ABOVE: There’s still a lot of Mayor Rob Ford questions left unanswered. Mark McAllister reports.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know: What’s in the Project Traveller search warrants? Is Rob Ford connected to the raids? And what’s in the blacked out parts of the Sandro Lisi documents?
The Project Traveller raids at – among other locations – a Dixon Road apartment building led to dozens of arrests and the seizure of a hard drive containing a video of the mayor smoking what appears be crack cocaine.
Media organizations, Global News among them, have been fighting ever since for the information contained within those search warrants to be made public. They scored a partial victory Tuesday, when Justice Ian Nordheimer ruled wiretaps aren’t enough to make warrants secret by default. So reams of Project Traveller documents are still in play.
Related: Ongoing coverage of Mayor Rob Ford
But lawyers have to fight to get them.
“It is now the law that we are able to get access to those intercepts, at least for the purposes of making an argument and the court deciding what is in the public interest to release and what is not,” media lawyer Peter Jacobsen, who is representing news organizations on this case, said in an interview Wednesday.
Getting access to that information should help paint a picture not only of the Project Traveller raids, but their connection to the murder of Anthony Smith and, potentially, to Mayor Rob Ford, who according to reports and court documents associated with some of the people involved.
At the same time, reporters are fighting to get at the redacted portions of the Lisi documents. It’s still unclear what they contain. But we know the police investigation targeted both Lisi and Mayor Ford, and that homicide detectives were assigned to dig into crack video allegations.
We know surveillance began on a “crack house” at 15 Windsor Road – the home outside which Ford was famously photographed with Anthony Smith. The documents say activity at the residence was consistent with drug trafficking but there were no arrests or seizures made during the operation.
Other than that, little else is known. With the exception of Lisi’s home address and a sentence stating that Rob Ford’s phone was not reported stolen, the two pages under the ‘Project Traveller and the Rob Ford connection’ heading are blacked out.
None of the statements in the Lisi documents have been proven in court.
On Friday, Jacobsen will argue in court that the redacted information should be released.
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