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Photo by Chris Wattie/Reuters

For four months last fall, Wilson-Raybould was subjected to a profane lobbying effort by the PMO, the Clerk, and various officials to have her interfere with the decision made Sept. 4 by her director of public prosecutions (DPP) Kathleen Roussel, not to offer SNC-Lavalin a way out of a criminal prosecution for bribery and fraud in connection with its activities years earlier in Libya.

The way out is a deferred prosecution agreement, a DPA, new to Canada, and SNC-Lavalin would be the first in the country to get it.

When Raybould-Wilson got that notice from Roussel, she did her due diligence.

While she was doing that, two days later, Morneau’s chief of staff, Ben Chin, approached her chief of staff, Jessica Prince. Chin told Prince “if they don’t get a DPA, they will leave Montreal, and it’s the Quebec election {the election was Oct. 1 of last year} right now, so we can’t have that happen.”

That was just the beginning.

Until Wilson-Raybould was shuffled out of the AG portfolio in January, this government did all it could to get her to change her mind.

They worked her deputy, Nathalie Drouin, worked around Wilson-Raybould as it were, believing her more pliable.

They fiercely lobbied Prince, with no success, to also lean on her.

Even as the preliminary hearing into the charges against SNC was underway and later, in October, even when SNC had filed a motion in Federal Court seeking to overturn the Roussel/Wilson-Raybould decision, the pressure continued.

In other words, even as the matter was actively before the courts, when it was clearly wrong for politicians to interfere, they were doing so.

By mid-September last year, Wilson-Raybould had done her due diligence and concluded her DPP, Roussel, was correct and that she would not interfere with the decision: SNC would not get a DPA.

From that moment on, she told all those who were leaning on her to back off.