Trudeau refused to release documents to Mounties as part of the SNC investigation

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The RCMP dropped its investigation into the SNC-Lavalin scandal in part because it was unable to access cabinet documents.

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Either the Trudeau government is hiding something in this scandal, or it just wants it to appear that way.

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This is the second official inquiry into the issue that has been thwarted to gain access to certain documents after the government invoked Cabinet confidentiality.

Previously, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion was blocked from accessing documents while he investigated whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had violated Canada’s ethics laws for MPs and federal civil servants.

“I was unable to fully discharge the investigative duties assigned to me by law,” Dion wrote in his August 2019 report.

Nevertheless, he was able to conclude that Trudeau violated Sec. had violated. 9 of the Conflict of Interest Act by attempting to influence Jody Wilson-Raybould in her role as Attorney General. Despite the evidence, the RCMP said they were unable to conclude that Trudeau or others in his government violated the Criminal Code’s ban on obstruction of justice.

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New documents, disclosed to Democracy Watch in accordance with the federal Access to Information Actshow that RCMP officers investigating the scandal were turned down when attempting to gain access to Cabinet documents and decided not to seek a court order for their release.

Despite collecting a wealth of evidence, including from the report and the ethics commissioner’s testimony in the House of Commons, the Mounties did not believe they could obtain a search warrant to obtain Cabinet documents.

“In order to obtain production warrants or search warrants, there must be reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has been committed,” the RCMP report states, “it is believed that the available evidence is insufficient to dissuade a court from committing the crime “To convince the accused of criminal offenses.”

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With that, the RCMP gave up its case.

“Given the current legal framework, the overall assessment of the evidence and the threshold of evidence required for a criminal conviction, it is considered that there is insufficient evidence to support further investigative action or a prosecution,” the report said.

Translation: We haven’t looked at all the evidence, but we don’t think we should either.

For those who have forgotten, Trudeau was under investigation over allegations that he tried to get Wilson-Raybould to drop criminal proceedings against SNC-Lavalin in a bribery case. The company or his officersThis was found to be the case involved in bribery And other corrupt practices many times in multiple jurisdictions but often prefer to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement.

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Wilson-Raybould disagreed with this approach and planned to go to court. That angered the prime minister and his aides, who spent months calling, texting and meeting with her to persuade her to change her mind.

It is incredible that the RCMP does not believe that interfering in the Attorney General’s decisions constitutes obstruction of justice Section 139 Paragraph 2 StGB It states that it is a criminal offense to “obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice.” In an attempt to get Wilson-Raybould to change her mind, Trudeau and his aides appear to have attempted to obstruct justice by trying to persuade the country’s most senior prosecutor to drop the case.

Trudeau was so determined to make this happen that Wilson-Raybould was axed from the portfolio and eventually left cabinet, but the Mounties are having none of it.

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When the story broke in the media, Trudeau initially denied the reports, calling them false. He later admitted that he had spoken to her but had not put any “undue pressure” on her.

When a House of Commons committee got too close to the issue, Trudeau got his MPs to close the matter. When the ethics commissioner conducted an investigation, he refused to release documents, but still found he had broken the law.

At the RCMP, he again refused to release documents, and this time the Mounties closed their investigation.

You can smell the rot in Ottawa across the country.

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