Tale of the Tape: Two out of three forensic audio experts agree … to disagree. Or not.

By kadyomalley - Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

Don’t worry, I’ll be back on duty later tonight, and you can bet that I’ll have plenty to say about the most recent developments in the Cadman case:

• the latest revelations from the case file to be unearthed by Canadian Press: at least one of the still unknown number of forensic audio experts hired by the PM’s legal team to analyse the now infamous tape was unwilling to state conclusively that the recording had been “doctored”
• Tom Zytaruk’s very public plea for Dona Cadman to set the record straight.

For now, though, amateur Cadmanologists can colonize this shiny, new thread to continue the conversation.

UPDATED: Tale of the tape redux: How do you deny what was never said?

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 8:51 AM - 0 Comments

ALSO NEW AND FRESH AND WORTH CLICKING: Read Dona Cadman’s supplementary affidavit here.

EVEN MORE OF AN UPDATE: Ryan Sparrow (!) sends along this excerpt from an interview Zytaruk did on Mike Duffy live on June 4 — the day after the Conservative Party press conference alleging that the tape had been “doctored.” What strikes me most of all is the remarkable consistency between the description of how the three of them – himself, Harper and Dona Cadman – were positioned on the stairs in the following passage, and what he told Dale Goldhawk earlier this year.

Mike Duffy Live, June 4, 2008:

Zytaruk:

Mike, I will just back up. Give you some context here. Donna and Chuck had asked me to write Chuck’s biography. During the process of interviews and everything Donna told me about this insurance policy business. I thought the best thing for me to do would be to speak would Stephen Harper about it, being the leader of the party. You know, head guy, so to speak. So a local conservative fellow had winked me over to the Cadmans’ place that day because they said that Stephen Harper would be showing up. So I got to Donna’s place. Parked my car across the lawn. When I got to her front door she was at the top of the stairs. This is inside the house. Stephen Harper is in the middle. And I’m at the bottom at the landing there. You know, captive audience, unfortunately, for him. And Donna introduced me, you know as the biographer of Chuck’s book and I can’t remember exactly what Mr. Harper said. He said something to the effect about Chuck being a nice guy and he deserves the — you know, he deserves that kind of thing and then he went. When he went out the door, I followed him, and I interviewed him at the top of the driveway. He had like a suburban or his people waiting at the bottom of the driveway. And I brought my tape recorder out, and I started my interview with — I mean, there was a life insurance policy for Donna, a million dollar life insurance policy for Donna, do you know anything about that or something to that effect? I don’t have the tape in front of me.

UPDATE: See also this post, which compiles the various accounts of that day being put forward by the main players.

A little more than a month after the Conservative Party released its as-it-turns-out-somewhat-less-than-definitive proof that the infamous tape of the interview between the Prime Minister and Cadman biographer Tom Zytaruk was “doctored” comes this explosive headline, courtesy of CanWest News:

KAPOW! BOFF! SCRUMPH! There goes Zytaruk’s credibility, and the Liberal party’s main defence against the PM’s defamation suit, in one fell swoop – except that neither of those statements from Dona Cadman contradict Zytaruk’s version of events at all.
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Tale of the Tape: James Moore dares call it conspiracy!

By kadyomalley - Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

… Well, sort of. He’s asking questions, not making statements. Full text – and commentary – after the jump:
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Tale of the Tape: Unspooling the Timeline

By kadyomalley - Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 9:09 AM - 0 Comments

UPDATE: Courtesy of Une femme verte: The Cadman scrum/QP highlights reel

Note: All dates taken from the Notice of Motion submitted by the Conservative Party of Canada.

April 1, 2008

Liberal Justice Critic Dominic Leblanc holds press conference calling on the Prime Minister to “testify on the Cadman affair, and without [his] consent or authorization, played the doctored audiotape.” (Affidavit of Prime Minister Stephen Harper dated June 2)

April 17, 2008

• The first appearance of the Cadman “Explain the Tape” Van: “Several Young Liberals played the audiotape while driving around downtown Ottawa in a van with my photograph painted on the side of the van.” (Harper affidavit)
• Gowling Lafleur Henderson lawyer Wendy Wagner asks forensic audio expert R. Alan Gough if he can determine “what caused” the “interruption of the recording” at the 1:45 second mark. Note: This is a new, unplayed wire-to-wire audio tape of the interview. In her letter to Gough, Wagner notes that author Tom Zytaruk had “previously” provided the firm with a duplicate audiotape of the interview “that has an interruption of the recording at about the one minute-45 second mark.” (Affidavit of Alan Gough)

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Tale of the Tape: Okay, they are alleging what I thought they were alleging …

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 11:21 PM - 0 Comments

And the Globe and Mail has it on the record from PMO deputy communications director, Dimitri Soudas:

{…}Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for the Prime Minister, said in a later e-mail that the edits changed the meaning of Mr. Harper’s comments, and that one of them inserted a question to misrepresent his answer.

