As I mentioned before- This scandal has legs. And it is just starting to run.
Kelly McParland: Nigel Wright, a good man caught in an ugly world | National Post
I’ve never met Nigel Wright, and all I know of him is what I’ve read. But after consuming the 80-page, minutely detailed RCMP document released Wednesday, I have to say I sympathize with the guy. He comes across in the document just as his defenders have described him: capable, dedicated, “a person of good faith, of competence, with high ethical standards,” as Jason Kenney put it. You get the impression of a man who found himself in a rat’s nest, and tried to keep one of the rats from destroying himself. Instead, he got destroyed too.
Andrew Coyne: Stephen Harper’s story — and reputation — still hanging on by a thread | National Post
To get straight to the point — though it is hardly the point: Stephen Harper’s story, and with it his reputation and his office, have been hanging these past six months by the slenderest of threads
That thread, which the Prime Minister has artfully arranged over his own head, is that whatever illegal acts his every senior aide, Senate leader or party grandee might have known, approved of, connived in, covered up and lied about, he, personally, did not know before a certain date that Nigel Wright, his chief of staff, had written a personal cheque to reimburse Senator Mike Duffy for $90,000 in improperly claimed expenses.
The Prime Minister has hung onto that single thread even as every other part of his story has fallen apart: as “acted alone” became “very few,” as “full confidence” turned to “acted honourably” turned to “deceived,” as “resigned” turned to “dismissed.” So long as it could not be proven that he knew what he denied knowing, he could not be caught in a lie; and so long as the whole issue was framed as “did the Prime Minister flat-out lie to Parliament,” the multiple lies told by everyone around him, before, during and after the whole sordid affair might be made to recede into the background.