ERIN O’TOOLE’S CONSERVATIVE LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN IS ALLEGING SOMEONE IN AN MP’S OFFICE PASSED LOGIN INFORMATION TO PETER MACKAY’S CAMPAIGN, GIVING HIS CHIEF RIVAL ACCESS TO HIGH-LEVEL CAMPAIGN DETAILS.
O’toole side says Mackay given sensitive info
Erin O’toole’s Conservative leadership campaign is alleging that someone in a member of Parliament’s office passed sensitive login information to rival Peter Mackay’s campaign, giving his chief competitor access to virtually all high-level campaign activity, according to a letter sent to police and obtained by the National Post.
The O’toole campaign believes at least 138 Zoom meetings in English were accessed and at least seven meetings in French. Some of the meetings were high-level strategy discussions among senior campaign figures.
The version of the letter obtained by the Post redacts the name of the person in the MP’S office who is alleged to have taken the login credentials from the MP’S email account. The O’toole campaign has obtained a confession letter from the person, according to a senior campaign source.
The campaign wouldn’t identify the MP, but did acknowledge the person was an O’toole supporter.
An O’toole staffer, who asked not to be identified in order to describe the inner workings of a campaign, said that if the allegations were true, then the Mackay campaign was able to “effectively bug the virtual boardroom” of its rival camp.
“Campaigning in the time of COVID-19, there are internal video conferences to replace boardroom meetings about the platform, the message-of-the-day, debate prep, issues management, strategic planning, fundraising. It’s all happening in that virtual boardroom that is Zoom,” the person said.
The letter identifies Jamie Lall, described as a “senior regional advisor to the Peter Mackay campaign,” as the person who persuaded the employee in the MP’S office to hunt for the login information.
In a campaign statement on Friday, O’toole identified Lall on Twitter as the subject of the complaint sent to the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and Toronto Police Service.
“Not a single word of this is true,” Lall wrote on Twitter, followed by three laughing emojis. Lall did not respond on Monday to a summary of the allegations made against him provided by the Post.
Jordan Paquet, a spokesperson for the Mackay campaign, said “the O’toole campaign has made accusations but has failed to give us anything at all to back up those accusations. We cannot comment on documentation that we have not seen.”
The letter to police alleges that Lall convinced the person in the MP’S office to download private video calls from the O’toole campaign Zoom account and share them with the Mackay campaign.
The campaign says it also learned that the two met in person, where the login credentials were passed “surreptitiously” to Lall, who is then alleged to have shared the information with other campaign officials in Toronto.
The O’toole campaign is confident that there are enough digital fingerprints to make a case.
When a private video of a meeting with social conservatives in Quebec was leaked to Radio-canada a week ago, the campaign launched a full investigation to determine how it happened.
The campaign initially suspected some rogue operator in a constituency association had passed the information to the Mackay camp, but the O’toole tech team was certain that the leaked video could only have come from the Zoom archive held by the O’toole campaign.
The Mackay campaign denied being the source of the leak to Radio-canada.
“The Mackay campaign is not in possession of any such documents, has made no attempt to obtain possession of any such information, and has leaked nothing of the sort to Radio-canada or any other entity,” said Paquet.
A deeper investigation following the Radio-canada incident then found multiple unauthorized entries into the O’toole campaign’s digital vault.
The IT team on the O’toole campaign cross-referenced their Zoom data logs and IP address traces with the campaign’s mailing list data. The two IP addresses associated with the unauthorized activity on the O’toole server were also on the campaign’s mailing list, allowing the tech team to easily discover the identity of the two “specific individuals,” the letter says. All they had to do was look at the email addresses associated with the matching IP addresses.
“We have more specific information; however, we will await further discussions with police,” the letter reads.
The letter was sent on Friday to the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and the Toronto police. Due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the allegations, it is so far unclear who will be conducting the investigation, but the O’toole camp believes the RCMP National Division is involved. The National Division is tasked with protecting the prime minister and foreign dignitaries and investigating “sensitive, high-profile cases that could threaten Canada’s integrity and reputation.”
The O’toole campaign was in contact with the OPP, which will be meeting on Monday to determine how the investigation will proceed.
O’toole’s campaign says their investigation found that the login credentials were compromised on June 5 and that logs show unauthorized access on June 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12.
In a statement released on Friday, O’toole’s campaign called for Mackay’s campaign team “to immediately return and delete any stolen data or videos currently in the possession of staff and volunteers.”