later learned that the third Daemon Dialer download was “cancelled by Prescott and so was never ‘exported.’” Rougier provided the “targeting information,” which described the criteria “Prescott” used to request the material from CIMS.(This information would later change in a very important way. On April 3, 2014, Maher and McGregor published an article with information based on what Andrew Prescott had told investigators in March 2014: that Guelph campaign manager Ken Morgan had asked him to log on to a robocall account on his computer, a computer he later destroyed.)
The CIMS data was compared to listings of the outgoing robocalls provided by RackNine under a court order. The lists matched. Investigators were now certain that the list used to make the fraudulent robocalls came from the data bank of the Conservative Party of Canada. Mathews also asked Rougier for the IP addresses that five Marty Burke volunteers had used to access CIMS between April 23 and May 2, 2011. Access is limited by the party, and each person is given a unique password. Rougier told Mathews that thirty-two of the forty-one “access events” were through the Burke campaign IP address. Investigators found puzzling blanks 10 between one person’s logon and logoff of CIMS at headquarters on the day the Guelph data was accessed. On May 1, 2011, the day before the vote, a call was made from the Conservative Party war room in Ottawa to RackNine. The number was listed as belonging to Chris Rougier. 11
On February 28, 2012, and again on April 19, 2012, Elections Canada investigators Ron Lamothe and Al Mathews met with another important player in the puzzle of robocalls, Matthew McBain—and once again the ubiquitous Arthur Hamilton. Lamothe, a seasoned veteran, was the assistant chief investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada. In 2008, the former Ottawa police officer’s affidavit had laid out the elaborate scheme to move Conservative Party money from national coffers into and then out of the accounts of local Conservative campaigns to skirt national spending limits for the 2006 election. It was brilliant and brave police work. Conservative Partyof Canada headquarters was raided as part of the investigation’s effort to acquire evidence in the in-and-out scandal.
One of the big unanswered questions of the robocall investigation was why investigators allowed the party to provide the information from CIMS, rather than seizing the computers with a warrant and investigating the downloads themselves. Lamothe was interested in talking to Matthew McBain, a party worker who was in the central war room during the 2011 election. Sona had left voice messages for him during the campaign, but McBain didn’t know him. So instead of answering, he sent an email to John White, whom he did know, to see if he should talk to his unknown caller. White was one of five workers on the Guelph campaign who had access to the CIMS list. 12 When Andrew Prescott lost his computer job at a Guelph hospital, John White had helped find the young man a job in Calgary. 13 He vouched for Sona in a return email, explaining to McBain that his colleague on the Burke campaign needed some advice: “His name is Mike Sona . . . and he’s good. He has [ sic ] some advice that you may be well qualified to give.” (Later, at Sona’s trial, White would testify he meant to say that McBain had advice for Sona.)
Through Arthur Hamilton, a copy of the email exchanges of April 26 and 27 between the two Conservative workers was given to investigators. According to McBain, Sona wanted to know how to make untraceable phone calls. Mathews initially recorded in his account of this interview that McBain claimed that Sona asked about “a campaign of disinformation such as making misleading poll moving calls.” But that astonishing assertion was amended in a subsequent affidavit from Mathews dated May 25, 2012. Now McBain “did not recall Sona as relating the call
The CIMS data was compared to listings of the outgoing robocalls provided by RackNine under a court order. The lists matched. Investigators were now certain that the list used to make the fraudulent robocalls came from the data bank of the Conservative Party of Canada. Mathews also asked Rougier for the IP addresses that five Marty Burke volunteers had used to access CIMS between April 23 and May 2, 2011. Access is limited by the party, and each person is given a unique password. Rougier told Mathews that thirty-two of the forty-one “access events” were through the Burke campaign IP address. Investigators found puzzling blanks 10 between one person’s logon and logoff of CIMS at headquarters on the day the Guelph data was accessed. On May 1, 2011, the day before the vote, a call was made from the Conservative Party war room in Ottawa to RackNine. The number was listed as belonging to Chris Rougier. 11
On February 28, 2012, and again on April 19, 2012, Elections Canada investigators Ron Lamothe and Al Mathews met with another important player in the puzzle of robocalls, Matthew McBain—and once again the ubiquitous Arthur Hamilton. Lamothe, a seasoned veteran, was the assistant chief investigator in the office of the Commissioner of Elections Canada. In 2008, the former Ottawa police officer’s affidavit had laid out the elaborate scheme to move Conservative Party money from national coffers into and then out of the accounts of local Conservative campaigns to skirt national spending limits for the 2006 election. It was brilliant and brave police work. Conservative Partyof Canada headquarters was raided as part of the investigation’s effort to acquire evidence in the in-and-out scandal.
One of the big unanswered questions of the robocall investigation was why investigators allowed the party to provide the information from CIMS, rather than seizing the computers with a warrant and investigating the downloads themselves. Lamothe was interested in talking to Matthew McBain, a party worker who was in the central war room during the 2011 election. Sona had left voice messages for him during the campaign, but McBain didn’t know him. So instead of answering, he sent an email to John White, whom he did know, to see if he should talk to his unknown caller. White was one of five workers on the Guelph campaign who had access to the CIMS list. 12 When Andrew Prescott lost his computer job at a Guelph hospital, John White had helped find the young man a job in Calgary. 13 He vouched for Sona in a return email, explaining to McBain that his colleague on the Burke campaign needed some advice: “His name is Mike Sona . . . and he’s good. He has [ sic ] some advice that you may be well qualified to give.” (Later, at Sona’s trial, White would testify he meant to say that McBain had advice for Sona.)
Through Arthur Hamilton, a copy of the email exchanges of April 26 and 27 between the two Conservative workers was given to investigators. According to McBain, Sona wanted to know how to make untraceable phone calls. Mathews initially recorded in his account of this interview that McBain claimed that Sona asked about “a campaign of disinformation such as making misleading poll moving calls.” But that astonishing assertion was amended in a subsequent affidavit from Mathews dated May 25, 2012. Now McBain “did not recall Sona as relating the call
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