Crown prosecutor Brendan Gluckman spent Friday slowly going through metadata with RCMP Cpl. David Connors, a computer forensic examiner, laboriously establishing the dates and times of the electronic documents drawn from the laptop of Frank Hall.
The records show that several campaign invoices and quotes were created by Hall in Microsoft Word in October 2008 although they were dated June 2008.
Hall, who was president of a now-defunct voter contact firm at the time, has testified that he backdated invoices for work his company did for Del Mastro’s 2008 election campaign at Del Mastro’s request, an allegation the defence challenged in cross examination.
But computer records show that one document Hall sent to the campaign, for instance, was created at 7:48 p.m. on Oct. 6, 2008, a week before the 2008 election. It was dated June 20, 2008.
Earlier in the trial, the Crown told Judge Lisa Cameron that a personal cheque for $21,000 that Del Mastro gave Hall was dated August 2011, but that banking records show his account didn’t have enough money to cover it until October.
The Crown alleges that Del Mastro and Richard McCarthy, his official agent from the 2008 campaign, backdated records to hide expenses incurred during the campaign.
Del Mastro and McCarthy are charged with exceeding the spending limit and filing an incorrect financial return. Del Mastro is also charged with exceeding the donation limit. They each face a maximum year in prison and $1,000 fine if convicted.
The Crown’s case hinges on three banker’s boxes full of documents, mostly computer records extracted from Hall’s laptop.
Proving they may have been tampered with — which would make it easier to defend against the charges — looked tougher after Connors’s testimony.
After spending hours meticulously testifying to the authenticity of individual files, the RCMP computer expert told Gluckman that he would not personally have the technical expertise to make changes to the files without it being evident in the layers of metadata attached to the files.
“At my current level of expertise it would take me quite some time to do that,” he said. “Not without corrupting the (Personal Storage Tables) likely, causing damage to the files.”
Under cross examination by Jeffrey Ayotte, Del Mastro’s lawyer, Connors acknowledged that if someone had deleted emails from Hall’s laptop before Mounties examined it, they would not have known, since, to protect unrelated emails, Hall insisted that investigators only extract emails that fit certain parameters.
“I wouldn’t have been able to see that email because the search parameters would have filtered it out,” said Connors.
Hall has testified that his firm conducted hundreds of hours of electoral phone calls during the campaign, and his testimony was backed up on Thursday by the testimony of David Pennylegion, a former analyst for Hall. Pennylegion regularly prepared and sent databases to the Del Mastro campaign, keeping a tally of hundreds of hours of voter-identification calls conducted for the campaign.
Ayotte took care to point out that his testimony depended on integrity of the databases.
On Friday, Connors and Gluckman sought to establish that those files were created and modified in 2008, not more recently, relying on a forensic review of time stamps that seem to authenticate the files.
In the back of the courtroom, two expert computer analysts employed by Del Mastro sat taking notes, preparing to help Del Mastro’s lawyer with his cross examination of Connors, and eventually testify.
Del Mastro has repeatedly publicly attacked Hall, and Ayotte grilled him aggressively earlier in the week, suggesting that he is motivated by a desire to get back at Del Mastro over a business dispute.
Del Mastro, who left the Conservative caucus in September when he was charged with the Elections Act offences, has said he intends to testify in his own defence.
The trial is scheduled to run all of next week and into the following week.
Original Article
Source: canada.com/
Author: STEPHEN MAHER
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