Bombshell moment to ignite campaign
Where to begin but with the bombshell, at long last arriving at the Mike Duffy trial to set Parliament Hill and the campaign buses ablaze and potentially place Conservative Leader Stephen Harper in the soup.
What emerged at the trial late Tuesday was the revelation that another key Harper aide, Ray Novak, then working as Harper’s principal secretary and now on the election trail with the prime minister as his chief of staff, was allegedly in the room when then- chief of staff Nigel Wright announced that he was going to pay Duffy’s ill- gotten expenses out of his own pocket.
This was on March 22, 2013, just three days before Wright’s bank draft for $ 90,000 arrived at the office of Duffy’s then- lawyer, Janice Payne.
Wright was calling Payne to finalize the arrangements.
According to emails filed at trial, three people from the Prime Minister’s Office — Wright, Novak and Ben Perrin, then Harper’s special adviser and legal counsel — were all to be on the call with Payne.
But Tuesday, with Duffy’s tireless lawyer Don Bayne crossexamining Wright for a fourth consecutive day, it emerged that in his Feb. 20, 2014 statement to the RCMP, Perrin said he’d arrived a few minutes early to Wright’s office that day to give him the heads- up that the call was going to be “really difficult.”
Duffy and Payne, according to Perrin, were once again resisting agreeing to the dealinthe- works, with the senator for Prince Edward Island still imagining he might be able to convince the world that he’d done nothing wrong in claiming extra expenses for living in his longtime Kanata, Ont., house, and that his actual “primary residence” was his cottage in P. E. I.
“He ( Wright) said, ‘ He will be repaying because it’s coming out of my pocket,’ ” Perrin told the RCMP.
“And I believe Ray Novak was in the room at the time. Ray heard this,” Perrin said, “and I remember looking at Ray to see his reaction.”
Novak, who isn’t expected to testify as a witness here, has publicly maintained he didn’t know Wright was paying for Duffy until much later and that he wasn’t actually on the call; given his closeness with the prime minister, it added a level of support to Harper’s claim that he also didn’t know, and that once he did, Wright was gone from the PMO.
Wright told Bayne that “Ray was not on the call, though he may have dropped into the office.”
“Perrin will suggest that he was,” Bayne said.
“That’s just not true,” Wright replied firmly, adding that he’d wanted Novak on it, but it didn’t happen that way.
Now, worthy of note ( so guaranteed to be overlooked) is that while Bayne read aloud from Perrin’s RCMP statement, he didn’t ask Wright a single question about it, except how much he knew or didn’t about the mood of the Duffy- Payne contingent at the time.
Indeed, the propriety of putting to one witness the statement of another — let alone then failing to ask the witness any questions about it — is only arguably relevant to the issue of Duffy’s guilt or innocence.
This has been the norm throughout Wright’s cross- examination, in that the former chief of staff has been shown and questioned about dozens of emails he wasn’t copied on or said he’d never seen before.
This isn’t to suggest that Bayne’s grilling didn’t yield some nuggets.
One was Wright admitting that he’d exchanged BlackBerry messages “probably about two weeks ago” with Novak.
Again, however, Bayne didn’t ask what the two had discussed; it’s reasonable the two are friends, and that this was a personal message.
Another, which was Bayne’s focus for much of the day, was the attempt of the PMO to try, in the lawyer’s words, “secretly, conspiratorially” to “fix” the outcome of an independent audit commissioned by the Senate and being done by Deloitte.
There’s little doubt that Wright and others in the PMO were, in their desperate efforts to contain the Duffy scandal, trying at the least to have Duffy dropped from the audit; Wright defends that as reasonable, because once Duffy publicly said he was going to repay his expenses and “may have made a mistake” in claiming he actually lived in P. E. I., the audit was moot.
Whether it was as bad as Bayne portrayed it — Wright “trying to interfere with an independent audit” and enlisting Sen. Irving Gerstein to use his contacts at Deloitte to lean on the auditor doing the work — or as benign as Wright described it is difficult to know.
But the one sure thing that can be said of the PMO effort in this regard, whatever its purpose, is that it failed: the auditor stuck to his guns and Gerstein was effectively told to back off.
What is astonishing is how irredeemably political this trial — a criminal trial, after all, revolving around one man’s guilt or innocence — has been from the get- go.
Even in its earliest days, Bayne was noticeably ragging the puck and questioning relatively minor witnesses for days, almost as if he hoped to drag the whole business out.
Then, when it became apparent more time would be needed, he was keen to get it going this fall, when, by chance, everyone knew the election was coming. Prosecutors Jason Neubauer and Mark Holmes, who are also handling the fraud case against Sen. Mac Harb, said in open court they both have murder trials scheduled.
Miraculously, in late May, Harb’s lawyer, Sean May, appeared at the Ottawa courthouse with an application to have Harb’s trial date cancelled.
The case of the disgraced former Liberal senator, facing fraud and breach of trust charges of his own, had been slated to start Aug. 10.
Its postponement, agreed to by the prosecutors, meant these August weeks opened up time and space for the Duffy case to resume.
It’s surely just a happy coincidence, but one pales at the dark conspiracies Don Bayne would hatch if the likes of Nigel Wright ever claimed it was just a perfect storm of accident and happenstance.