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To be sure, on the specific charge against him, that he had told her chief of staff in a meeting on Dec. 18 that “there’s no solution that doesn’t involve some interference,” he had “a very different recollection.” Variations on that theme were to be heard later from the clerk of the privy council, Michael Wernick, who had “no recollection” of a variety of statements attributed to him — that SNC-Lavalin would move its headquarters from Montreal if it did not get its way, or that something unfortunate might happen to her career if she kept crossing the prime minister.

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But for the most part the strategy appeared to be unchanged: to blur important distinctions and focus on irrelevant questions; to confuse the obvious, that two people might have conflicting accounts of the same event, with the insane, that it neither happened nor did not happen; and otherwise to rely on the public’s hazy grasp of the legal principles involved to see them through.

The emphasis of Butts’s testimony was that the sustained and mounting pressure the former attorney general said she was under — from ministers, political staff, civil servants and the prime minister himself — was not really pressure at all. Or if it was, it was merely pressure to seek an outside legal opinion on the matter, perhaps from a former Supreme Court justice.

Various reasons were presented as to why this was justified. Wilson-Raybould had taken only 12 days to arrive at her decision not to overrule the DPP. The law permitting prosecutors to negotiate remediation agreements was “new,” having only been passed (in response to years of lobbying by SNC-Lavalin) earlier that year. Decisions on prosecutions are never final, but must be constantly reassessed in light of fresh evidence. And, of course, those 9,000 SNC-Lavalin jobs that were supposedly at stake.