House panel to discuss articles of impeachment vs. Bautista next week

The House Committee on Justice will hold a meeting next week to discuss the articles of impeachment against Commission on Elections chairman Andres Bautista, panel chair Reynaldo Umali said Thursday.

This was after the House of Representatives, on Wednesday, voted to reject the panel's report dismissing the impeachment complaint against Bautista.

"I will call for a hearing. We will prepare the articles of impeachment and then we will have to strengthen the case so we will have to do case build-up," Umali told reporters in a phone interview.

"Then we will organize ourselves into the panel of prosecutors and then we'll file the case. But this should happen on or about November na rin kasi we will have to elect the prosecutors who will constitute the team of prosecutors who will prosecute this case before the Senate impeachment court," he added.

Umali said they may have to subpoena some witnesses and documents in their process of case build-up.

"We will have them ready before we start with the impeachment trial in Senate," he said.

Kabayan party-list Representative Harry Roque, one of the endorsers for the complaint against Bautista, on Wednesday night submitted a draft articles of impeachment against the poll chief before the House Committee on Justice.

Umali said they will look into this draft during their meeting. "If it will suffice, then we may adopt it. Otherwise, then we will have to look at how we will strengthen this case," he said.

Meanwhile, Umali said the 11 members of the prosecution panel will not necessarily come from the House justice panel.

"They must be lawyers. But we will have a spokesperson, too. We will have to discuss the matter of private prosecutors," he said.

The panel is likewise open to accepting additional evidentiary documents that will strengthen case against Bautista.

"We will gather that pagka-resume namin ng hearings namin. That will be the order of the day, to gather evidence and strengthen our case so that we will present a strong case before the Senate impeachment court," he said.

Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III said the Senate, sitting as an impeachment tribunal, may begin its trial on Bautista's impeachment case by the last week of November or first week of December.

Bautista, however, has expressed his intention of resigning by the end of the year.

The complainants accused Bautista of betrayal of public trust due to his failure to address the hacking of the Comelec website in March 2015 and for failing to properly disclose his Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth.

Aside from this, the complainants said Bautista betrayed public trust for admitting that he had received referral fees from the Comelec's technology provider Smartmatic through the Divina Law Office, and for obstructing justice in saying that, pending investigation, the script tweak of the transparency server during the 2016 elections was "merely cosmetic." —KBK, GMA News