Mr. Soudas said that change “creates a question that was never asked” about an allegation that his party had offered a $1-million life insurance policy to terminally ill Mr. Cadman, an Independent, and that Mr. Harper replied, “I don’t know the details …”

“When the PM says he does not know the details, he is not answering a question about the insurance policy for [Mr. Cadman's wife],” Mr. Soudas said in the e-mail. [...]

One of the breaks identified by the experts comes early in the recording, where Mr. Zytaruk asks Mr. Harper if he knows anything about the life insurance policy.

“I don’t know the details. I know that um, there were discussions, um. But this is not for publication?”

Wednesday, Mr. Soudas wrote in an e-mail: “The edits change what the PM told Zytaruk during that interview. “… When the PM says he does not know the details, he is not answering a question about the insurance policy for Dona.”

It’s worth pointing out that neither of the audio experts that party lawyers consulted go nearly as far as Soudas. (Read their affidavits – and the rest of the filing – here, courtesy of Stephen Taylor, who has put the entire package online.)
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Only tangentially tape-related: Remember all that confusion over when the meeting took place?

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 6:02 PM - 0 Comments

A quick recap, in case you’ve forgotten: Dona Cadman told Zytaruk that she found out about the offer on May 17th, 2005, but Doug Finley and Tom Flanagan – the two men who claimed to have met with Cadman to discuss his possible return to caucus were adamant that the meeting actually took place two days later, on May 19th. The publishers eventually took the extraordinary step of removing the date completely from the final text of the book.

In an affidavit dated May 23, 2008, Dona Cadman once again states that her husband told her about the offer after meeting with Conservative officials on May 17th – not May 19th, as alleged by Tom Flanagan and Doug Finley:
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The Tale of the Tape: Are the Tories alleging what I think they're alleging?

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 5:21 PM - 0 Comments

(I’ve finally managed to relocate my binder from this morning’s press conference, so expect a burst of mini-posts as I go through the three hundred or so pages filed as part of the Conservatives’ request for an injunction against using the tape.)

The Prime Minister’s affidavit, which is dated June 2, 2008, includes the following passage:

(iii) The Insurance Policy Question

9. At no time did I tell Mr. Zytaruk during my interview that I knew of a $1 million insurance policy for Dona Cadman offered to Chuck Cadman by Conservative Party representatives. At no time did I tell Mr. Zytaruk that I knew of any discussions of a $1 million insurance policy for Dona Cadman offered to Chuck Cadman by Conservative Party representatives. On September 9, 2005 I had no knowledge whatsoever of anybody making a $1 million insurance policy offer to Chuck Cadman on May 17, 2005, or on any other date. And I have no such knowledge today.

What isn’t clear is whether or not he is claiming that the question itself – whether Harper knows anything about an alleged offer – was never asked - which would be a fairly sensational allegation, since it would point to deliberate, elaborate “doctoring” of the tape.
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Tale of the tape: Zytaruk speaks!

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

… to his employer, Surrey Now. The editing is a little slapdash – understandable, since they obviously wanted to get this up as soon as possible – but it does answer the question of whether it was the original recording that was sent to the forensic experts (no) and whether he stands by his claim that the entire conversation is on that tape (yes).

[...] Media crews descended on the Now office Wednesday morning to get reporter Tom Zytaruk’s reaction to comments made by Conservative MP James Moore that the 2005 taped interview is “incomplete” and contains doctored soundbites. The tape, an interview from 2005 with Stephen Harper about financial considerations offered to then Independent MP Chuck Cadman on the eve of a confidence vote, was part of Zytaruk’s research for his biography Like a Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, released earlier this year. [...]
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More on the Cadman tape: Seriously not the Nixon tapes, guys.

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at 12:55 PM - 0 Comments

Rescued from the liveblog, and added here for the attention- and/or blogreadingtime-challenged:

After the press conference, I brought this [the chain of custody of the evidence, i.e. the tape sent to the forensic experts] up with Ryan Sparrow, and he assured me that the tape went straight from the publishers to the party’s lawyers, who sent it to the experts. It’s still not clear, however, how many people would have had the opportunity – or for that matter, the motive – to “doctor” the tapes. I guess the Liberals are off the hook, though, since they never had access to the tape sent to to experts.

While I’m posting, I also want to reiterate my instaprediction that this will turn out to have been a big mistake for the Conservatives.
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Oh, come on. Even Lost had a more coherent story arc this season

By kadyomalley - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:15 PM - 0 Comments

Seriously? Has Who Wants To Chair The Justice Committee gone into reruns already? Did I miss the season finale?

Orders of the Day

Pursuant to Standing Order 106(4), meeting requested by four (4) members of the Committee to discuss their request to proceed to the vote on the appeal of the ruling of the Chair concerning the motion moved by the member from Beauséjour on March 11, 2008

… must not only be done, but be seen to be done.

By kadyomalley - Monday, May 5, 2008 at 9:29 PM - 0 Comments

Hey, remember when we had a Justice committee? You know, one that would hold regular meetings, albeit regular meetings that would regularly come to an abrupt halt within minutes as the chair stormed out of the room, muttering darkly about the tyranny of the majority?

Well, it’s back. Sort of. But don’t get your hopes up.

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