WHO’S ON TRIAL? IT’S NOT CLEAR
It is sometimes tricky to know who is the alleged perp here at the Mike Duffy trial.
This is especially true since Don Bayne, Duffy’s lawyer, began cross- examining Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff and the man who paid back $ 90,000 of Duffy’s ill- gotten expenses out of his own pocket, and, the sly bastard, tried so very hard to hide what he was doing that he wrote at the top of the bank draft, on the left- hand side, “Senate expenses.”
Bayne’s theory is that his poor client was the victim of a vast dark conspiracy that sought to make him repay the expenses, totally overwhelmed his fervent desire to defend himself and his free will, and which involved if not the Prince of Darkness himself, then many of the Prince’s many minions, including, of course, Wright.
And there’s an element of truth to it all, in that Duffy was embarrassing to the prime minister and the government, and they desperately wanted to contain the scandal.
They failed, of course, because Duffy is a loose cannon and the Conservative senators the PMO was trying to herd were like toddlers on the rampage, prone to random bizarre behaviour and occasional tantrums.
The best proof that they failed is this freaking trial, where a passerby, sitting in, would assume that Wright, the witness, is the alleged perpetrator, or perhaps the prime minister, and where, this being Ottawa in mid- federal election, every thundered question by Bayne echoes across the land and into the campaign buses where it is parsed to shreds as though the question was the evidence, not the answer.
But if there’s no doubt that this PMO was involved in sometimes grubby conduct, the problem with Bayne’s theory is that it ignores the record.
If Duffy really had wanted to defend his claim that his actual main residence was not in Ottawa but in P. E. I., and that he’d done nothing wrong, he could have easily done it.
After all, he was a veteran former broadcaster, with all the greasy connections that game can entail, and if, the very first time that Wright told him he had to repay his expenses because even if they were potentially legally defensible, they were ethically repellent, the Old Duff could have called a press conference, told the world what was going on and taken his chances.
But what he tried to do, instead, was get the best deal he could, hang on to the job he inexplicably loves without ever explicitly acknowledging wrongdoing or paying a sou.
He got himself a lawyer straight away, one Janice Payne, who later distinguished herself by asking the PMO to promise that if anyone tried to refer Duffy’s expense claims for “further investigation or action by Deloitte ( the auditor), the RCMP or any other party,” the Tories would vote it down.
Wright nearly lost his mind at that one, pointing out that, “If someone thinks a crime has occurred, can we have an internal agreement not to refer it to the RCMP? I think that would be a scandal, no?”
As he said in another note, “I have some vague recollection from law school about it being improper for a lawyer to seek civil advantage in connection with a promise to refer or to not refer a suspected criminal matter to the authorities.” Fuzzy as his memory was, it was still apparently better than Payne’s.
It was Duffy who first raised the possibility of RCMP involvement with Wright, writing him a month earlier to report he’d seen a TV reporter claim “the libs want the rcmp to investigate senators….” He expressed his hope that if that happened, Liberal senators “will be on the rcmp list?”
Lesson 1: Duffy’s first reaction, then and now, is, if he’s going down, so will all those he can drag with him.
When faced with Wright’s unyielding stand that what he’d done was wrong, Duffy three times agreed to repay the money he owed, but in the next uttering, would revert to his position of innocence.
It was he who raised the question of money with Wright, telling him, according to Wright, on Feb. 19 that he didn’t have the funds to repay.
That time, Wright didn’t respond, but when they talked again the next night, and Duffy “said again he didn’t have the money to repay,” Wright said he’d look into it.
At one point, Wright said, Duffy even raised his heart problems and said “should he pass away, his wife wouldn’t have anything.”
Lesson 2: No bar is too low for Duffy.
Bayne was going through the emails of a day in February of 2013 when the folks in the PMO believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that the long- running Duffy story was about to die.
Unusually, Duffy was in P. E. I., and showed up at the local CBCTV shop in Charlottetown to say, as he’d agreed, that he was going to pay back his expenses and that he “may have made a mistake” in declaring that his cottage on the island was his “Primary Residence.”
Briefly, the boys in the PMO allowed themselves a moment of joy.
Wright sent out a note to thank them for their work.
“Yay this is fun,” Andrew MacDougall, then Harper’s communications director, wrote — just before watching Duffy tell another network he was under “strict orders” not to talk to a third network. “Sweet,” Wright replied. “This was extreme glee that you’ve pulled this off!” Bayne cried. “‘ Sweet’ conveys your glee!”
No, said Wright, it was his wry comment that, yet once again, Duffy was saying something that wasn’t true and was gumming up the works.
“These are terms of exultation!” Bayne said. “You are all now gloating in the PMO that you’ve pulled this off.”
Worth remembering was the moment late last Friday, when Bayne was asking Wright if he’d watched Duffy on TV from P. E. I. “Did you think, ‘ This is untrue’?” he asked.
Bayne turned toward Duffy then, and on his face was a smile of delight: The lawyer was hugely enjoying himself.
Don Bayne knows about glee and gloating, in other words: Pot, meet kettle.
Duffy is a loose cannon and the Conservative senators the PMO was trying to herd were like toddlers on the rampage, prone to random bizarre behaviour and occasional tantrums. Christie Blatchford