[Newspoint] A running commentary

I’ve been doing a running commentary on the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte. In the beginning, I set my comments down for my own professional purposes, as an opinion writer for this news site and as a prospective resource interviewee in other forums. But lately, as the proceedings have become more interesting, of urgent popular interest, and less tedious — although, still, less tedious only in parts — I have been posting my comments on certain online threads. 

Since I’m published here only once every fortnight, I’m scarcely able to comment on those occurrences in good time. Considering, therefore, their fair removal from the actual occurrences, these views, having been necessarily hurriedly posted in their original, needed to be reset in context or clarified here. 

In any case, to set the original from the additions, I have put the latter in brackets, as professional form prescribes. The subtitles, although unbracketed in keeping with house style, are additions themselves. 

And so, here goes:

With a little help 

[Davao City Mayor] Baste [Duterte] tries to look confident and knowledgeable, but comes across…as inconsistent and self-contradictory. He says he does not know, but ends up showing it impossible for him to not have known [as in the case of granting city contracts to a corporation one of whose principal owners is a close family and political associate, indeed a corporation of which his sister Sara is herself, by her own admission, part owner].

All Baste needed to memorize for his testimony was that he knew nothing and variations [of expressing that professed ignorance], which should have required not much memory work and no mental work altogether. [Still, in one blank moment, he needs to be rescued by the court president, Chiz Escudero, who prompts him: Would he have granted a corporation any contracts if he had known that his sister had anything to do with it?] 

The ultimate test

When Chiz said “the senators” preferred [the former senator Antonio] Trillanes did not testify, which senators was he referring to? [This utterance I had learned from sources privy to the relevant conversations.]

I cannot quite understand how it is proper at all for the court to say it wishes anyone not testifying, especially someone like Trillanes, whose exposé alleging various crimes committed by the Dutertes has been validated…. If the senators Chiz referred to included majority senators, and with the prosecution panel going along, the suspicion cannot be helped that all of them were played. And Chiz being a turncoat [from the minority, along with Joel Villanueva] and now himself the impeachment court president, who could have been playing whom?

Possibly, just possibly, keeping Trillanes out avoids [as apologists say] his being shown as having turned up findings from his own investigations, therefore unofficial and only likely to be shot down as inadmissible by Chiz, who as court president tends to apply those standards more strictly than intended for an impeachment court.

Whatever the possibilities, and given how Chiz went so easy on Baste as to help him look innocent about his sister’s connection to the company he had awarded contracts to, Chiz cannot help attracting suspicions about his leanings.

I guess the ultimate test comes when the final vote is taken — guilty or not?

The ghost of confidentiality

[About defense lawyer Mark Vinluan’s warning that, under the law on confidential information, the press could get into trouble if it made public certain information from bank records:] Since, according to the Constitution, “no law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press,” I hold that it is a matter of public duty for the press to make public any information in the public interest, regardless of any law stopping the press fulfilling that duty, for in that case such a law constitutes the precise sort of abridgment disallowed by the Constitution.

A vulnerable majority

The defense in Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial is succeeding in dragging it out by playing to the vulnerabilities of a court apparently afraid to be seen as less than fair. Understandably, a court composed mostly of members of the political majority is not unlikely to feel that way. 

But the reality…is that an impeachment trial is as much a judicial as a political trial, in fact, more political than judicial in practical terms. After all, it is intended as an exigent process, undertaken not to prove any crime but only to judge the fitness of a high official to remain in office. For, unstopped, that official, if guilty as impeached and until so judged, poses a continuing grave…danger not only to her office but to the nation. 

Subsequently, anyway, criminal accountability is to be proven in a regular court.

The elephant in the sea

Finally, China, the communist world power to which President Duterte ceded control of the strategic and mineral-rich West Philippine Sea, has begun to emerge as an issue in the impeachment trial. It had been buried in the trial and even in the off-court discourse inspired by it until Trillanes, who had been trying to call proportionate attention to it, found an outside forum to discuss it. He pointed to Chinese money funneled through bank accounts traced to the Dutertes — the transactions had in fact been flagged — and donated to a foundation on whose board Sara Duterte herself sits. 

At the trial, Senator-judge Risa Hontiveros pursued the issue, but it has yet to gain the traction it deserves. Understandably, It continues to be overshadowed by issues more directly relevant to the impeachment. 

But the China-Duterte connection poses to the nation dangers no less grave or urgent than does a guilty Sara Duterte continuing in office. In fact, China and the Dutertes are mutually reinforcing inimical forces. Nothing, therefore, should stop watchdog institutions, the press in particular, taking up China as a separate horror story. 

A banking trick

If any revelation stands out [in Wednesday’s hearing], it is the unfamiliar banking practice that allows clients to conceal the true sizes of their accounts. It ought to be a particular help to public officials who naturally wish to be seen poorer than they actually are in at least the one document they are required to submit for public scrutiny — the Statement of Assets and Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN)

The trick consists in a client buying a manager’s check, whose amount is taken out automatically from the client’s account. Meantime, the check remains parked in a sort of limbo account, unencashed, waiting to be redeemed by the client once the purpose for the concealment has been achieved — in the case of a public official, [an obviously] willful but normally untraceable net-worth misdeclaration.

For a more knowledgeable and insightful observation, a retired banker friend adds: “Manager’s checks are equivalent to cash, obviat[ing] the necessity to clear ordinary check payments and wait for…two-day clearance…it is a necessary and convenient tool in making payments of large amounts…a facilitator of commercial transactions, which the criminal mind has perverted and used for its own crooked ends. Perhaps the manner of SALN reporting needs to change…. Police work is not [in] banking’s nature.”

Taken for fools

The defense is making life unnecessarily difficult for us home viewers. It wants especially those of us who take a particular interest in the proceedings [to bother] to take down notes ourselves, instead of allowing us to simply to photograph the exhibits flashed on the screen. If those exhibits are allowed to be presented in whatever other form, shouldn’t they be allowed to be flashed on the screen as the prosecution wishes — for at least the sakes of old and slow viewers like me?

[One online thread participant remarks: “Not just for the sake of ‘old and slow viewers’ like us but also for many who are not used to long, laborious expositions nor have the patience for them.” To which, I replied:] Well, I’m one specific objector. Others can choose to object on their own or just sit back and allow Chiz Escudero to take them for fools. – Rappler.com