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But what Nicholl specifically asked that day, Gitt said, was this: “He asked me, and he said ‘I don’t need details,’ ‘Are you able, if I gave you a group of people and a group of computers, can you set that up with administrative rights?’

“I said ‘I believe I can,’ ” Gitt replied.

According to him, Gitt said, “If you can’t do it, let me know and I’ll get someone else.”

The rights Nicholl was seeking were different in that they didn’t grant access to one computer, presumably the user’s.

Rather, Gitt said, Nicholl’s request was that “all those users have administrative rights to all those computers… It was for all the Premier’s Office computers.”

Gitt’s testimony is important for several reasons.

First, it contradicts the version of events given earlier at trial (and in an appearance at the justice policy legislative committee) by Nicholl.

He testified that as far as he knew, there was nothing special about the access Livingston had been seeking, and portrayed himself as an IT guy who operated at “the 50,000-foot” level and not in any frontline capacity.

And Nicholl wasn’t the only one who testified that he saw the request as nothing particularly alarming. Peter Wallace, then the secretary of cabinet and the highest-ranking public servant in the province, said that’s how Nicholl portrayed the request to him.

Wallace was extremely worried by Livingston’s request.

He had for several months, as the legislature’s estimates committee had been demanding documents and the energy minister (then Chris Bentley) and his office had produced none, begun to fear that he had on his hands a government that was “erasing” gas plants records.