RoboCon : Michael Sona and Sun News Network

Former Guelph Con Party communications director Michael Sona relates how he was sitting in his Hill office on Feb. 23 2012 when he was shocked to hear Sun News reporter Brian Lilley fingering him on air for the Guelph robocalls election fraud. Sona  : 

 "I contacted a few people at [Con] headquarters and I just said I wanna know what's going on. Like why am I being thrown out here because Sun News is you know kind of an alternate method of getting press releases and other stories out from the party, right? I mean everyone knows that, right? It's just a standard comm's tactic. And I knew if this is on Sun News, this isn't just some you know hack journalist picking up some story that he's fabricated in his head. This is someone. Someone is feeding him this."

Sona eventually hears back from Con Party lawyer Arthur Hamilton who tells him not to worry about anonymous sources.

Excerpted from that 2012 Sun News broadcast with Brian Lilley :

"The Conservatives have someone identified already on who they think this could be. ... We've been talking to sources here for the Ottawa bureau for Sun News Network and they're pointing towards on individual in particular. His name is Michael Sona. ... We're waiting on an official statement on this but sources are saying at this point it appears it is this one individual, a Michael Sona, who has associations with the campaign, may have worked on a local campaign, but he's not, was not with the national Conservative campaign. So then it becomes a question of was this a directive from the top, was this someone acting on their own locally to try and help their candidate win? ... "

Lilley says Con lawyer Arthur Hamilton is already on it - praises him as a "no-nonsense guy"

"But it does look at this point that it was Michael Sona who was behind this ...."

A statement is then read out from Steve's political director Jenni Byrne denying Con Party headquarters involvement. Back to Lilley :

"Sources say that it does look like it was Michael Sona who was behind this but no confirmation for sure, no charges laid at this point and we'll wait and see what Mr. Sona himself has to say. We'll be reaching out to him today of course as well."

After the broadcast and a phone call from Jenni Byrne, Con MP Eve Adams asked Sona to hand in his resignation.

DefMin Peter MacKay answering a question on the Guelph robocalls three days later :

"I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this ... and that individual is no longer in the employment of the party."

Eye-bleach graffic above inspired by the cover of Brian Lilley's popular runaway! runaway! bestcellar book CBC Exposed  which accuses the CBC of being the state broadcaster : 

"This book takes on the holy grail of the Canadian media landscape and lays bare the truth about CBC. Reckless reporting at the state broadcaster has ruined lives ...

"Ruined lives" indeed. Michael Sona, forced to resign his job on the Hill the day of that Sun News broadcast, is still waiting for resolution a year later.

Big City Lib blogged on Thursday that Harpercrat Action Plan ads appear to account "for well over half of the adverts on the Sun TV website."  

"Does this amount to a government subsidy...the Harper Gov. throwing money to a message friendly news service?  And if so, does that make Sun TV Canada's REAL state broadcaster?"

Certainly the Conservative Party seems to think so. 
Just before the last federal election, Patrick Muttart, Harper's former deputy chief of staff and chief marketing strategist for the Conservative Party of Canada, forwarded what appeared to be a photo of Michael Ignatieff in Kuwait in US battle fatigues on to former Harper spokesy now founder and VP of Sun News Kory Teneycke - presumably for election news publication. Teneycke caught it in time.
Muttart, who had moved to the Canada/ US practice of a US marketing firm, told reporters that at the time, he was both an unpaid advisor to Sun News to launch their TV network and "on the Con payroll as a consultant to the party's election war room."

CBC is the national public broadcaster. Sun News Network, as Michael Sona puts it, is an alternate method of getting stories out from the party.

Michael Sona's video interview with McMaher on Friday , btw, well worth a full listen.
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RoboCon : Cross-border election shopping

A Republican operative convicted of perpetrating election phone fraud for the Republican National Committee told interviewer Stephen Maher that "fraudulent calls in the last Canadian election are likely an American import" and a "fairly sophisticated operation".


