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Stephen Harper’s former in-house lawyer testified Friday that he was “blindsided” by senior staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office who cut him out of secret negotiations they were having with Sen. Mike Duffy.

Ben Perrin, legal counsel to Harper and his office in February and March 2013, when the PMO was desperately trying to bury the Senate spending scandal, said he was kept ignorant of key pieces of information — notably, the ongoing negotiations that Harper’s then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, were having with Duffy.

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“I look back at this as a situation I certainly felt blindsided by,” said Perrin, who has referred to his role as a “messenger” tasked for the most part with communicating with Duffy’s Ottawa lawyer at the time, Janice Payne.

“As counsel in the matter, I was clearly left in the dark,” he said. “This is not the proper way to conduct a legal matter.”

Perrin repeated his testimony of Thursday in which he said he was unaware that Wright had decided to secretly pay Duffy’s $90,000 expense tab out of his own pocket until minutes before a conference call with Payne in which Wright told her the same thing.