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She was the very definition of at-risk youth, and Meredith appears to have had her number in a New York minute.

She came to the church event to get his picture and shake his hand. She left with his cell phone number.

And the ugly picture painted by the excellent report Senate ethics officer Lyse Ricard wrote in March is that for the next two years, Meredith engaged in a calculated effort to both woo her and wear down her doubts.

A word, first, about that report.

Meredith’s lawyer took the position that the draft version of it went into “an unnecessary level of detail.”

By “unnecessary,” it appears the lawyer meant “mortifying.”

Ricard made some revisions, but stuck to her guns, deciding detail was necessary to understand the narrative and that there was a “need to promote public confidence in the fact-finding process employed in this inquiry.”

She also said she was “invited to prepare ‘public’ and ‘private’ versions of the report.”

Ricard declined, and thus does she demonstrate that it’s possible to conduct a thorough and fair investigation and produce a detailed report that can be released publicly, while protecting the identity of the complainant.

Photo by Colin Perkel / The Canadian Press

It was this report that led to the Senate’s ethics and conflict-of-interest committee on Tuesday recommending that Meredith be expelled from the Senate, the first such recommendation in its history.

The senator, now 52, has five sitting days to respond, so there won’t be a vote by the full Senate until next week at the earliest.