Newly-released court documents also show that a Conservative Party staffer told Elections Canada that he been asked by another Burke campaign worker in the days before the vote about making disinformation calls.
The documents strongly suggest links between the Guelph campaign and the phony calls, which Conservatives seized on to cast the robocalls scandal as the work of rogue elements working at the riding level, not a coordinated campaign.
The sworn statement filed by Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews and released Friday makes a crucial link between the calls and the Internet Protocol address (IP) used to arrange the fraudulent calls made through Edmonton voice-broadcasting company RackNine.
The IP address was used both by Burke campaign worker Andrew Prescott to arrange legitimate calls with the company and by whoever placed the fraudulent calls that sent hundreds of electors to the wrong polling stations, Mathews alleges.
RackNine records provided to Elections Canada showed that Prescott’s account had been accessed from 99.225.28.34, a Rogers IP address in Guelph. He used his account to send out robocalls promoting Burke campaign events.
Most of the IP addresses used by Poutine to logon to RackNine’s website to set up the calls were hidden by a proxy server that masks the originating IP, in an apparent attempt to conceal the user’s identity.
But Poutine — or “Pierre Jones”, as he was known to RackNine and PayPal — slipped up and made contact from the same address used to access Prescott’s account with the company.
The data linking the two RackNine clients, identified by client numbers 45 for Prescott and 93 for “Jones,” was captured in session logs not discovered by RackNine owner Matt Meier until March 6, although Mathews first asked for the IP address in November. Meier, who handled a lot of legitimate robocalls for the Conservatives during the campaign, uncovered the link after combing through session logs.
The logs showed that client 93, the Jones account, primarily used an IP that traced back to the proxy server, while client 45, the Prescott account, used the Rogers IP.
But in the two days before the election, both clients used both the proxy server IP and the Rogers IP, Mathews’ statement says, and on election day both accounts connected to RackNine from the Rogers IP within four minutes of each other.
There is no proof that Prescott himself logged onto RackNine using the Jones account — only that the logon came from the same address IP that had also been used by his account.
It is unclear from documents if the Rogers IP address was assigned to Burke’s campaign office or another location. Prescott hung up when reached by a reporter on Friday and his lawyer could not be reached.
Mathews interviewed Prescott in February about his use of RackNine for voter contact calls, and they were scheduled to have an interview on March 8, but the day before, Prescott’s lawyer cancelled the meeting.
The documents released Friday pertain only to the robocalls in Guelph. Elections Canada has said it logged complaints about misleading live or pre-recorded calls from about 200 ridings across the country. In Northern Ontario, Elections Canada investigators have been busy recently trying to obtain incoming call records from complainants who say they received misleading calls.
Prescott is a self-described cellphone expert who is active in provincial and federal politics in the Guelph area. He works in information technology for a local hospital and also writes a politics blog under the name “Christian Conservative.”
Mathews filed a sworn statement on March 20 to request a court order for Rogers to turn over subscriber information for all transactions related to the IP address during the election and for a period earlier this year. The company complied with the order the following day, providing three different account numbers.
Prescott, who has repeatedly denied having any involvement in the deceptive election day calls, downloaded a list of numbers from the Conservatives’ central database on April 30, the same day that someone bought a disposable “burner” cell phone under the fake Poutine name, according to the Mathews statement.
Prescott, who was out of the country on a holiday for part of the campaign, sent an email to Morgan and Michael Sona, the campaign’s communications director, providing contact information for RackNine.
According to Christopher Rougier, a party worker also interviewed by Elections Canada, Prescott had access to the centralized Constituent Information Management Systems (CIMS) the party used to track voters and donors. Records from CIMS given to Mathews by Rougier ——indicate that Prescott downloaded three “Daemon Dailer” reports for Guelph — a list of phone numbers with voters identified as supporters or non-supporters.
One of those reports “cannot be recovered from CIMS,” Rougier told Mathews.
Sources have told Postmedia and the Citizen that Elections Canada investigators have aggressively questioned witnesses about the missing data. Rougier, the party’s director of voter contact, played a key role co-ordinating telephone services during the campaign, working closely with national campaign manager Jenni Byrne.
Elections Canada has not served the Conservative Party with a production order. The party has been “proactively” providing information to the investigation.
Mathews says that Meier of RackNine provided the list of numbers used in the fraudulent robocall to the Conservative Party, which then compared it to the list of CIMS data for Guelph.
“They said the RackNine list appears to be a list of identified non-Conservative supporters,” Mathews wrote.
Mathews’ statement recounts interviews with two Conservative campaign workers who now work for the government, who report that Sona discussed deceptive telephone tactics. Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton sat in on those interviews.
Matthew McBain, who worked on the central campaign and is now a policy adviser to Agiculture Minister Gerry Ritz, said he spoke to Sona in April after Guelph campaign volunteer John White vouched for him.
“Sona spoke to McBain about a campaign of disinformation such as making a misleading poll-moving call,” Mathews wrote. “McBain warned Sona off such conduct as the party would not stand for it.”
After the Citizen and Postmedia first revealed the robocalls investigation, Sona suddenly resigned his job on Parliament Hill with MP Eve Adams, hours after he was named in a news report that cited unnamed Conservative Party sources. Other sources subsequently said the order to accept Sona’s resignation came from Byrne.
Mathews also interviewed Chris Crawford, a Guelph campaign worker who now serves as director of parliamentary affairs for Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Peter Penashue. During the campaign, Crawford was in charge of downloading CIMS data for use by canvassing teams and uploading voter-identification information gathered by volunteers knocking on doors and working the phone bank.
Crawford told Mathews that, while in Burke’s campaign office, he had heard Sona speaking to campaign manager Ken Morgan about “how Americans do politics.” The conversation referred to calling non-supporters late at night pretending to be Liberals, or calling electors to tell them their polling stations had moved.
Crawford told Mathews he did not think Sona was serious but claimed he told Sona the comments were inappropriate.
Crawford, Sona and Prescott were good friends who spent time together on provincial and federal political campaigns through their association with the Guelph Campus Conservatives.
In February, on his blog, Prescott wrote of Crawford: “He’s an amazing organizer, and he’s THE BEST Canvassing Coordinator I’ve ever seen in action.”
Other details from the documents released by the Ottawa court on Friday include:
— The RackNine account used to make the calls was funded with PayPal transactions, made with untraceable pre-paid “Vanilla” brand gift credit cards. The culprit bought a Vanilla MasterCard with a $200 credit and three Vanilla Visa cards totalling $260 from two Shoppers Drug Marts on opposite sides of downtown Guelph. Poutine used the proxy server to connect with PayPal, Mathews said.
— Mathews said he intends to seek a court order in Saskatchewan to obtain the records from freeproxyserver.ca, the proxy used by Poutine. Marc Norris, who runs the server from his home in Conquest, Saskatchewan, told the Citizen on Friday that he had complied with a court order and provided investigators with the records sometime last month.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: GLEN MCGREGOR AND STEPHEN MAHER
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