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For the trial, the central question is whose idea it was for Wright to give Duffy that bank draft. Beyond the court case, the question is what Harper knew and when.

Emails released in the course of the RCMP’s investigation of Duffy’s business — with which Wright co-operated — offer hints, but only hints: A note he wrote to underlings about the payment saying that “we are good to go from the PM” suggests Harper knew a lot. Later, Wright told a press secretary being asked questions by reporters that the boss knew only in general terms that Wright had helped Duffy find the money.

His testimony should clear that up, and cast a lot of light on how Harper’s staff coped with the deepest political crisis of his prime ministership, including whether the accounts he gave in public match up with what was happening in private.

Reading the documents the Mounties filed in court to get their search warrants and production orders in the Duffy case, an image comes across of Wright increasingly aghast at the mess he had to contend with in early 2013.

“I think this is going to end badly,” he told senior people in the PMO in February that year, just as the Duffy affair was beginning to consume him.

It sure did: The mess cost Wright his job at Harper’s side, which he’d held for about three years. Whether Harper accepted his resignation sadly or fired him in a rage over his bad judgment is unclear, since the prime minister has told the story both ways and Wright has kept his silence on it. Along the way, Wright struggled to manage Duffy (who’d lawyered up), senior Tory senators David Tkachuk and Marjory LeBreton (who were sick to death of their relatively new colleague), a drip-drip-drip of damaging news stories on television and in the papers, and the whole rest of the business of the Government of Canada.