Mr Anderson told Mr Sherborne that the notion he had known the material had come from phone hacking was “cooked up” by “your people”.
He said he had “never” commissioned Miskiw and had never commissioned anyone to commit phone hacking.
Mr Anderson sent a memo to Liz Hartley, Associated’s legal director, in December 2018 after Johnson contacted the publisher to reveal plans to publish a story about the emails on the Byline Investigates website.
In the memo, he described how he had felt he was being blackmailed during a call from Johnson in June 2016.
Mr Johnson is said to have warned that Mr Anderson’s alleged unlawful activity would form the basis of a legal case against the Mail.
“He (Johnson) said he was ‘authorised’ to tell me that if I co-operated with his enquiries into the Mail group, then the emails would be kept private,” Mr Anderson wrote.
“He wanted to expose phone hacking within the Daily Mail. I suggested he was threatening me.”
When Johnson gave evidence in the case last month, Antony White KC, for Associated, put it to him: “This was a threat tantamount to blackmail, wasn’t it Mr Johnson?”
Johnson replied: “No it’s not blackmail. Blackmail is a serious criminal offence.”
He suggested that Mr Anderson’s written account of the call was “a monkeyed up memo” designed to serve his own agenda.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
