Senate scandal closes in on Harper
Wright sought PM’s OK for party payout to Duffy, emails suggest
RCMP documents released Wednesday lay out in detail how the Prime Minister’s Office allegedly tried to manipulate a Senate audit report on Sen. Mike Duffy’s expense claims, including bringing high-ranking senators aboard to try to alter the course of a forensic investigation.
The records, which include dozens of pages outlining emails between the main political players and their staff, were made public as the RCMP also alleged Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, broke the law when he agreed to repay Duffy’s questionable housing expenses.
And while Wright is quoted in the RCMP documents as saying the PM was not aware of his plan to cut a $90,000 cheque from his personal funds to assist Duffy — a point on which Harper is also adamant — other sections of the RCMP records suggest Harper had more knowledge of Duffy’s woes and the widening scandal than the prime minister has publicly spoken about.
The documents also suggest Harper may have known at a key point in the affair that the party was willing to pick up the tab for Duffy’s housing expenses.
The RCMP allegations, unproven in court, are part of a process whereby investigators laid out allegations of fraud, bribery and breach of trust against both Duffy and Wright.
RCMP Cpl. Greg Horton writes that between Feb. 6 and March 28, 2013, Wright “did directly or indirectly corruptly give or offer to a member of Parliament for the benefit of that person, any money, valuable consideration, or office in respect of anything done or omitted, or to be done or omitted by him in his official capacity,” contrary to the Criminal Code.
Wright issued a statement through his lawyer Wednesday saying, “My intention was always to secure repayment of funds owed to taxpayers. I acted within the scope of my duties and remain confident that my actions were lawful. I have no further comment at this time.”
The development comes as a political bombshell for the Conservative government, which has been on its heels since the scandal broke in May. Harper, who came to office in 2006 promising to clean up politics, has faced daily attacks from the opposition over the affair, which has now only deepened with the spectre that his former chief of staff could one day face criminal charges.
The RCMP court document was filed as part of a request to gain access to emails between several highprofile Conservative senators embroiled in the expense repayment controversy: former government Senate leader Marjory LeBreton, and David Tkachuk and Carolyn Stewart Olsen, the two top Tories on the committee that oversaw Duffy’s audit. The RCMP is also seeking more banking records for Duffy.
The RCMP note that Wright believed he had done nothing wrong when he decided to use his personal funds to pay back $90,000 of Duffy’s irregular expenses. The documents also indicate that Duffy, for his part, believed his expense claims were legitimate and that he should not have to pay them back.
Emails Wright provided to the RCMP show Wright’s increasing frustration with Duffy’s belief that he had done nothing wrong, including taking Senate money for meals eaten at his Ottawa home, and with Duffy’s “outbursts in Senate caucus” that made it difficult for his Senate colleagues to agree to anything that “helps him save face.” Wright repeatedly told him to repay the Senate for his expenses. Duffy, according to the RCMP documents, resisted, then said he did not have the money to make repayment.
Because the issue was becoming an embarrassment to the government, the RCMP allege, a plan emerged under which the money would be repaid for him, and under which LeBreton, Stewart Olsen and Tkachuk would have an audit report of Duffy’s spending lightened so that “inflammatory language” about Duffy’s residency claims would be removed from the final version.
“We are not asking the senators to absolve him of anything — they would refuse that quite properly. We are asking them to treat the repayment as the final chapter of the expenses issue relating to his designation of the P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence to this point in time,” Wright wrote in an email on March 24, one of thousands provided to investigators.
“That is something to which Sens. LeBreton, Tkachuk and StewartOlsen already agreed once.”
On May 8, the day before Duffy’s audit was released, LeBreton, Stewart Olsen, and PMO officials met. At that meeting, they discussed the Senate committee’s draft report, the RCMP says, and the PMO staff there — issues management director Chris Woodcock and Patrick Rogers, manager of parliamentary affairs — urged them “to have the report amended to be less critical” of Duffy. Despite objections from one of LeBreton’s staff, it appears that’s what happened.
That staffer, Chris Montgomery, who has since left LeBreton’s office for the private sector, told investigators that in his seven years in the Senate, he couldn’t recall any other time PMO officials “actually attended meetings and insisted on wording of a Senate report.”
