Who Says Brian Mulroney Took a Dime from Schreiber?

Ask yourself this, when did Brian Mulroney admit taking $300,000 from Karlheinz Schreiber? When has he acknowledged taking Dime One from Schreiber? Have you ever heard him say it? Have you ever read where he's actually said it to anyone? I haven't and I'll bet neither have you.

We've heard Schreiber say it. We've learned about it in the great reporting from the Fifth Estate and the Globe & Mail but I can't recall anyone even getting a chance to ask Mulroney if he got the $300,000 he's alleged to have received.

Okay, okay, I know, Mulroney's supposed spokesman, Luc Lavoie, seems to have acknowledged the fact, even called it his boss's worst mistake. But that's Luc Lavoie, not Brian Mulroney. We've all heard about Mulroney promoting Schreiber's pasta venture of the Bear Head armoured vehicle plant proposal - but we haven't heard that from the mouth of the one guy who, at this point, truly matters - Martin Brian Mulroney.

Coming into the upcoming inquiry, Mulroney is seemingly trapped by facts. No one can know what he's facing better than Mulroney and his counsel. But take a hard look at the facts that confront him. For all we know, he may have a case built up that will blow Schreiber out of the water and make Lavoie look like an ill-informed,loud-mouth klutz.

Schreiber is vulnerable, that much we know. Lavoie can always say he was working from assumptions. Get enough of the clutter out of the way and all Brian Mulroney may have to overcome is Brian Mulroney.

That's not to say he doesn't have a lot of explaining to do. It's merely to say that a lot of what appear to be hurdles that lie in his path probably aren't as daunting as we might see them. What I'm also saying is that we're beginning to let assumptions get the better of us and, in these matters, that's like leading with your chin.

Mulroney's Colossal Mistakes

According to Mulroney mouthpiece, Luc Lavoie, the former PM made a "colossal mistake" in accepting money from Karlheinz Schreiber. Funny he would look at it that way.

Mulroney's problems aren't with taking the cash-stuffed envelopes in coffee shops and hotel rooms. It's what he did afterwards that amounted to colossal mistakes - plural.

It's why he omitted any mention of getting the Schreiber schmiergelder money in his sworn evidence in his law suit. It's why he seemingly waited until after Schreiber's bank records came out to admit receiving the money and then running off to Revenue Canada to make an "anything but voluntary" disclosure. Those are colossal mistakes and there may be more, who knows?

Mulroney is furiously slicing and dicing what's left of his reputation with utterly far-fetched explanations. Like why he didn't disclose his business relationship in his testimony. Why? Because he wasn't asked. He's right, the government's counsel didn't put that specific question to him but Mulroney answered it anyway. He volunteered that he had no dealings with Schreiber other than to meet the guy for coffee a couple of times. That's Mulroney's statement. It's on the record, given under oath. And it wasn't remotely true.

Mulroney's last-ditch defence is tantamount to saying that, since you didn't ask the specific question, I was entitled to give an utterly false and misleading statement of my own and if you were deceived by that, hey, it's your problem. Sorry, Brian, doesn't work that way. You're bound by your voluntary statements, regardless of the question asked, because you made them under oath. There's no special law for Brian Mulroney. Just the same one the rest of us have to live by. Oh yeah, Brian, you're a lawyer and nobody knows that better than someone from your profession.

Bear in mind that Mulroney hasn't said these things himself. Luc Lavoie has said them, the boss's mouthpiece. Lavoie has said a lot of things that weren't exactly true but they were his statements, not Mulroney's, and Lavoie is free to say pretty much anything he pleases. He's free to test one tall tale after another in a hunt to find the one that will fly best for the boss. So far he's not gotten anywhere but, hey, you have to give him full points for trying.

He had it all. A good life, every advantage, even some of his reputation back. But that wasn't enough for Brian Mulroney. He had to come back into the public eye as Stephen Harper's mentor and he brought all the old arrogance along with him. If he'd just laid low until after Schreiber was cooling his heels in a German jail cell, he might have dodged this bullet but life in the public eye was too enticing. Oh well.

Mulroney's fortunes took another hit yesterday when Jean Chretien told an interviewer that he'd discussed the latest information with Allan Rock, the former justice minister who handled the Mulroney lawsuit settlement. Chretien got out his trusty mallet and wooden stake and said the two agreed that, had they known of the Schreiber payments, there wouldn't have been a settlement, there wouldn't have been an apology. Payback is a bitch, Brian.

Sorry, Lavoie - It Is Our Business, Your Boss Mulroney Made It Our Business

"Luc Lavoie told CanWest News Service that when Mr. Mulroney left politics in 1993, he had money pressures since he was "not a rich man" at the head of a young family with certain lifestyle expectations."

I read James' post suggesting that having Luc Lavoie as a spokesman is a real blunder for Brian Mulroney. I'm not so sure that this isn't a pretty shrewd tactic.

Brian Mulroney likes to get his message out through underlings and fixers, like Luc Lavoie and Fred Doucet. I expect it's the deniability game. If Lavoie says something - and it backfires (as it has so often) - Mulroney can skirt the result by saying his underling was wrong. Much better than getting stuck with it personally.

Now if Mulroney is going to get a sympathetic ear anywhere, it's with Canada's uber-right media. Yes, I mean the National Disgrace. Sort of like how Cheney always gravitates to Fox News whenever he's looking for a compliant interviewer who will keep a straight face while he spins bullshit.

Not suprising Mulroney's latest "po-boy" refrain wound up being carried by Lavoie to the National Disgrace. Here's the latest. Yes, Karlheinz Schreiber met with Mulroney three times to pass cash-stuffed envelopes, each to the tune of $100,000, across a table to the boss. Why three envelopes? Why $100,000 each time? Easy. Each $100,000 was for one year's consulting fees for Mulroney helping Schreiber with a project to build military vehicles in Montreal and to establish a pasta business.

Yes, says Lavoie, Mulroney did accept the first cash retainer while he was still an MP for Baie Comeau but after Kim Campbell had succeeded him as prime minister.

Now the next line is that, because the delightful little bundles of cash were retainers, Mulroney wasn't obliged to report them as income right away. In other words, they only became income in the years in which they were earned. Okay.

And, on the thorny issue of when his boss did actually decide to run to RevCan and pay taxes on the "income," Lavoie punts and says that isn't anyone's "God damn business." Ooh, ouch! Sorry, Luc, but it is our goddamned business, Mulroney made it our business.

It was Mulroney who told counsel, under oath, that his involvement with Schreiber after leaving office had amounted to simply having coffee with the guy once or twice. Mulroney offered an account of their relationship and he can hardly now say it's the government's fault because they didn't ask if he'd pocketed any cash-stuffed envelopes from Schreiber.

Mulroney proferred an account demonstrably at odds with the current story now that incontrovertible facts have come out that certainly seem to contradict his testimony. So it's cut here and snip there and sand off these rough spots trying to make his account conform to the known facts and the more he does that, the more obvious everything becomes.

One thing I don't get. LaVioe goes to the National Disgrace with a sob story about how Mulroney was all but broke when he left office. Poor fella! What I don't get is how does a guy in such embarrassed circumstances manage to get in his car, drive down to Montreal and buy a really big house for, oh, $1.6-million (March, 1993) and then throw another $1-million to renovate the old dump? Wouldn't you like to be that kind of poor? When you look at those numbers, Schreiber's $300,000 was chump change.