“A Hunting Accident In My Living Room”
Imagine the reaction, if, during Watergate testimony, one of the principals testified he believed the “president’s men” would murder him if he broke his silence. Now, imagine there were two such witnesses.
A former vice-president of Groupaction, told Charles Guité’s fraud trial Wednesday that he feared for his life if he were to blow the whistle on what he saw as suspicious goings on between his ad agency and former prime minister Jean Chretien’s office.
“I wasn’t interested in having a hunting accident in my living room,” he testified. Lambert, who quit Groupaction in 2001, said he felt like his was trapped in a system with many tentacles, at the centre of which was Chretien.
In Canada, however, the explosive testimony is barely causing a ripple in the “Liberal friendly” English mainstream press. Andrew Coyne;
“So the former VP of Groupaction becomes the second person connected with the sponsorship scandal to testify, under oath, to having been afraid someone would kill him — a fact CP neglects to mention until the eighth graf...”
Well, there was some talk about the “Clinton Trail of Dead Bodies” back in those bad old days.
The truth was bad enough — travel office employees fired and prosecuted on trumped-up charges, as just one example — that it didn’t need to be overstated the way it was. But it was, and now what everyone remembers about that time is a DNA sample taken off a blue dress.
In one way, I hope this “hunting accident in the living room” talk is just hype. Then again, if it is just hype, it needs to be dialed back severely or the truth about the Chretien years will get buried in tinfoil.