The details in the RCMP court documents, also suggest Duffy’s demands of the PMO, including stopping the independent audit of his expenses by Deloitte, “were the start of the ‘monstrous fraud’” — words Duffy recently used in the Senate to defend himself against a move to suspend him. The RCMP allege he and other senators interviewed by investigators may not have been entirely accurate in their recounting of events, both to police and inside the Senate chamber. None of the allegations has been tested in court, nor have any charges been laid. What is clear from the RCMP documents is that the management of the Duffy affair appeared to be progressively spinning out of control.
Harper told Duffy on Feb. 13 to repay any improperly claimed funds — a message Wright, the documents say, had also delivered days earlier. But Duffy, whom the RCMP alleged thought he was “entitled to his entitlements,” made demands, including getting him out of the Deloitte audit; acknowledging there were no concerns regarding his residency and being a senator from Prince Edward Island; having the PMO pay off his legal fees; getting the Conservative caucus to toe the party line on speaking points regarding Duffy’s repayment, and giving Duffy the right “to collect a living allowance in the future.”
A deal appeared to be in place to have the Conservative Fund cover the costs, but Sen. Irving Gerstein, chairman of the fund, refused to raid party coffers when the price tag was found to be $90,000.
That decision, however, came after PMO lawyers, including onetime Harper legal adviser Benjamin Perrin, had already negotiated a deal with Duffy and his lawyer, Janice Payne, and after Duffy had publicly said he would pay the money back.
What followed was a series of emails and moves to get Duffy out of the audit. The RCMP allege that Wright asked Gerstein to get in touch with a contact at Deloitte — a partner named Michael Runia — to see what was happening with the audit. In a March 1 email, Wright told Perrin that Gerstein’s actions were part of PMO work to get Deloitte to stop auditing Duffy.
By March 8, Wright had decided to pay the Duffy expenses himself and told his assistant, Chris Woodcock, about his decision. “….For you only: I am personally covering Duffy’s $90K …” he emailed Woodcock.
The RCMP say Wright didn’t tell Harper about the “minutiae” of Duffy’s repayment, but that Harper was kept apprised of problems with Duffy’s expenses as the controversy increasingly became a political headache.
At one point in the documents, the RCMP quote from a May 14 email from Wright where he says: “The PM knows, in broad terms only, that I personally assisted Duffy when I was getting him to agree to the expenses.” It isn’t clear from the documents what “personally assisted” means in this specific context. The documents say the 2,600 emails the investigative team has reviewed suggest “the Prime Minister was informed by his staff that they were working on a plan to have Sen. Duffy repay expenses,” a plan contingent on Duffy not losing his Senate seat.
Cpl. Horton says Harper may have been aware of the original plans to use the Conservative Fund to repay Duffy’s legal bill — a Feb. 22 email from Wright says he wanted to “speak to the PM before everything is considered final,” referencing the demands Duffy made of PMO — but the full details of what was discussed with Harper are not contained in the emails.
In the House of Commons Wednesday, Harper pointed to the RCMP document as proof he was not apprised of the Duffy-Wright personal payment deal.
“It is in black and white that I did not know. The RCMP confirms it,” Harper said under grilling from Opposition NDP Leader Tom Mulcair.
The RCMP document raises questions about what LeBreton and Stewart Olsen said to investigators during interviews over the summer.
When the audit of Duffy was done, the PMO was given a draft of the Senate committee’s report on that audit, which contained harsh language about Duffy. That language was removed by votes of the Senate committee after two hours of emails between the PMO and Stewart Olsen.
In an interview with Postmedia News, Sen. David Tkachuk, who chaired that Senate committee, said he first spoke with Wright about Duffy’s spending in December, thinking it would become politically problematic.
Tkachuk said he, Wright, LeBreton, Stewart Olsen, and political staff from the PMO and Senate did meet in late April or early May about Duffy’s audit and reviewed a copy of the audit. That meeting, he told Postmedia News, was to talk political strategy around the release of the audit, specifically what everyone would say publicly. “We had discussion — ‘what do you think the report will say?’ — nothing that would be abnormal,” Tkachuk said.