Allen Raymond wrote a book about his stint as a GOP dirty trickster called How to Rig an Election in which he explains the use of tactics like phone jamming political opponents - hey, did Elections Canada ever investigate the over 10,000 phone jamming calls used to disrupt the NDP's online leadership vote this year ? - as well as harassment live calls intended to discourage opponents from voting at all. 


Raymond says he was approached for the illegal phone work by an RNC field director he knew called Jim Tobin, a regional chairman of George Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
The RNC spent years and millions of dollars defending Tobin through umpteen court cases and appeals to choke off the flow of election fraud charges at just Raymond. When Raymond realized he was going under the bus alone, he talked.


Today the Ottawa Citizen and the G&M both report Elections Canada has confirmed 'Pierre Poutine' launched his fraudulent robocalls from the Guelph Con campaign election office.
Stephen Maher explains on CTV here.

Alykhan Velshi comes home to roost

Ever since Patrick Muttart left the PMO war room under a cloud back in April for sending a photo of an Iggy look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait to SunNews during a Canadian election while working for a US PR firm, Steve has been struggling along without a proper planning director.

Beginning next month, fresh from his fabulously successful stint promoting the Keystone XL tarsands pipeline as the "no-brainer" ethical oil alternative to 'conflict oil', Ethical Oilster Alykhan Velshi will be in charge of planning new things for Steve. From an intern at the American Enterprise Institute to Steve's ear. Oy!

Will Mr. Velshi be continuing his crusade to save the US from importing oil from what he describes as the "blood-soaked, conflict oil-fueled foreign dictatorship"  of Saudi Arabia.?  

According to the StatsCan Energy Statistics Handbook, Second Quarter, 2011, page 53 and 54, Canada imported 45,125.7 thousands of cubic meters of crude petroleum last year at a cost of $23,855- million, and 3,986.5 thousand cubic meters of it was from the " blood-soaked, conflict oil-fueled foreign dictatorship" of  Saudi Arabia, our fifth highest oil import country of origin after Algeria, the UK, Nigeria, and Norway.


More likely Mr Velshi's new job will involve selling us on the idea of shipping ethical oil across BC to China.  
Good luck with that.
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Canadian media : It can't happen here.

We're getting a lot of stories from our media who are at pains to assure us a Canadian equivalent to the Rupert Murdoch scandal of cozy incestuous relationships with British politicians and illegal phone hacking/dirty tricks couldn't possibly happen here in Canada.

Really? No cozy incestuous relationships? No dirty tricks?

On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, PMO staffer Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, and Roger Ailes, president of Fox News and former communications adviser to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., all sat down to lunch.

We know this because it showed up in the mandatory disclosures media consultant and former White House flack Ari Fleischer made to the U.S. Justice Department. Ari, you will recall, had a personal contract with Steve to grease US media wheels for him. Teneycke had a dream of a Canadian Fox news channel.

Four months later, Teneycke had left the PMO - barely a year into his job as Harper's chief spokesman - only to pick up a contract with Quebecor to explore a project that Ottawa insiders almost immediately described as a fledgling "Fox News North."

Three more PMO staffers followed Teneyke to SunMedia : an issues management adviser, an advertising manager, and an issues management researcher, described as "a guy who could dig up any dirt on the opposition in a jiffy".

Teneycke himself had to take a brief three and half month leave from heading his new project after conflict-of-interest embarrassments ramped up following his Sun op-ed and public admission to prior knowledge of the hacking of an Avaaz petition hostile to his setting up of a Fox News North in Canada.

Teneycke was back in the Sun saddle during Steve's re-election campaign in April this year when a fifth former PMO staffer, Harper's former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart, sent him a photo of an Ignatieff look-alike posing in full combat gear in Kuwait in 2002.
"Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning" ran the SunMedia headline and story, sans photo, before Teneycke apparently tumbled to the ruse.

Patrick Muttart was working for the Con election war room at the time, while simultaneously heading the "Canada/US practice" at the US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs, where he works under Terry Nelson. Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush Cheney campaign and McCain-Palin campaign manager, now a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, is famous for the race-baiting campaign ads and phonejamming dirty tricks done under his GOP watch, and for employing the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry's war record during his run for US president.

