Stephen Harper's PMO withholding email about Wright-Duffy deal from RCMP - Some would call it 'Obstruction of Justice' ...
Wow!
"The Prime Minister’s Office has been withholding from the RCMP an email about the $90,000 cheque Stephen Harper’s former chief of staff wrote to Sen. Mike Duffy, CTV News has learned.
RCMP investigators have been trying to obtain the email ever since CTV News first revealed its existence two months ago.
The prime minister’s communications director, Andrew MacDougall, confirmed that the email exists.
“My understanding is it is a paraphrase of conversations that happened,” he told CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife. “I’ve had them described to me from someone who is no longer here.” The Feb. 20 email describes a secret deal to have Harper’s then-chief of staff Nigel Wright personally bail out Duffy, a Conservative senator who improperly claimed $90,172 in living expenses and faced the public release of an audit of his spending.
In the email, Duffy tells his lawyer that Wright worked out a “scenario” where all of his invalid expenses would be covered, including “cash for the repayment.” Under the arrangement, Duffy would claim that he personally repaid his debt to taxpayers and the government would use its influence to blunt the outcome of the external audit.
A Conservative-dominated Senate committee subsequently whitewashed a damning audit report on Duffy’s expenses, which highlighted problems with his residency claims and per diems collected when he wasn’t in Ottawa on Senate business.
After CTV News broke the story, Wright resigned and Duffy left the Conservative caucus to sit as an Independent.
CTV News
""When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon, 1977
Posted by
Brian Busby |
11:00 am, July 17, 2013
If the shoe fits ... and in this case it certainly does! Thanks.
Posted by
leftdog |
3:06 pm, July 17, 2013