Mulroney Inquiry Getting Nowhere Slowly

To date we’ve had a bunch of well-paid lawyers going around in circles at $2,000 a day. The CBC’s Fifth Estate has done a better job so far and Harvey Cashore isn’t costing taxpayers $14 million dollars.

The past week was spent beating up on Karlheinz Schreiber in the witness box. The German-Canadian arms dealer and one-time friend of Brian Mulroney faced relentless questioning.

The lawyers tried to trip him up with contradictions, things he’d said or might have said, or never said -- to prove that he has been lying, or might be lying or might have forgotten he has been lying.

Schreiber was like an old prize fighter who has been on the ropes like this before. He ducked, he bobbed, came up with lame jokes, avoided direct questions or turned to his faulty memory.

His best excuse came with a document that had his signature on it. Yes, it was his signature, he admitted, but no, he did not sign it.

Come again, the lawyers asked. Then was it a forgery, they asked?

Schreiber waited, paused, and replied with a straight face that it was “a miracle.”

The judge was incredulous. “A miracle?” the judge repeated slowly.

Yes, indeed “a miracle” Schreiber replied. And he stuck by his story.

The judge said that he had heard of disappearing ink, but in all his years on the bench he had never. . . . He didn’t finish the sentence.

Two days later we got the explanation. It was not an original document but one that Schreiber had been shown at a parliamentary ethics committee hearing a year ago. No one bothered to ask why he had signed the document during the hearing.

On another occasion Schreiber answered that he had not done something necessarily out of the goodness of his heart. “I am not a samarite for Jesus Christ,” he said. Nobody really wanted to get into biblical etymology with Karlheinz, so most reporters didn’t include the remark in their newscopy. Later he explained that he meant a Samaritan. At least Schreiber was not comparing himself to the Most Holy.

The inquiry also went from the biblical to the scatological.

Schreiber was waxing about his meeting with Brian Mulroney Dec. 8 1994 in the Hotel Pierre in New York when he slipped his then-friend Brian another $100,000 but never discussed what the money was for.

Had Mulroney discussed going to Russia or China to sell Schreiber’s light-armoured military vehicles, the lawyers asked? “Nonsense,” snorted Schreiber. NATO would never approve Canada selling military equipment to Russia or China back then.

So then what did Mulroney talk about in the hotel room?

Nothing much said Schreiber. “He was quite often running to the washroom because he had a big diarrhea.”

The audience laughed, and Schreiber loved that reaction so much that he repeated it twice again until Wolson had to ask him to stop talking about Mulroney’s diarrhea.

He could have said “ a gastro.” People would have understood.

So what if Schreiber wasn’t telling the truth. That doesn’t mean he didn’t give Mulroney the money. Both he and Mulroney and Schreiber already agree on that. They just quibble on the amount. What we want to know is what the money was for. For past services, for future services, or for “maybe” services, in case he needed Mulroney to open some doors for him. Maybe it was because he felt sorry for his old friend Mulroney who needed the money, as Schreiber testified. We still don’t know.

That should be the work of the commission. Proving somebody is lying doesn’t cut it with us. Follow the money, boys.

Remember Mulroney’s old anecdote on his campaign plane about “the boys were in the back room cutting up the money.”

Schreiber had a credibility problem.

As Commission lawyer Richard Wolson put it oh so politely to Schreiber Wednesday afternoon: “My suggestion to you is that you aren’t telling the truth.”

Sounds like what New Democrat Pat Martin told Mulroney to his face at a Commons Ethics Committee meeting last year: “Mr. Mulroney I don’t want anyone here to think that I believe you are telling the truth.”

Someone remarked back then that a commission of inquiry would never treat a witness this badly. Oh yeah?

It remains to be seen how the inquiry treats Mulroney when he testifies next month.