Yet another inquiry into the Brash email leaks doesn’t find quite enough evidence to name the Deputy Prime Minister.
Yet another inquiry into the Brash email leaks doesn’t find quite enough evidence to name the Deputy Prime Minister.
This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 4:34 pm and is filed under economy, history, jobs, journalism, law and order, national, parliament, politics, wellington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
So you are naming him? Thats a fairly serious accusation without being able to back it up.
Shudder
I’ve read The Hollow Men. 
@ Trevor Mallard.
Your comment is intriguing. You are clearly well informed. It is now generally accepted that the leaked emails saga was an inside job. I take it you are suggesting that someone stole the emails and then either passed them on to the Deputy Prime Minister or showed them to him. Perhaps he advised the culprit(s) on an appropriate course of action?
@ Bikerkiwi, check out Whaleoil from earlier this afternoon. He beat Trevor by hours.
Oh no – does that mean I agree with blowhole? I suppose the probability of it happening at sometime on a random basis is remote but not nil.
I hope for yoursake Trev you made this post from your laptop in the middle of the debating chamber in parliament.
I thought Trevor was talking about the next piece of legislation to be promoted by David Garrett, straight after his “Removal of the Sexual Apparatus of Scumbags Bill” which should be lodged any time.
Yeah, Trev, right on the table in the middle
You tories have become very sensitive about this issue. Pity y’all didn’t think about it before perpetrating the rort on the voters in the first place.
John Key on TV1 claimed he believed the job was done by a hacker probably from the Left. His expression gave him away… he was lying and he knew it! My pick is that every journalist present knew it too.
Trevor, if you know so much, (more than the police it seems,) about time you put up or shut up don’t you think? After all, these are serious allegations you make.
Just think about who is the slickest operator in National at the moment.
Bill English ? Not likley
My two bobs worth puts the culprit as Steven Joyce.
As Hager says on his web site
http://www.nickyhager.info/the-hollow-men-notes-for-press-conference/
Finally, contrary to other rumours in the media, it is not a ‘Brash email’ book or a book primarily about Brash. Those rumours were vaguely right but off the mark. The book is about the Brash-led National Party and based on interviews with and a large amount of documentation from National Party sources. These included many emails to and from Brash but the majority of documents were other kinds of documents and other people’s emails.
There was much more than some emails to and from Brash but other kinds of documents as well as emails to and from others in Nationals organisation.
At the time Joyce was the spider at the centre of the web
Anne
If Trevor knew it was English, the Labour Party would have had English nabbed a long time ago.
I believe Trevor is spinning up the myth to take the heat away from the actual thieves.
Interesting to see Nicky confirm that the leaker is still involved in politics in NZ at a high level on TV3 tonight.
@ pentwig
John Key is spinning up the myth (weekly press conference)
to take the heat away from the actual thieves. It was an inside job so stop pretending otherwise!!!
Cough cough
Who stole Don’s emails? – http://tumeke.blogspot.com/2010/03/who-stole-dons-emails.html
Ben… a little technical hitch.. parliaments in recess atm.
kinda agree with GWW. The book also had a bit about Key in their. From memory it quotes him as saying people on the benefit are “breeding for a business”….
Bomber says at his blog site: “National don’t want to know who leaked the emails because… the truth would be devastating to the party.”
Replace National with “The police” and I think the same sentiment would apply – albeit for slightly different reasons. A story within a story?
Anne
Of course it was an inside job.
Guess which party was so scared of Brash they would stop at nothing to discredit him?
Which party was already trawling the gutter at the time.
It was a bad move as it certainly got rid of Brash who only had a marginal chance of winning an election, and brought in the ever popular, sauve, smile winning John Key.
That mistake will cost Labour for as long as John Key remains in power.
In power as leader I mean.
James, I am alluding to the fact that I wouldn’t want to go around making such defamatory accusations without the protection of parliamentary privilege.
It’s not defamatory unless you can prove the meaning of the statement is similarly inferred and remember, there is the defence of truth… why would Bling-glish not have already taken the action?
