IN late May, 12 New Yorkers selected at random for a jury trial found former US president Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsified business records. What was more amazing about the verdict was this: of the four criminal cases against Mr. Trump, the case on the payment of $130,000 to porn actor Stormy Daniels to prevent the story of her tryst with the ex-president from going public was considered the weakest.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had been pilloried by veteran prosecutors and criminal lawyers for even filing that case. The novel theory argued by his office said the falsification of business records to hide the hush payment to Daniels was part of a bigger conspiracy to help Mr. Trump win the November 2016 presidential election, a crime rising above the usual misdemeanor. The "weak case" ended up with a unanimous guilty verdict.
In democracies still committed to the rule of law, falsifying records is taken more than seriously, as we just recently saw in a court in Lower Manhattan. One falsifies records at great risk, even if you are a former president of the US — and a possible winner in the presidential election this November. The 12 jurors knew the risk of convicting the vengeful Mr. Trump, as well as the personal risks they may face after a possible doxxing. But they stood up for two things: the rule of law and the uplift of democracy.
Many are not hopeful that the current Senate inquiry into the all-too-obvious falsification of records by Bamban Mayor Alice Guo — about her life story that enabled her to claim Filipino citizenship, leading to her subsequent victory in the 2022 mayoral elections — would even lead to her exit from Tarlac politics. It's the least she could do, given her many assaults on the Philippine Constitution. If we list every instance that Guo gamed the many cracks of our weak electoral and legal institutions to get into where she is now through fake documents, the list would even exceed the 34 felony counts of Mr. Trump.
[A digression: The Ombudsman's order suspending Mayor Guo for six months has nothing to do with her falsification of records. It was based on her illegal issuance of an operating permit to a Philippine offshore gaming operator (POGO) firm hosted by a Bamban compound that was 50 percent owned by the mayor herself until mid-2022.]
The institutions of democracy have spoken in the case of Mr. Trump, now a convicted felon. I have this depressing feeling that Mayor Guo will get away scot-free and move on from Bamban politics to conquer bigger political arenas. If former convicts, clowns and certified grifters can have second and third lives as senators and then even lead major political parties, why not her? You get this sinking feeling that her calibrated evasiveness and her "farm girl" shtick are her subtle ways of further mocking and assaulting the Senate as an institution of democracy. She conned her way into getting proof of citizenship — the greatest con of all, the equivalent of a nation's birthright. The rest of the con games would be relatively easier to hurdle.
On that farm-girl shtick: Farm people like our kind are easily identifiable: dark skin, calloused hands, many still in their farm "uniforms" from the past century — remnants of decommissioned parachutes crudely sewed into farm clothes that could last forever and are as thick as carabao hide. Mayor Gou appears at every Senate hearing like she is competing with Victoria Beckham. The lead questioner at the Senate hearings, Sen. Risa Hontiveros, looks like a pauper beside her.
And Mayor Guo has been getting props from all over, from people and institutions of power.
Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chairman George Garcia, instead of initiating a deeper probe into how the incredulous electoral filings of Mayor Guo slipped through the Comelec's offices in Tarlac, said she could definitely run for reelection. No caveat, no qualifier, just the definitive pitch for Gou. Had the Tarlac Comelec office exercised basic due diligence on her electoral filings, the mayor would have been disqualified outright.
Newly installed Senate President Francis Escudero said the burden of proving Mayor Guo's many fakeries lies with the senators desperately shifting through likes and evasions, and blanks upon blanks of her life story that the mayor's ever-changing narrative cannot fill. The issue here is fake citizenship, an imposter running for and winning an elective position, feigning allegiance to the laws of the land in the process. In many ways, what the senators are looking for and trying to document in the inquiry are overly egregious violations of the fundamental laws, more serious than Mr. Trump's felonies. And yet ...
Many commentators have defended Mayor Gou with the equally incredulous claim that she is being shamed by the senators' inquisition, ignoring some basic facts about why a hearing was held in the first place. Law enforcers raided the Bamban POGO and the documents found during the raid uncovered Guo's part-ownership of the POGO and her deep connections. Filipinos are excluded from POGO ownership, thus raising the question of Guo's true nationality. What unraveled during the Senate hearings point to a fake Filipino citizenship and the many schemes to obtain that fake citizenship document.
But unlike in countries like the US that can convict a former US president and possible winner in November's White House race for falsifying documents, we have no such guardrail against fakes and fakeries. Alice Guo would most probably go scot-free and then move on to lead a bigger political suzerainty.
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