OTTAWA—The Prime Minister’s Office orchestrated backroom efforts to smooth over Mike Duffy’s expense scandal as it pressed to get him removed from an independent audit, negotiated repayment with his lawyer, and sought to influence the Senate’s investigation of his spending woes, emails reveal.

Overseeing much of that effort was Nigel Wright, the then-chief of staff to Stephen Harper, as the expense scandal in early 2013 became a black eye for the prime minister.

Wright, a financier and lawyer who is no stranger to high-pressure situations, could barely contain his frustration at times at Conservative senators and Duffy himself.

“It’s not your fault Ben, but I am getting frustrated by this, particularly because it is not my role in this office to be micromanaging files,” he wrote Benjamin Perrin, another senior aide in the PMO, in March, 2013.

At one point, he says he ordered Tory senators to stop all “unilateral” action on the controversy unless it had been cleared with him first.

The emails were filed as evidence in court Wednesday as part of Duffy’s trial for fraud and breach of trust. They include emails taken from both Wright’s PMO account and a personal Gmail account.

While some of the emails had been previously released, included as part of the RCMP’s court filings, the 426 pages of documents released Wednesday provide new insights about the PMO’s dealings with Duffy.

Duffy, appointed by Harper to the Senate in 2008, ran into trouble when the long-time resident of Ottawa was challenged for claiming a P.E.I. cottage as his primary residence.

Wright would cut a personal cheque for $90,172.24 to cover Duffy’s expenses.

But before that, Wright struggled to contain the fall-out of the spending controversy, the emails show.

Wright suggested that Conservative senators implement a secret process to review the residency qualifications as one possible remedy. “Speed, at least for Duffy, is of the essence,” he notes in a February 2013 email.

In early February, 2013, Duffy passed to Wright a list of issues prepared by his lawyer, Janice Payne, to resolve the spending controversy. One option on the list — that Duffy pay the expenses with his legal bills covered by the Senate — caught the eye of the PMO.

“From an issues management perspective that would certainly stanch the bleeding,” senior Harper aide Ray Novak wrote to Wright.

On Feb. 20, 2013, Wright set out the “Duffy scenario” that he hoped would defuse the expense headache. That included getting Duffy to acknowledge he made a mistake but blaming it on confusing paperwork.

In discussions with Payne, Wright and other senior PMO staff agreed on a five-point plan to address Duffy’s predicament, according to the emails.

Under that deal, Duffy would be withdrawn from the Deloitte review, there would be written acknowledgement that he could sit as a senator from Prince Edward Island and he would be reimbursed for his questionable expenses. The Prime Minister’s Office pledged that members of the Conservative caucus would speak on the issue “consistent with agreed media lines,” an email states.

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As well, Duffy would be allowed to claim a housing allowance in the future if Senate rules were changed.

Wright sought clarification on several points and suggested that Harper himself would be briefed on the situation.

“I do want to speak to the PM before everything is considered final,” Wright wrote on Feb. 22.

Less than an hour later, Wright responded to his PMO colleagues: “We are good to go from the PM.”

It’s that email, previously disclosed, that has raised questions about how much Harper knew about the scheme to defuse the Duffy controversy.

From the start, the PMO tried to ensure different treatment for Duffy than other senators facing scrutiny over their expense claims — in part, it seems, because they were worried about the public profile of the former television broadcaster.

“The purpose of this is to put Mike in a different bucket and to prevent him from going squirrelly on a bunch of weekend panel shows,” Wright says in a Feb. 7, 2013 email.

At one point, Duffy sought assurance that the RCMP won’t be called in to review his questionable expenses. Officials in the Prime Minister’s Office balked at that request. “I think that would be a scandal, no?” Wright replies.

When Duffy finally went public with the news he would repay his expenses, it was PMO staff who helped orchestrate the media coverage and even wrote the so-called media lines to help the embattled senator respond to reporters’ questions.

The emails also reveal tensions within the Conservative caucus over Duffy’s expense controversy and suggest the high-profile senator was getting on the nerves of other Tories.

“I was pretty frank with Mike this morning about attacking the very people who are trying to help him,” Novak wrote in a March 2013 email.

That same month, Wright voices similar frustration. “Sen. Duffy would make this easier if he did not have outbursts in Senate caucus that make Senators oppose anything that helps him save face,” he wrote.

Correction – August 13, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that included a typographical error in the final paragraph that referred to ‘make’ as ‘male’.

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