CHICKENPIE.The fishing was their word. The prosecution is “on a fishing expedition,” said Sara Duterte’s lawyers, after the Senate impeachment court ordered subpoenas for her bank records, AMLC files, and tax returns covering 2007 to 2025. Eighteen years of financial history, compelled into the open.
That’s a lot of water for a fishing trip.
Here’s what the metaphor misses: fishing expeditions are for lakes you expect to be empty. Nobody hauls a net into rich water and calls it speculation. The prosecution’s theory runs something like this — the Vice President received and disbursed hundreds of millions in confidential funds with minimal public accounting, and the bank records might explain where it went. That’s not fishing. That’s following a very specific smell.
The trial is now in its second week. Four articles of impeachment sit at the center: misuse of confidential funds, unexplained wealth, alleged bribery of DepEd officials, and — the one everyone keeps tiptoeing around — grave threats against President Marcos Jr., his wife, and former House Speaker Romualdez. The NBI said in court that Rodrigo Duterte’s pending ICC case — the extrajudicial killings one — was a “factor” in assessing whether Sara’s alleged threats were credible. Not that she did anything. Just that the family resume makes the idea believable.
That’s a sentence that doesn’t exist in normal countries.
Rep. Chel Diokno, leading the prosecution, has the energy of someone who has already done the reading. That could be a performance. But subpoenaing eighteen years of records is an unusual gamble to stake if the ledger turns out boring.
Sara Duterte is still Vice President. She collects her government salary. She is technically second-in-line to the Marcos presidency — the same Marcos presidency whose principal the prosecution says she threatened. The trial unfolds every weekday morning at 10am like an exhausting telenovela that nobody writes scripts for, because nobody needs to.
Chester sat outside the hearing room with fishballs from a cart. He had questions. The security guard had questions. The questions were not about the fishballs.
Eighteen years of records. The fish are in there somewhere. The question — the only question — is whether the Senate is actually fishing, or just performing the motion for another fifteen years.
