TORONTO—One of the senior federal officials that Jody Wilson-Raybould accused of interfering in the SNC-Lavalin criminal case is insisting that he did “nothing wrong.”

In a very brief exchange Wednesday morning in Toronto, Ben Chin, chief of staff to Finance Minister Bill Morneau, told iPolitics that everything he did in relation to the controversy was above aboard, after initially saying he couldn’t comment directly on the allegations.

“I did nothing wrong, but I’m a staffer so I don’t talk,” Chin said as he accompanied Morneau to a post-budget breakfast speech to the Toronto Region Board of Trade, the Canadian Club and the Empire Club.

In testimony before the House justice committee last month, Wilson-Raybould, the former attorney general, accused Chin of inappropriately pressuring her office after she decided not to intervene in the engineering giant’s criminal case.

[READ MORE: A timeline of the SNC-Lavalin/PMO controversy]

During her appearance, she detailed three specific instances last fall where Chin spoke with staff in her office about the possibility of giving SNC-Lavalin a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) so that it could avoid a possible ban on lucrative government contracts.

Wilson-Raybould signalled out a meeting between Chin and her then-chief of staff Jessica Prince in early September where he warned that if SNC-Lavalin didn’t receive the DPA they would leave Montreal. Given the upcoming Quebec election, he told Prince “we can’t have that happen,” Wilson-Raybould said during her committee appearance.

She argued that raising partisan concerns or election fallout to justify interfering in a criminal case was “completely inappropriate.”

Chin dismissed Wilson-Raybould’s analysis of the discussions.

“Political staffers talking to other political staffers is entirely appropriate,” he told iPolitics, before being whisked away with Morneau and his other staff.

Wilson-Raybould told the committee that Chin was part of a group of senior staff and ministers who held a “consistent and sustained effort to attempt to politically interfere with my role as the Attorney General.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — who Wilson-Raybould says also improperly pressured her — has staunchly defended his government’s work but he also confirmed some of the points she said he raised with her.

“It is our job as parliamentarians to defend the interests of the communities we were elected to represent, to be the voice of those communities in Ottawa,” Trudeau said at a press conference on March 7.

“I stressed the importance of protecting Canadian jobs and reiterated that this issue was one of significant national importance.”

[READ MORE: Conservatives threaten to delay budget after Liberals stop SNC-Lavalin study]

On Tuesday, against loud protests from the opposition, the Liberal-controlled justice committee shut down its study of the allegations.

The NDP and Conservative members of the committee had wanted Wilson-Raybould to return to respond to testimony made by the country’s top bureaucrat Michael Wernick and Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts.

They also wanted to hear from Prince and other senior staff in the prime minister’s office named by Wilson-Raybould.

“Canadians now have the necessary information to arrive at a conclusion,” the Liberal MPs on the justice committee said in a letter released in advance of the meeting.

To date, four senior government figures have resigned in the wake of the controversy, first reported by the Globe and Mail on Feb. 7.

Wilson-Raybould resigned from cabinet on Feb. 12, Butts followed on Feb. 18, while Treasury Board President Jane Philpott stepped down on March 4. And on Monday, Wernick announced he would resign from the public service before the next election.

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