Harper’s staff and top senators colluded to whitewash Duffy report: RCMP
OTTAWA (CP) — The prime minister’s chief of staff went to Stephen Harper for approval of a secret plan that would have seen the Conservative party repay Mike Duffy’s contested expenses and whitewash a Senate report, new RCMP documents suggest.
When the party balked at the ultimate total of Duffy’s $90,000 bill, however, Nigel Wright stepped in to pay the bill himself — apparently without Harper’s knowledge. Harper has called that a “deception.”
But emails included in Wednesday’s explosive new RCMP court filings quote Wright as getting a green light from Harper when the original plan was to have the party pay. The plan was to be kept entirely secret.
“I do want to speak to the PM before everything is considered final,” Wright wrote in one February dispatch.
An hour later, he followed up: “We are good to go from the PM...”
Asked late Wednesday whether the prime minister was asked in February to approve such a plan, Jason MacDonald, a spokeman for Harper, offered a one-word answer: “No.”
The 80-page court filing provides an unprecedented look into the months of discussions that took place inside the Prime Minister’s Office and the Senate on how to deal with the Duffy problem. In several cases, the documents illustrate senators and staff clashing or badmouthing each other behind the scenes as Stephen Harper’s office intervenes directly in an effort to manipulate the activities of Senate committees.
RCMP Cpl. Greg Horton alleges senior Conservatives went to great lengths to agree to Duffy’s list of demands to ensure he would say publicly he had repaid his living claims, thus making a political headache go away.
Email chains and details from police interviews also make clear exactly who was in the loop about the $90,000 payment from Wright: at least six Conservatives, including the party’s former executive director.
That contrasts with the claims made in the House of Commons this spring that no one else was aware of the plan, and that there were no documents related to the matter.
The Mounties say they have found no evidence that the prime minister knew specifically about the $90,000 payment. However, there are suggestions in the file he might have known about other elements of the plan: “The PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to repay the expenses.”