An act of an honest man
It’s funny how, perhaps particularly in criminal courtrooms, the preference is almost always to paint the world in black and white.
This may never be more true than it is at the fraud, breach-of-trust and bribery trial of the disgraced Prince Edward Island Senator Mike Duffy.
Here, Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff and Duffy’s benefactor, Thursday completed his first day in cross-examination at the hands of Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne.
Wright essentially repeated a story that many find preposterous: He didn’t tell Harper (or many others) he was personally repaying Duffy’s $90,000 in ill-gotten expense claims; he did it because he thought the claims were a disgrace, that the taxpayers had been robbed and because, as a wealthy man, he could.
At the same time, Wright admitted that he had had to frog-march Duffy to the point of doing the right thing and agreeing to repay the expenses, that he had leaned on him hard, and that he believed, and even believed that Duffy believed, that Duffy may have had a legally defensible explanation for his conduct — the Senate’s ludicrous non-rules on all such matters.
In an interview he had with the RCMP in the summer of 2013, by which time Wright had left the PMO, he was asked if he thought Duffy was really so grandiose that he actually had expected the PMO and the Senate would bend over backwards to save him.
In other words, is it arrogance that explains Duffy?
And Wright said, “I don’t think so. I think this is a scared man, flailing around. … He thinks I threatened him … he feels we’re against him, he doesn’t trust me, he thinks his very existence as a senator is at risk. … I don’t want to use ‘paranoid,’ but I think he thinks his very existence as a senator is at risk.”
Bayne’s view, and certainly that of those who see the human race as far more organized than I do, is that Wright was part of a monstrous conspiracy, or as the lawyer put it once — this when Wright was out of the room at his request and Bayne didn’t have to meet his serious and very level gaze — that Wright was the “chief commander” of a “conspiratorial action” in the PMO that involved “the conscription of Senate leadership,” misleading Canadians, and forcing his poor sap of a client to take $90,000 of Wright’s money, the quid pro quo of which required Duffy to admit he may have made a mistake.
And to some significant degree, much of that is true.
There was an organized effort in the PMO to control t he Duffy problem, of course there was. The hundreds of pages of emails from senior PMO staff are evidence that they surely tried. Wright was certainly party to much of it.
But, just as Wright predicted early on in a Feb. 6, 2013 email to some of his senior staff, “…let this small group be under no illusion. I think that this is going to end badly.”
And as he told Bayne a few minutes after the lawyer quoted from the email, “It did end badly.” And then, softly, “It hasn’t even ended.”
Can a 60-something-yearold man, a veteran broadcaster who had covered politics for decades and was certainly a man of the world, who was being advised throughout this process by his own lawyer (her bills were covered, of course), really be forced to take a $90,000 gift which, had the conspiracy been more successful, might have seen Duffy save his own rear even as the government was saving its own?
As Wright said, in response to Bayne’s you-made-him-take-it scenario, “Senator Duffy is an adult. He was advised by counsel. We went back and forth, and finally, he agreed to a statement to which he contributed.”
(Duffy’s contribution, incidentally, which he asked a PMO speechwriter to make, was for some “down-home” P.E.I.-isms to be worked into the statement. Presumably, when he genuinely sounded “down home,” he sounded like Ottawa, where he lived and worked most of his adult life.)
What seems most plausible is that several different forces were at work simultaneously, as is often the case in real life, sometimes even in the same flawed human being in the same darned moment.
Wright is far too genteel to ever say it so coarsely, but my hunch is that when he learned of Duffy’s porkery — remember, on the first expense form he filed, starting on the day after he learned he’d been appointed but well before he was sworn in, he claimed “additional living expenses” for living in the same house he’d lived in for five years — Wright was repelled.
Revulsion appears to have driven him personally, not only to make out the bank draft for Duffy but, before that, to try to make him see that whether or not what he’d done was illegal, it was improper, and that ordinary people would recognize it immediately: Duffy had been caught with his snout in the trough, and he needed to make it right.
Happily for Wright, his personal raison d’être coincided with the needs of his job, to protect Harper and his government and to stifle scandal, wherever it bred.
He must have been as much of an anomaly in politics as he is in that courtroom, an honest witness sitting in a chair most often occupied by mooks, thugs and liars, this man with the great wide streak of hard-as-nails pragmatism and the almost ridiculous sense of propriety.
I think he thinks his very existence as a senator is at risk