Ex-Tory party intern says offer to MacKay team was rebuffed

Former O’Toole aide now in middle of pitched fight between campaigns

OTTAWA— A former intern who says he attempted to leak sensitive Erin O’Toole campaign videos to Peter MacKay’s campaign claims his offer was rejected, adding another twist to the allegations of hacking in the Conservative leadership race.

In an exclusive statement to the Star, the former employee of Calgary Centre MP Greg McLean’s constituency office said he approached Jamie Lall, a Calgary-based MacKay campaign organizer, in early June and offered him log-in credentials for the O’Toole campaign’s Zoom account. The account included 38 gigabytes of video conferences, including senior staff meetings, debate preparations and private meetings conducted by O’Toole.

He said Lall quickly shut down the meeting and told him a few days later the MacKay campaign wasn’t interested.

Last week, the O’Toole campaign submitted a complaint to police, accusing the MacKay campaign — and Lall in particular — of hacking its Zoom account.

Lall has denied any wrongdoing and told the Star he is considering legal action against the O’Toole campaign.

The intern, a 19-year-old man, was fired from McLean’s office this week. He provided a written statement to the Star on the condition that his name not be used.

“During the meeting when I brought up the information about the Zoom account, Jamie Lall abruptly finished the meeting,” he told the Star.

“I forwarded a link to share videos in a folder to Jamie Lall, but I do not know whether that request was accepted, or whether the link was used or denied,” he wrote. “I hadn’t notified Jamie Lall that I would be sending him an email beforehand.

“When I followed up with Jamie Lall a few days later, he said that the campaign has declined to use the information.”

The man also acknowledged downloading videos from the Zoom account himself.

He now finds himself out of a job and in the middle of a pitched fight between the O’Toole and MacKay campaigns.

According to his version of events, he was hired on May 1 to work in McLean’s constituency office, although McLean had endorsed O’Toole in the Conservative leadership race and he had publicly supported MacKay.

He said McLean asked him to upload a video onto social media. After some email trouble, he said he was contacted by Jordan Katz, a regional organizer for O’Toole, and given the log-in credentials to a Zoom account used by the O’Toole campaign. Reached for comment Wednesday, Katz would only say that the intern misrepresented himself in order to gain access to the account.

The O’Toole campaign named Lall personally in its complaint to police, describing him as a senior organizer for the campaign and accusing him of being one of three people who had inappropriately accessed its files. The MacKay campaign told the Star that it could not comment on the substance of the claims because the O’Toole campaign had not shared the details of its allegations.

In a complaint filed Friday with Toronto police and the RCMP, the O’Toole campaign alleged that its files were inappropriately accessed and downloaded from three Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. It said two of the IP addresses were in Calgary, and the third was in Toronto.

The O’Toole campaign said its internal investigation used publicly available IP-locating services to narrowed down the Toronto location to an area in midtown. A senior O’Toole campaign source told the Star more than 100 unique videos were downloaded at that IP address.

It will now be up to the Toronto police cybercrimes unit and the RCMP’s national division to sift through the political squabbling and determine if any crime has been committed. A source said police interviews are scheduled to start later this week.

A Conservative party spokesperson said there would be no comment on a police matter .