One part of it was evidently to secure Duffy’s cooperation in the scheme to minimize and misrepresent his abuse of the Senate housing allowance, in which he was to be cast as an honourable man who, having claimed these expenses in good faith and without clear guidance from Senate rules, was nevertheless repaying them out of his own pocket. But it was equally intended to preserve him from the scrutiny of a Senate audit.
The secret payment to a sitting legislator by the prime minister’s former chief of staff has understandably attracted most of the attention: it is, after all, at the heart of the fraud and breach of trust case against Duffy. The attempt to tamper with the audit, if it is mentioned at all, is treated as a secondary matter. But it is clear from the emails that the effort to pay off Duffy’s expenses was driven as much by the audit as by any other concern. And that understanding helps to explain one of the central mysteries of the case.
Namely: why didn’t the Conservatives just insist that Duffy pay back his own expenses? That plainly was the original plan, as discussed in those early February 2013 emails, until Duffy protested that he didn’t have the money. But if it was just a matter of cash flow, it’s hard to see why that should have been such an obstacle. He needn’t have paid it back all at once, after all. It could have simply been taken out of his Senate salary, over many months or even years.
What made the payment a matter of some urgency was the launch of the audit some days later by the Senate internal economy committee, who hired the firm of Deloitte & Touche (the Conservative Party’s auditors, as it happened) for the task. A finding by the auditors that Duffy’s house in Ottawa, where he had lived for many years, was not his “secondary” residence, as he had claimed, would have greatly complicated the storyline Wright & Co. were hoping to construct for him.
If, on the other hand, Duffy were to pre-emptively pay back the expenses, then the matter would surely become moot. There would be no need for Deloitte & Touche to make a finding on the residency issue, as there would no longer be any claim for them to adjudicate. Or so it was to be suggested to them, via the Conservatives’ contacts there.
The plan to pay off Duffy’s expenses, then, first by the Conservative Party and then, when the full amount of his expense claims were known, by Wright, was not just an attempt to keep Duffy quiescent, but also, indirectly, the auditors — and through them to influence the Senate committee, and the public at large.
At least, that was how Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s people understood the plan. But what also emerges from the emails is that they and Duffy had very different agendas.
It wasn’t just on his housing expenses that Duffy wished to be absolved of any wrongdoing. The emails from his lawyer are explicit in demanding that all of his expenses be found “in order.” It wasn’t enough that the auditors should punt on the housing allowance question. The audit had to be called off altogether. And there was yet a third demand: the government was to promise not to refer Duffy’s expenses to the RCMP.
It is to the credit of Wright and his co-conspirators that none of these demands were met. It is very much less to their credit that the rest of the fraudulent scheme went ahead. The decision to pay Duffy’s expenses, on its own, might be written off as an error of judgment or even, as Wright would have it, a good-faith attempt to return the money to the taxpayer.