Malacanang on Wednesday said if the Senate convened as an impeachment court will issue a gag order, Palace officials will abide by it.

 

“We will follow what the Senate will say,” deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said at a press briefing.

 

The Aquino administration also clarified that said it will not be involved in the strategy the House prosecution panel will adopt in the trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona.

 

Valte said that “of course, the strategy of the prosecutors is something that is entirely within their control… It is not proper for us to be the ones to answer.”

 

Earlier in the day, Senators Francis Escudero and Panfilo Lacson reminded the parties involved in the trial to refrain from commenting on the merits of the case.

 

The senators commented on the same day chief House prosecutor Iloilo Rep. Neil Tupas Jr. said members of his team did not violate any Senate rule on impeachment proceedings when they showed to the media documents on Corona’s condominium unit in Taguig City.  

 

Presidential political adviser Ronald Llamas said the documents obtained by the House panel would show that Corona may have amassed ill-gotten wealth, including at least four multimillion-peso real estate properties, that “he could not have paid for out of his salary and allowances as an Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.”         

 

Llamas said the evidence the prosecutors gathered can stand the “the most rigorous scrutiny” by the senator-judges in the impeachment trial that starts on January 16.

 

“The impeachment complaint signed by 188 congressmen is the product of thorough research and inputs submitted by concerned citizens who could no longer stand the willful and deliberate trampling of the Constitution and the rule of law by Chief Justice Corona,” President Aquino’s political adviser said.

 

“Corona sits in the High Tribunal on the basis of an illegal appointment by disgraced former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who now faces serious charges of electoral sabotage and plunder during her nine years of misrule,” Llamas added.

 

He said that apart from being a midnight appointee as Chief Justice, “Corona has shown obvious partiality and bias for Arroyo in 19 cases brought before the Supreme Court.”

 

Llamas said his statement that Corona may be acquitted was merely talk of possible outcomes.

 

“An acquittal is a possibility, just as a conviction is also a distinct—and very real—possibility,” he said. — ELR, GMA News