seeking information or profile on the audiences Senator Duffy was entertaining on behalf to the Conservative party.HELP!
He was simply a speaker at various gatherings were he would rally the voters to get out and vote and raise cash, for the cons of course. He actually performed that aspect well but somehow CTV's Robert Fife broke the story on Duffs spending habits which is showing us how broken the 'no set rules' Senate is.........
Long before his fraud and bribery trial started, Senator Mike Duffy suggested he had explosive evidence about the role of the Prime Minister’s Office in his case. It was a set up, Duffy said, a “monstrous scheme.”
No explosion has occurred, but a loud bang did sound from the court last week as new evidence emerged tying the prime minister’s office more closely to the attempted cover up of Duffy’s expense problems.
Until now, the trial has dealt only with Duffy’s questionable expenses and the Senate’s role in enforcing, or not, its permissive spending rules. It has further damaged the Red Chamber’s reputation, but barely mentioned Stephen Harper’s inner circle.
No more. The emails and interview transcripts illuminate the determined efforts by the Conservatives to foil an independent audit and hide Duffy’s problems from Canadians.
In early 2013, audit firm Deloitte was set to report its findings on the expense, travel and residency claims of Duffy and other senators. Duffy had gone ballistic, demanding that Senate Conservatives ensure he wasn’t tainted by the report.
He argued that the PMO knew very well that he lived in Ottawa. It had cleared him to take a seat as a P.E.I. senator. To Duffy’s thinking, that entitled him to make claims for a “secondary residence” in Ottawa.
In the hours before the report was to be released, Conservative senators David Tkachuk and Carolyn Stewart Olsen, along with senior PMO staffers, were embroiled in discussions about Deloitte’s findings.
These PMO aides weren’t lowly clerks. Key operators, including chief of staff Nigel Wright, political advisor Chris Woodcock, press spokesman Andrew MacDougall, principal secretary Ray Novak and Joanne McNamara, Wright’s deputy, were all in the loop.
They and the two senators agreed to manipulate the Deloitte report to mollify Duffy and as Wright put it in an email, “to prevent him from going squirrely in a bunch of weekend panel shows.”
Tkachuk and Stewart Olsen then set about making changes in the report to remove references to Duffy’s travel between Ottawa and P.E.I. and his residency in the capital, according to two Senate administrators who were interviewed by the RCMP.
Tkachuk and Stewart Olsen made the changes without informing Senator George Furey, the only Liberal on the Senate’s internal steering committee. Furey won’t discuss the matter, citing legal advice. But I’m told he was furious at Tkachuk and Stewart Olsen for making the changes behind his back.
Jill Anne Joseph, the Senate’s director of internal audit, told the Mounties that Stewart Olsen’s objective on the Duffy case “was not to get to the truth of the matters . . . her consideration seemed to be more like, what’s the media going to do with this information?”
Stewart Olsen is a former Harper press spokesperson and senator from New Brunswick, who also had lived in Ottawa for many years and claimed expenses for a “secondary residence” there, much like Duffy did.
While this was going on, the prime minister insisted, and did so for many months, that nobody in his office knew about the Duffy matter. When it emerged that many did know, Harper fell back on insisting that he wasn’t informed. That hasn’t been disproven.
But what has been proven is that the Duffy case occupied the attention and efforts of people near the top of the PMO, the Senate and the Conservative Party. The first instinct of all those involved was to manipulate, distract and cover up the embarrassing facts about their star senator and fundraiser.
Neither the government nor the party are on trial, but these facts gathered by dispassionate investigators from the RCMP blow holes in the claims by all those Conservatives that they acted in the public interest at every step.
NDP Leader Tom Mulcair calls it obstruction of justice. That’s a stretch. But it was certainly manipulation, lying and the attempted concealment of potential wrongdoing by a public official. That’s bad enough.
LEGER: Duffy’s troubles and PMO’s coverup | The Chronicle Herald