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“This is fun”: PMO staffer watching Duffy media appearances | Ottawa Citizen
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Senior staff in the prime minister’s office reacted with “glee” as they watched suspended Senator Mike Duffy on TV reciting lines they had scripted for him – lines they anticipated would fulfil an order from Stephen Harper to quickly close down the embarrassing senate spending scandal.
For play-by-play coverage, see @kady’s live blog.
“This is fun,” wrote one senior staffer in an email as they received reports back from Prince Edward Island on Duffy’s media appearances.
During his third day of testimony at Duffy’s trial today, Harper’s former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, repeated several times that his primary concern was getting Duffy to pay back expenses he had “wrongly” claimed.
Duffy’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, is using sheaves of emails to make the case that Wright and his team of senior PMO staffers were engaged in hardball political damage control and not guided by any moral correctness, as Wright had constantly claimed.
“What you were selling was a deliberately deceptive scenario designed to deceive the Canadian public,” Bayne told Wright during his cross-examination.
In a scenario that played out over two weeks in February 2013, Duffy maintained his innocence and fought hard against Wright and others in the PMO who wanted him to pay back the expenses and issue a public mea culpa – an admission that he had claimed the expenses in error.
As the PMO squeezed harder, Duffy asked repeatedly that he be allowed to take his case to an external auditor to examine the spending scandal and allow them to decide on the appropriateness of his expense claims.
He wanted to go to Deloitte (the auditor), make his case and let the chips fall where they may.
But he was basically forced to go through a scenario that you people created and scripted … that involved an untruth at its core. He fought that. It was also untrue that he was paying and making it right.
— Donald Bayne
Duffy had told Wright that he couldn’t afford to repay the money himself and Wright eventually agreed to secretly pay it — $90,000 — out of his own pocket.
Wright said he didn’t want Duffy going the auditor route and publicly making the case that his true home was in P.E.I.
I thought that was wrong and thought it would discredit us.
— Nigel Wright
All of this was basically forced on him (Duffy) because you didn’t want the party to suffer any damage to its reputation.
— Donald Bayne
With Duffy making last-minute appeals to Ray Novak, a long-time close Harper aide and now his chief of staff, Duffy eventually “capitulated,” said Bayne, and was sent to P.E.I. — deliberately to avoid Ottawa Press Gallery reporters — where arrangements were made for him to delivery his mea culpa on regional media.
(Wright says it was an agreement, not a capitulation, and said that he was unaware of Duffy’s emails to Novak.)
The PMO kept a close watch on the media coverage, as the deluge of emails produced by Bayne confirms.
“There was extreme glee that you pulled this off,” said Bayne, quoting from a short memo Wright sent to his team.
Wright wrote: “I appreciate the work this team did on this. One down, two to go and one out.”
Duffy was “down,” explained Wright, “two to go” were Senators Pamela Wallin and B.C.’s Dennis Patterson and the one “out” was Senator Patrick Brazeau.
“Ya, this is fun,” responded PMO communications chief Andrew MacDougall.
“Sweet,” responded Wright.
Harper’s former right hand man denied suggestions that the two short exchanges indicated “glee” but rather frustration at a slight deviation Duffy had made from the PMO script.
The trial continues.
“This is fun”: PMO staffer watching Duffy media appearances | Ottawa Citizen