed a counterintelligence and black ops office. So accessing phone records was easy pie.

A Fox News spokeswoman says there's no truth to the claim that the network has the capability to snoop through phone records. As for the part about Ailes's arm-twisting, I'm still waiting to hear back from Leibner.

UPDATE, 6:43 p.m.: Leibner says it's "not true" and that he didn't fire Cooper as a client.