Amusingly, the CTV piece, Harper immune from Murdoch-style scandal, makes extensive use of analysis from Muttart to assure us a similar scandal could not happen here. We just don't have the same "intense, quasi-incestuous" clique of political and media elites, Muttart says without irony.
Besides, another Harper former chief of staff, Ian Brodie, explains about Canadian papers: "so few people actually read most of them."

Yet somehow the rightwing National Post muddles on for 13 years losing $9-million a year, no one seems to know who owns CanWest/PostMedia now besides it being some US hedge fund and so much for the rule limiting foreign media ownership to a third, and 99% of the papers which endorsed a candidate in the last election all endorsed Steve.

We could have a Murdoch-style scandal here and it would be out of the news cycle again the same week, no damage done.

Update : More from David Climenhaga at Rabble
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Hey, Globe&Mail, who's your daddy?

I didn't think I'd be mentioning Tim Pawlenty so soon again after Steve's rip of Pawlenty's tea party ad for his own election campaign, but for the third time in five days the G&M has run a story on TeaPaw's entry into the Republican race for the 2012 presidential nomination.

"A laid-back Midwestern Republican who governed a Democratic-leaning state, " went Friday's fluffer.
"A serious Republican," reads the headline in today's Globe Editorial, "to make Americans forget Donald Trump." A list of TeaPaw's virtues ensues, winding up with :

"Mr. Pawlenty is pursuing sound policy ideas for the greater long-term benefit of the United States.

Mr. Pawlenty is on the right track: His brand of truth-telling is a political strategy that could ultimately be more rewarding than the usual approach, stroking the base’s pleasure points."

Speaking of not stroking the base's pleasure points, TeaPaw presents his own one minute endorsement of himself :


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In their rush to publish their latest Republican mancrush, the G&M appears to have forgotten all about the Tea in TeaPaw. Here he is in January with American Family Association's Bryan Fischer :

I've been a strong supporter of the family, pro-life positions, traditional marriage positions.
I was co-author of the law in Minnesota that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. I've been a vocal supporter of an amendment in Minnesota that would put that into our constitution.

[W]e now have a small majority of people on our Minnesota Supreme Court we are conservative and strict constructionist. I think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided by the Court. But I have been careful that I appoint people, particularly at the appellate level, that share this strict constructionist philosophy.

I have been a public supporter of maintaining Don't Ask, Don't Tell and I would support reinstating it as well.

Harper's former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart was working for both the Con war room and US PR firm Mercury Public Affairs/IGG Group's "Canada/US practice" during last month's election. Muttart's new boss is Terry Nelson, now Senior Advisor to TeaPaw.

So, G&M, who's your daddy?
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Patrick Muttart trail leads back to US dirty tricksters

Sun News headline, April 20, Brian Lilley  : Ignatieff linked to Iraq war planning

"As a politician in Canada, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has said that he was on the sidelines of the Iraq war, but new information reveals he was on the front lines of pre-invasion planning when he worked in the U.S."

Well, it is Sun News, aka Fox News North, after all, wot?

But then yesterday morning Sun Media Corp President Pierre Karl Peladeau published a photo that Sun News VP and former Harper spokesy Kory Teneycke had received from Harper's former deputy chief of staff Patrick Muttart.

It was "a compelling electronic image of a man very closely resembling Michael Ignatieff in American military fatigues, brandishing a rifle in a picture purported to have been taken in Kuwait in December 2002", together with "a clip from a Pentagon press briefing in which an American colonel thanked Michael Ignatieff specifically for his work in preparation for the invasion" on the day before the invasion.

Trouble was - it wasn't Iggy in the photo, a discovery credited to Teneycke by Peladeau.

Peladeau :

"It is my belief that this planted information was intended to first and foremost seriously damage Michael Ignatieff's campaign but in the process to damage the integrity and credibility of Sun Media and, more pointedly, that of our new television operation, Sun News."