True or not – the issue is a sore for the Tories because either way, the leak came from the inside – obtaining of the emails isn’t the issue, Hagar having them is, the issue of how they were obtained in the first place is a distraction away from who gave the emails to the appropriate person to get them to Hagar in time. Brash was sentinal to the win in ’05 and the puppeteers knew that. So, were they mercinary enough to do it themselves in the face of overwhelming Roundtable support? Doubtful – It had to be someone who wanted the neo-liberal agenda re-established, someone with something to gain because of it.
I just love how this winds the Tories up no end…
pentwig says: It was a bad move as it certainly got rid of Brash who only had a marginal chance of winning an election
We do have sort memories! Brash got within spitting distance of being PM in 2005 despite the Nats having been in meltdown in 2002. If it hadn’t been for Michael Cullen pulling the rabbits of WFF and interest free student loans out of the hat just before polling day it’s almost certain that the Nats would have won. Remember that Winnie said he’d talk first with the largest party. Unfortunately for Helen Clark that was Labour!
It may be comforting to believe that populist policies will never win elections, but although they may appeal to the baser beliefs of the public they are, by definition, very popular. And probably very likely to appeal to that section of the floating vote that isn’t much interested in politics and definitely doesn’t have the inclination to listen to the substance of debate.
If ACT were to put together a populist agenda of extreme right-wing social policies (on law and order, welfare, education, child-rearing) it would be far more likely to draw support from Labour’s heartlands than from National’s.
short, not sort, of course
Got to agree with George’s memory of history. The 2005 campaign was a nail biter, and in many respects the murk that arose from the Exclusive Brethren’s campaign for National and particularly against the Greens in the last few days before the poll may have tipped it. But it all got so close who can tell for sure.
Not so sure on the point that ACT could win significant votes with populist policies. I guess it might be possible, but after following the news reports of the party’s conference last weekend, it didn’t sound like they had the potential MPs to move the party on in practice, nor a significant core of supporters to find more capable people in.
As for the ‘left-wing-Cyber-ninja-hacker’ theory of who leaked the emails, it was obvious nonsense to begin with. The person(s) who leaked those emails has to have known where to look and what to find. I don’t see it as Joyce, the ‘Hollow men’ make it clear he was deep in the Brash camp. And it may just be coincidence that Bill English was the only National party politician to come out of that book with any sort of credit, as a man prepared to swim against the party tide if he had good reason to.
UPDATE
David Farrar and John Key protesteth too much
http://tumeke.blogspot.com/2010/03/david-farrar-and-john-key-protesteth.html
Ghostwalker – Bravo. SO many believe the book was about Brash. It was about political machinations. Brash got dumped for it but KEY and JOYCE were in it deep, Joyce up to his neck… perhaps explains his instant elevation to a Cabinet spot.
IF National had ANY proof the emails were hacked they would have coughed it up a long time ago. They use it like they use so many things to spin it onto the Labour Party.
True Tracey, and Ghost. Also not everything that was leaked was email, Hager used physical documents as well.
How about the police requesting the TV2 Sensing Murder psychics tell us who stole the Brash emails? After all, it is taxpayer dollar that TVNZ is funding the crap show for the public. It would be a good use of taxpayer dollar to use TV2 Sensing Murder psychics to do a tell all of who was/were involved in this stolen email saga.
I think you will find that the charter money isn’t being used for that any more – one of several programmes that convinced me to change the system a couple of years ago.
[...] Nicky Hager says it was an inside job, the police think it was an inside job, and insiders across the political spectrum are pointing the finger at Bill English. But Key would rather believe in [...]
IF Bill leaked to Hager, did it backfire on him and he was hoping that Brash and key would go down and he would step into the breach? IF that was his intent he must have ground his teeth to the nerves clenching a smile on his face around Key.
It is interesting that Bill English has not uttered a word in public. Compare that to the accommodation rort affair. He was in boots and all defending his name. If he was innocent, surely he would have been all over Trevor Mallard…
You’ll have to excuse this question, but what exactly was wrong with these stolen emails
Balance trolling deleted Trevor