Day 3 of testimony from former Harper chief of staff Nigel Wright at the Duffy fraud trial saw the senator’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, use internal PMO e-mails to paint a picture of a Prime Minister’s Office that ruled the Conservative majority in the Senate with an iron fist when it needed to do so.
“You’re not just commanding and controlling Senator Duffy. The PMO is controlling Senate leadership here,” Mr. Bayne said to Mr. Wright in court. “They are not to issue independent statements. They’re to clear anything and everything they do with you and they apologize for having stepped out of line, right?”
Mr. Wright replied: “I certainly did ask that office to co-ordinate with us and clear things with us before they took actions, yes.”
Mr. Duffy, a Harper appointee, is on trial after being charged by the RCMP with bribery, fraud on the government and 29 other charges related to Senate expenses.
Mr. Wright quit the Prime Minister’s Office in May, 2013, after it was revealed that he personally paid $90,000 to reimburse taxpayers for questionable expenses incurred by Mr. Duffy after the PEI senator balked at paying them himself.
PMO e-mails cited by Mr. Bayne in court on Friday show how angry Mr. Harper’s office was after the Conservative leadership in the Senate, namely Senator Marjory LeBreton, co-wrote a letter with Liberal Senate Leader James Cowan that called for a crackdown on senators claiming taxpayer-paid allowances for second homes.
Ms. LeBreton and Mr. Cowan had set in motion a process to target questionable expenses that ended up branding senators as rule breakers. “We request you proceed to interview each senator who has claimed a secondary residence allowance to confirm the legitimacy of such claims. Should any senator be unable to convince you that the claim is valid that senator should be required to repay immediately all monies so paid with interest,” the letter instructed Red Chamber staff.
Mr. Wright testified that he thought it was mistake for Ms. LeBreton, then Conservative Senate Leader, to set out criteria for residence because he thought that some Tory senators would not meet them – and it might “impede” a deal with Mr. Duffy.
The letter was made public in early February, 2013, and helped to jeopardize a plan being hatched by the PMO to get Mr. Duffy to quietly repay his own housing expenses and promise not to make further claims, as long as it was made clear that he had not intentionally broken the rules and he was removed from a list of senators being targeted for audit.
It was important to Mr. Duffy that this process not put at risk his qualification to sit as a PEI senator and not brand him a rule breaker. In February, 2013, he was growing increasingly adamant that he, in fact, had done nothing wrong.
An e-mail cited by Mr. Duffy’s lawyer on Friday illustrates the anger the letter triggered in the PMO when Ray Novak, Mr. Harper’s closest aide, fumes about the Senate leadership releasing its crackdown publicly.
“Why on earth did their letter to the committee have to be public? It’s as though there is a deliberate strategy to feed every media cycle with this,” Mr. Novak wrote on Feb. 11, 2013, to Mr. Wright and other PMO staffers.
Mr. Wright, for his part, penned an acid note to fellow Harper aides asking them to thank Ms. LeBreton for all the trouble she has caused him. “Please convey my thanks to Sen LeBreton’s office for making this more difficult,” he wrote on Feb. 11, 2013.
On Friday in court, Mr. Wright called the tone of this letter “facetious,” but he challenged Mr. Bayne’s characterization that the PMO controlled the Conservative presence in the Senate. “It doesn’t actually work that way.”
The LeBreton and Cowan letter prompted significant worry by Mr. Duffy, and PMO staff themselves remarked in e-mails how the crackdown on housing allowances will ensnare the PEI senator. “I am worried this letter has pretty much hooped Senator Duffy,” PMO staffer Patrick Rogers wrote in a missive to Mr. Wright and others.
Mr. Wright, a wealthy businessman who works for private equity giant Onex Corp., has returned from London to testify in the Duffy case.
Original Article
Source: theglobeandmail.com/
Author: STEVEN CHASE
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