Later in the day Muttart's present employer, the US PR company Mercury Public Affairs, responded to Peladeau :

"At no point did Muttart tell Sun Media that he had positively identified Ignatieff in the photo in question."

and went on to describe Muttart's work in helping set up the branding of Sun News :

For the record, Mercury was hired by Quebecor to assist Sun News with its pre-license branding and positioning. Muttart worked with a creative agency to develop the network's original logo (a modified version is currently in use). And he was the original source for the network's "hard news" and "straight talk" framing language."

including Muttart's pro bono work for Sun News after his contract ended!

Of particular interest here is that while all this was going on, Muttart was also working for the Harper re-election campaign :

"mostly from his Chicago home base where he has worked for an American public affairs firm since 2009, returning occasionally to Ottawa as needed. ... A source close to Muttart said the photo was found online by a U.S.-based political party researcher ."

"He has no further role in our campaign," Conservative spokesman Alykhan Velshi said from the party’s Ottawa war room. Muttart recently returned to work on the Conservative campaign as a consultant “offering advice on messaging and strategy,” according to Velshi.

According to Mr. Velshi, the Tory campaign "provided Sun Media with information that had been acquired during Internet research, namely a photograph described as that of Mr. Ignatieff. The campaign made clear to Sun Media that the identity in the photograph could not be verified and that our own efforts to verify the photograph had been exhausted."

So. Patrick Muttart, former Harper staffer, helps Kory Teneycke, another former Harper staffer, set up the brand for Sun News and then sends him incriminating but fake material in what looks to be an attempt to swiftboat Michael Ignatieff - and he did this while giving "advice on messaging and strategy" to Harper's re-election war room? Unbelievable!

So who is this US company Mercury Public Affairs that Muttart now works for - presumably the source of the photo found by "a US-based political party researcher" ?

Mercury - A firm specializing in "high-value public affairs," including image management, polling, and "grassroots coalition building".
Company slogan : "We know what it takes to win in difficult situations."

May 20, 2009 :

Mercury Public Affairs named Patrick Muttart as an MD [Managing Director] and leader of the firm's new Canada/US practice, starting May 4. Muttard is the former deputy chief of staff for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former chief marketing strategist for the Conservative Party of Canada. At Mercury Public Affairs, he will also work with the international public affairs team, which is led by partner Terry Nelson.

Muttart's new boss Terry Nelson, former political director of the 2004 Bush Cheney campaign and former McCain-Palin campaign manager, is now also a Senior Advisor to teabagger and 2012 presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, which might go some distance towards explaining why Harper's recent campaign ad bore such a strong resemblance to Pawlenty's.  [My parody of Harper's ad here.]

Here's Rachel Maddow on Terry Nelson : the race-baiting, the phonejamming dirty tricks, and, before his firm Crosslink Strategy Group became an operating unit of Mercury Public Affairs, the staffer in his employ who was previously the media advisor on the original Swiftboat Veterans For Truth ads , which used lies and doctored photos to smear John Kerry's war record.



Which pretty much brings us full circle on the apparent attempt to swiftboat Michael Ignatieff by a former Harper staffer on loan from a Republican PR company during our election.

Update : Sixth Estate has a few questions.

Thursday Upperdate : Cons : No, no, no, he wasn't in our war room while simultaneously advising Sun Media.
Muttart : Yes, I was.

PostMedia : "Contrary to what some have reported, Patrick hasn't been working in the (Conservative) war room or been in Ottawa," wrote Conservative spokesman Chisholm Pothier in an email."

CP : Tory strategist says he advised Sun Media, and worked for political war room

"Patrick Muttart, the former deputy chief of staff for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told The Canadian Press on Thursday he gave periodic unpaid advice to Sun Media in recent weeks to help it launch its new television news channel. Until this week, he was also on the Tory payroll as a consultant to the party's election war room."

We still don't know, however, what he was doing sending false and incriminating stuff on Iggy to The Sun in the middle of an election. And did he send it from the Con war room and on whose instructions?
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