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“Even if Livingston and Miller had tried to scrub the emails, they couldn’t have because they’re backed up off site.” (Surely the breach of trust is in the attempt, not the successful completion.) “It can’t have been bribery, because Olivier had already been denied the nomination.” (So Lougheed and Sorbara were peddling him career opportunities for … no reason?) “It’s just politics.” (Do y’all not think you should do something about that?”)

It’s reminiscent of the Mike Duffy affair: partisans hope we’ll read 'not illegal' as 'virtuous'

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The Ontario trials are different in many other ways, of course — some of them quite interesting.

Duffy’s $8-million lawsuit against the government, his lawyer’s tales of a virtuous man “threatened, cajoled, arm-twisted and rebuked” until he finally “capitulated” in an Edwardian swoon, make him a popular villain. But the Clusterduff brought several people and institutions into more disrepute than Duffy himself: the Conservatives, for brushing away Duffy’s inquiries as to his eligibility to serve P.E.I. in the first place, then trying to cover up the fallout; every Senator who voted to expel Duffy from the Upper Chamber, knowing full well he genuinely hadn’t broken the rules (on account of their barely existing, but still); and the RCMP for somehow managing to prosecute the recipient of an alleged bribe from an emissary of the PMO but not its provider. It impugned whole entrenched systems of operation including the Senate and, via the Senate, federal politics as a whole — and what’s more, federal politics’ denizens seemed to realize it. Rules were hastily rewritten. Everyone clearly wanted Duffy to go away; he wouldn’t; they couldn’t make him; the collective nightmare continues.