Investigators had hoped the Internet Protocol (IP) address 99.225.28.34 would help point them to a suspect responsible for the more than 6,000 calls to non-Conservatives on election day.
But court documents made public Friday show that investigators now consider the IP address “inconclusive,” raising doubt about when, if ever, they will wrap up the politically-charged probe that began more than 14 months ago.
Since days after the vote, Elections Canada has been trying to identify Poutine, the suspect who sent out the pre-recorded calls telling voters, incorrectly, that their polling stations had moved.
In March, under a court order, Rogers provided investigators with the name of the subscriber in an unnamed community southwest of Guelph who was using the IP address when the calls were made through a phone-dialer service in Edmonton.
Elections Canada investigators Al Mathews and Ronald Lamothe travelled to the Guelph area in April to interview four residents of the home where the Rogers subscriber lived.
They found the residents had no apparent connection to the campaign of Conservative candidate Marty Burke and did not appear to know their wireless Internet connection was being misused, according new court documents unsealed in Ottawa on Friday.
“Persons resident there during the election period disclaim any involvement in the election process and deny knowledge of any of the primary Conservative campaign participants.”
None of the residents could account for the use of the IP address and none could recognize pictures they were shown of Burke campaign workers, Mathews said in a sworn statement. A fifth resident, who was reached on the phone by his mother, also came up blank, Mathews said.
(Mathews said he did not name the subscribers in the court document to shield them from media interest in the investigation.)
“None knew of individuals visiting their residence who might have used the IP,” the document says.
“The house has wireless Internet, which residents describe as ‘weak.’ I have no reason at this time to believe the individuals are not truthful.”
Other records obtained by Elections Canada show that five members of the Burke campaign team used that same IP address in the final weeks of the campaign to access CIMS, the Conservative Party’s central database of voter information.
Campaign manager Ken Morgan, deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott and volunteers John White, Trent Blanchette and Christopher Crawford all logged onto CIMS from the Rogers IP, according to the document. Through the Conservative Party’s lawyer, Arthur Hamilton, Crawford told investigators that he had always accessed CIMS from the Burke campaign office.
It seems unlikely anyone in the Burke campaign headquarters, which was located northeast of Guelph’s downtown, could have connected to a Wi-Fi signal on the opposite side of the city.
But in court documents, Mathews offers no possible explanation for how or why five campaign workers all signed on from the same IP address used by Poutine — and over a Wi-Fi signal nowhere close to their office.
Indeed, Mathews suggests that the subscriber information behind IP address looks to be a dead lead, calling it “so far inconclusive.”
Instead, his latest request for court orders focuses on the relationship between the IP address and log-ins to RackNine, the Edmonton-based call company used to transmit the robocalls.
RackNine’s owner, Matt Meier, has found the robocalls were sent using his servers by a customer known to the firm as “Client 93”, who logged on with the Rogers IP. Elections Canada has already tied this account to a disposable Virgin Mobile cellphone registered by the suspect using the bogus name Pierre Poutine.
Prescott, a RackNine subscriber known as “Client 45”, used the company to send out legitimate robocalls about campaign events. Records produced by the company show that Prescott and Poutine accessed the company’s servers from the same IP address, sometimes within a few minutes.
Both their accounts also used the same proxy server — an Internet service that can disguise IP addresses — based in Saskatchewan.
Prescott has consistently maintained he played no role in the misleading robocalls.
Mathews’ statement was used to obtain court orders compelling Rogers to provide more subscriber information about other IP addresses used by Client 45. One of the IPs, Mathews wrote, corresponds to an MTS Allstream account for St. Joseph Health Centre, where Prescott works as a systems administrator. Mathews traced two others, both Rogers Cable accounts, to Cambridge, Ont., the same town where Prescott lives.
Mathews wants the subscriber information for these IP addresses to be certain these belong to Prescott because he believes that Client 45, “who is probably Andrew Prescott, interacted on occasion with the individual responsible for the misleading calls to electors in Guelph ...”
Prescott is not talking, however. Through his lawyer, Mathew Stanley, he cancelled a scheduled interview with Mathews in March. Stanley did not respond to Mathews’ request in April for an interview. Stanley has not responded to repeated calls from the Citizen requesting comment.
With the IP address coming up cold, Mathews is also seeking a court order compelling Google Inc. to hand over information about the email account pierres1630@gmail.com that Poutine used with PayPal to pay for the RackNine calls.
Mathews says that when he asked for this information in February, Google told him that they are a U.S. company operating under U.S. law and that their records are immune from Canadian production orders. The company has taken the same position with the RCMP and is fighting for an exemption in court, Mathew notes.
Google, however, appears to have complied with this court order. Mathews filed a statement before a justice of the peace on Friday indicating Google had provided the information to him in June.
In April, Mathews interviewed Burke campaign volunteer John White, who has an Internet technology company.
White told Mathews that Sona “was looking about doing some stuff that might not be OK, and I told him go talk to Matt,” according to Mathews’ statement.
First in February and then in April, the investigators interviewed central campaign worker Matt McBain, both times in the presence of party lawyer Arthur Hamilton.
White vouched for Sona in an email, after which, McBain says, he called him.
Sona wanted “to set up an autodial so that the payment for the calls would not track back to the campaign.”
McBain told the investigators he presumed Sona was considering making “embarrassing or improper” calls, and told him the party “would not stand for it.”
Central campaign manager Guy Giorno has publicly discussed steps the party’s war room took to avoid unethical behaviour, and others have said that included having a compliance officer in the campaign to make sure rules were followed.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: GLEN MCGREGOR AND STEPHEN MAHER
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