When Gerald Butts appeared in front of the House of Commons justice committee on Wednesday, he did not to try to topple Jody Wilson-Raybould from her truth-teller pedestal in the SNC-Lavalin affair — almost certainly an impossible mission — but he did chip away at its base.

From the same basic facts, Justin Trudeau’s former principal secretary wove a strikingly different narrative of the interactions that took place between the prime minister, his inner circle and the former attorney general over the handling of the judicial file of the Montreal engineering firm.

In the process, Butts pulled at some of the threads that hold Wilson-Raybould’s version of events together.

The former minister had earlier testified that there were sustained attempts from the highest political level over a period of months to interfere with her judicial independence.

She also testified that she takes copious notes. As a lawyer she would be mindful of the importance of a paper trail.

And yet she never sent a caution in writing those she accuses of having subjected her to intense pressure to direct her department to spare SNC-Lavalin the risk of a criminal conviction by offering the company a negotiated plea.

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Those she accused include Butts himself.

Last week, Wilson-Raybould testified that some of the pressure she had endured had been applied directly by the former principal secretary over the course of a dinner they shared in December.

On Wednesday, Butts shared correspondence they exchanged in the immediate aftermath of that encounter. It is hard to read any hint of tension between the cordial lines they exchanged.

The smoking gun — inasmuch as there is one in this affair — is the January cabinet shuffle that saw Wilson-Raybould moved from her justice post to veterans affairs. She believes she was punished for having stood her ground on SNC-Lavalin.

Butts offered an alternative narrative.

He said Jane Philpott, who was then the minister of Indigenous services, was the most logical candidate to fill to the treasury board post about to be vacated by Scott Brison.

Trudeau, he said, wanted to put Wilson-Raybould in a front line Indigenous cabinet slot to ensure the Indigenous community did not see her reassignment as a signal that he was flagging on his commitment to a reconciliation agenda.

It was only after Wilson-Raybould refused that assignment — on the basis that she did not want to run a ministry that operates under the auspices of the colonial-era Indian Act — that she was offered veterans affairs.

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The option of Wilson-Raybould continuing as justice minister was never on the table. Butts said he told Trudeau that if he started to take no for an answer from ministers who did not want to leave a preferred portfolio, he would eventually lose control of his cabinet.

His testimony left the opposition parties clamouring for Wilson-Raybould to be invited to respond. The Liberal majority on the committee quashed the proposal.

Many Canadians will struggle to reconcile Wilson-Raybould’s testimony with that of the former principal secretary. Some will give up on trying to make sense of the twists and turns of the story. That may be the government’s best hope for closure to this crisis.

Her correspondence with Butts does not fit her self-portrait as a minister enduring relentless pressure on his part and that of his PMO cohorts.

But his assertion that the top levels of the government were unaware of her concerns is at odds with the fact that she shared them with both Philpott and at least one of her top officials.

Deputy justice minister Nathalie Drouin testified on Wednesday that the former attorney general had told her she was uncomfortable with the content of a September conversation with Trudeau over SNC-Lavalin.

And Butts revealed it was Philpott, at the time of the cabinet shuffle, who first raised the notion that Wilson-Raybould was being moved out of the justice portfolio as a result of locking horns with the PMO on SNC-Lavalin.

Were this affair unfolding in a court of law, Butts would probably have provided the seeds of reasonable doubt.

But it takes more than that to secure a political acquittal in the court of public opinion. In this case, Trudeau may be happy enough just to secure a hung jury.

The testimony of his former right-hand man is expected to have set the scene for the prime minister himself to provide Canadians a more thorough accounting of his actions at a Parliament Hill news conference on Thursday.

That can’t come soon enough. It is extraordinary that it has taken a full month for the government to put a full-fledged narrative of its own in the public domain.

Meanwhile, Butts, Drouin and Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Wernick (who was back at the committee for a repeat appearance on Wednesday) all maintain they acted appropriately in the SNC-Lavalin matter. That suggests that if the prime minister’s explanations do feature an element of contrition, it will likely be extremely limited.

Chantal Hébert is a columnist based in Ottawa covering politics. Follow her on Twitter: @ChantalHbert

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