By Alison@Creekside
According to Mike Duffy, the PMO blackmailed him into taking a bribe to save his own skin and that of the Cons from the wrath of their base.
Questions …
It seems no amount of $90K carrots or Senate expulsion sticks were spared to shut down that Duffy/Deloitte senate audit. Where was it going that was ultimately worth the risk of what’s coming out now — the PMO conferring an illegal under-the-table “gift” on a sitting senator and then trying to cover it up?
When CBC applied for access to docs and emails re the Wright/Duffy payoff, there were apparently none to be had. None. Yet Duffy seems to have his end of that same correspondence. If those e-mails had in any way corroborated Steve’s story that he had nothing to do with Wright writing Duffy a cheque, do you think for one moment they wouldn’t have been pasted up at Sun News already?
On Tuesday Duffy’s lawyer waved around a few of the “mountain” of those supposedly non-existent e-mails and read out excerpts, calling them “the tip of the iceberg.” He claimed the e-mails were “germane” to Steve’s involvement but would not release them, saying they would come out in the event Duffy was hauled into court. Was that a threat?
Because when Duffy told his side of the story on Tuesday night, he stopped just shy of definitively placing Steve in the cheque-writing loop. Was there a quiet conversation after Duffy’s lawyer’s statement, but before Duffy’s, that resulted in Duffy holding back on what his lawyer alluded to the day before?
Steve looked pretty confident in QP on Wednesday, replying to 20 Duffy questions by extolling his own personal ethical rectitude in dumping him.
Duffy had said the day before that Steve’s senior aide Ray Novak and Senator LeBreton called him in May and ordered him to resign. Mulcair questioned Novak’s involvement and Steve denied it, based on Wright not having named Novak as one of the three PMO staffers who knew about the cheque. But unfortunately for Steve, Pamela Wallin had elected to wait till after QP to give her statement in the Senate in which she too said Novak and LeBreton called her in May demanding she resign.
Will Steve’s recently promoted personal friend Novak be next to go under the Con bus?
And lastly, remember when, for a few days after May 14th, the Con story was that Nigel Wright was just helping out his dear “friend” Duffy and selflessly taking a personal financial hit for the benefit of Canadian taxpayers? Then Nigel Wright resigned, saying Duffy was not his friend and exonerating Steve of any knowledge of the $90,000 cheque on his way out the door. Mr. Wright, who will presumably be returning to the fold at Onex after his investigation by the RCMP, pretty much owns Steve now, doesn’t he?
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