Article content continued

But Duffy was the Big Deal, arguably the most famous person in the Senate and a prize for the Tories. The party wanted very much to help him out. It failed. Within a year, Harper’s chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had resigned, Mr. Duffy had left the Conservative caucus and then been suspended from the Senate, and the police were rummaging through everyone’s dirty laundry.

The shape of the Crown’s case is in documents filed in court by RCMP investigators.

They’re mainly sworn statements from officers asking for search warrants, explaining to judges what they’re looking for and exactly why, pulling together material from interviews, media reports and previous searches. There’s a lot in them but they aren’t complete.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

Mr. Duffy’s lawyer, Don Bayne, has promised that Mr. Duffy has more emails, more notes, more evidence, “the tip of a big evidentiary iceberg.”

What the Mounties do have led them and the Crown to lay charges so wide-ranging it’s hard to keep them all in your head at once. If they have a theme, it’s this: When Mike Duffy saw a dollar, he tried to get it.

Duffy’s career on television paid a lot more than most jobs but not enough to make a man with expensive tastes comfortable for life. When he quit his politics show to become a $135,000-a-year senator, he took a pay cut, maybe of as much as half.

So, goes the allegation, Mr. Duffy found ways to make it up. He claimed that the house he already owned in west-end Ottawa, a city he’d lived in for 38 years, was a secondary residence, a place he kept only because he needed somewhere to lay his head while doing Senate work here.