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The Crown alleges Sen. Duffy took a bribe; Sen. Duffy says in fact he was the victim of extortion, threatened with the loss of his Senate seat if he did not agree. Indeed, the Senator seems acutely aggrieved that he was ever asked to pay the money back, as he has always maintained that in filing for the impugned expenses he was guilty of at worst a clerical error. Or rather, his assistant was.

For their part, senior members of the government no doubt just want the truth to come out. The several leading Conservative senators who certainly appeared, in that voluminous archive of emails the RCMP collected, to be scheming to erase any criticism of Sen. Duffy’s behaviour from a committee report, and to lean on the accountants conducting a forensic audit into his expenses to make a similarly exculpatory finding, will certainly be glad of the chance to tell their story at last.

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The prime minister, on the other hand, will be crestfallen that he will in all likelihood not be called as a witness, inasmuch as this would have provided him with the first opportunity he has had to tell his side of the story — not counting the hundreds of questions he has avoided directly answering in the House or the dozens of press conferences he has never held.

Were he to have the honour of testifying under oath, however, I am confident he would clear up the many questions surrounding his own knowledge of the affair: what Mr. Wright could have meant in February of 2013 when he emailed the other participants in Operation Clusterduff that the PM was “good to go” with their plan, at that time to have the party repay Sen. Duffy; or what Mr. Wright could have meant in May of that year when he told the prime minister’s spokesman that Mr. Harper knew, albeit “in broad terms only,” that he had personally repaid Mr. Duffy’s expenses; both of which remain a puzzle, since the prime minister has vehemently denied knowing one iota of either plan.