Call recordings recovered in one day
The national RCMP’S director of media relations is under investigation for recording snippets of the teleconference call between commissioner Brenda Lucki and N.S. Mounties, which have confirmed political interference just days after a mass shooting claimed 22 lives in April 2020.
Dan Brien recorded parts of the teleconference call on April 28, 2020, when Lucki scolded N.S. RCMP members for not disclosing during a news briefing what firearms the gunman used on April 18 and 19, 2020.
But when the police force learned about the recordings in June 2022, Brien told the RCMP he no longer had access to the audio files. Therefore, they weren’t provided to the Mass Casualty Commission.
That is up until Oct. 13, when the RCMP were able to recover the three partial recordings revealing Lucki's request, stemming from former public safety minister Bill Blair.
An affidavit by Supt. Jeffrey Beaulac, the RCMP’S deputy chief security officer at the RCMP’S national headquarters, released by the Mass Casualty Commission on Tuesday details how the calls resurfaced four months later.
According to Beaulac, Brien told the RCMP on June 24 that he had recorded parts of the teleconference call “in error” on his personal cellphone and “it was not his common practice to record meetings.”
But Brien thought he no longer had access to the recordings because they were taken on a cellphone that had been stolen.
The recollection of events, however, differs from what Brien told Lori Ward, a lawyer for the federal Justice Department that oversees the RCMP, shortly after the recordings came to light.
“We met with Mr. Brien on July 7, 2022, and he advised us that he would on occasion record interviews that the commissioner gave so he would have a record of what was actually said,” Ward said in a letter addressed to the Mass Casualty Commission July 8.
During the meeting with Ward, Brien was asked to “confirm what device the meeting was recorded on; whether he still has the device; if not, what happened to it; and if there is any way to retrieve the recording.”
That same day, Brien went on sick leave and hasn’t returned to the workplace.
Beaulac said the RCMP had multiple concerns when it came to Brien’s recordings: privacy and security.
In July, the RCMP launched an investigation into the “unauthorized recording of an RCMP operational meeting on an employee’s personal mobile device and stored outside of the RCMP’S information technology infrastructure.”
Investigators with the RCMP requested an interview with Brien near the end of August, but Brien said he needed to speak with his personal physician, who wasn’t available until Sept. 6 or later, on whether or not he could do so.
In the meantime, Brien’s Rcmp-issued devices, RCMP networks, shared drives and work email were being searched for traces of the call, but nothing was found.
After being cleared for an interview, Brien sat down with a security investigator on Sept. 20.
Turns out, during the interview, Brien said “he was still in possession of the device upon which the April 28, 2020, call was recorded.”
“He confirmed that he had deleted the app that was used to record the call sometime between the April 28, 2020, all and the Spring of 2022 due to space limitations on his phone,” Beaulac said.
Brien gave the phone to RCMP but when investigators went to set up a meeting with Brien to extract the data from his phone on Sept. 29, the director told them he wouldn’t be back in Ottawa until Oct. 10.
“The RCMP does not have the authority to search, in the absence of the individual’s consent or judicial authorization, a personal digital mobile device,” Beaulac explained.
On Oct. 12, Brien met with the investigators to allow the search to go ahead.
The following day, three audio recordings of the April 28, 2020, meeting were recovered but they weren’t turned over to the Mass Casualty Commission until four days later, Oct. 17.
But that doesn’t end the RCMP’S investigation into Brien.
Beaulac said the security investigation, as well as an administrative investigation into Brien’s action to record the teleconference, are still ongoing.
The Mass Casualty Commission will undergo brief virtual proceedings on Thursday to table the three recordings as exhibits, as well as other documents.