Article content continued

The OPP confirmed to the National Post on Thursday that Clement had made a report during the summer. Scheer’s spokesman, Brock Harrison, told the Post that Clement did not inform his party of that report.

But reached Friday, Strahl said a conversation had indeed happened. He said he did not “escalate” the matter to the leader’s office because Clement led him to believe the problem was a relatively “routine” one, of an internet troll harassing a politician.

This was just, ‘an anonymous troll has an account and they’re spreading lies about me, what should I do?

“Tony and I did have a conversation this summer about it, and how it was presented to me was a fake Instagram account was spreading lies about him on Instagram. Nothing about, ‘someone has intimate photos of me,’ nothing about blackmail at all at that time,” Strahl told the Post. “This was just, ‘an anonymous troll has an account and they’re spreading lies about me, what should I do?’”

Clement had been given top-secret security clearance as one of two Conservative MPs appointed to a special committee of parliamentarians charged with overseeing the work of Canada’s spy agencies. Security experts have raised concerns this week about the danger of a member of the committee allowing themselves to be vulnerable to blackmail. As of Friday evening, there was no public evidence the extortionist sought secure information.

Strahl knew the matter was serious enough for Clement to want to approach police. But he didn’t inform Scheer or go any farther than providing Clement with information about how to have a harassing account taken down by Facebook, which owns Instagram. “Apparently, within a couple of days, the account was taken down. So that was the end of it, as far as I knew,” said Strahl.

A source close to Clement told the Post that Strahl’s account sounded accurate — that at the time, it appeared to just be a troll trying to spread politically-damaging content about Clement, not a national security issue.

“At no time have these personal lapses impacted or involved my day-to-day work as a Member of Parliament,” Clement said in the letter posted Thursday. He could not be reached for comment Friday evening.

With files from Christie Blatchford.

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: mariedanielles