Rawshark has continued his or her terrorism of the John Key government by a further dump of screenshots of emails.
Something interesting struck me about the latest dump which contains a series of emails which were collected in a folder called “Mark Hotchin”.
The emails are fascinating and justify Matt Nippert’s articles on the subject. But Judith Collins is not mentioned once in any of the emails, at least as far as I can see.
When the story was raised National obviously feared the worst and went looking for it. But I wonder if the Cathy Odgers email had not been released to National if they would have dumped Collins. From the look of the emails in the latest whaledump I do not think so. Although the behaviour is sleazy and worthy of a police prosecution there appeared to be no link to Collins in what was happening.
It probably would not have saved her. The Herald has just reported that Collins communicated with Slater via facebook about the impending release of the SFO SIS information concerning the Goff interview to Slater. Obviously she should be considered as a potential witness in the intelligence inquiry. You get the feeling that there is further information to come out about her and at some stage her tenure would have been untenable. Maybe Mike Smith is right and this particular email was a pretext for Key to get rid of Collins.
They must also be worrying if there is anything to directly leak Key to Slater.
But this does put National in a terrible bind. Either it anticipates what information is going to be released, proactively does something so that Key can show he is in charge, and potentially does more than it could have got away with once the actual information has been released. Or it waits for Whaledump and the media to break a story, loses control of the framing of the issue and looks disorganised and reactive.
It must be a real bugger knowing that there is someone selectively feeding information to the media who can then present the story in the worst possible light. This is the sort of thing that National through Slater has been doing for years. Karma really is a bitch sometimes.
The simple solution of course is to engage in ethical politics, not the sort of politics which is currently being broadcast to the nation leak by leak by leak.
Edit: took a bit of text out of a paragraph that did not make sense.
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