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In the Crown’s take, Wright was Duffy’s victim. He’s a powerful and sophisticated man with a lot of money, but also a guy who’s out $90,000 of his own cash because Duffy demanded it.

In the defence’s take, Wright masterminded a scheme to turn Duffy into a scapegoat after a nudge-nudge-wink-wink arrangement to make him a Conservative party celebrity went bad. Duffy had been the one worried about his legitimacy as a Prince Edward Island senator, the one uncertain about some of his expenses, until senior party figures reassured him everything was on the up and up — and Duffy was the one to suffer when he became a political problem.

Bayne has promised he has a hoard of emails and other documents showing it, almost none of which has been seen publicly yet. In one, a nugget dropped by the by in some documents the canny lawyer filed about a separate dispute over a bit of evidence, Wright admitted he thought the living expense-claims that made up the $90,000 were legitimate, or at least defensible, and that leaning on Duffy to repay them was a brutal bit of politics.

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In this telling, Wright’s $90,000 bank draft was booby-trapped: the point was to give Duffy the money he needed to write a cheque to the government with his own name on it, akin to a confession that he’d done wrong and was trying to make it right. The whole thing, Bayne said on the trial’s first day, was “a fiction, a fraud, a lie conceived for political damage-control purposes.”

The forensic-accounting expert Mark Grenon, who helped the Mounties disentangle Duffy’s finances and testified just before the trial’s summer break, pooh-poohed that idea. If Wright set Duffy up, he did it ineptly, with no obfuscation about the source of the money. “It’s only one level in between. You would have multiple layers set, or pay somebody else and have them pay (Duffy),” Grenon testified. Wright even put “Senate expenses” right on the paper.

In the documents the RCMP has made public, the idea of the payment crops up in an email from Duffy’s then-lawyer Janice Payne, setting out who would do and say what about an affair that at that point had not progressed beyond an internal Senate investigation.

But much happened in this dirty business that was never written down. Wright was there. He’s expected to face questions for at least a week. All of political Canada will be watching.