Vice President Leni Robredo talks with President Rodrigo Duterte during a courtesy call to Malacañang in July. Photo from Robredo's Twitter page

Malacanang is investigating the alleged "LeniLeaks" controversy that shows a supposed plot by supporters of Vice President Leni Robredo to discredit and eventually unseat President Rodrigo Duterte.

Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and online forensics experts are verifying social media rumors that Robredo's supporters are part of a "restricted" Yahoo group that allegedly drew plans to denigrate Duterte in the international scene.

He noted that at least one Inquirer columnist, Randy David, mentioned in the conversation thread had already denied being part of any ouster plot.

"Number one order of the day is to check the veracity of the document; kung ito ba talaga ay bonafide Yahoo conversation, at number two, kung bonafide siya, kung ito ba talagang personalities ay kasama nga, kung sila ba talaga iyun," Andanar told radio DZMM.

"This is a process na ang makakaalam lang nito, ang makakapag-imbestiga ay mga online forensic experts. Makikipag-tulungan na rin ang Yahoo."

(The number one order of the day is to check the veracity of the document, if this was a bonafide Yahoo conversation, and number two; if the personalities tagged in the controversy were really involved. This is a process that can only be verified by online forensic experts. Yahoo will cooperate with the probe.)

The hashtag #LeniLeaks dominated social media over the weekend after several bloggers claimed that some of Robredo's Filipino-American supporters and aides are plotting to overthrow the Duterte government, as well as discredit former Senator Bongbong Marcos, who has a pending electoral protest against the Vice President.

Andanar said the conversation thread showed more of a media strategy to counter the negative publicity being hurled at Vice President Robredo while undermining Marcos.



He said that while the bloggers' unfounded claim must be "taken with a grain of salt," the administration cannot readily dismiss any threat to unseat Duterte.

"It's a serious matter sapagkat may nakasulat doon kung paano nila papag-resign-in si President Duterte... Siyempre, that does not sit well with us in the government because any move to oust the President is not good and it is definitely illegal," he said.

(It is a serious matter because it is written there how they will force Duterte to resign. Of course, that does not sit well with us in the government because any move to oust the President is not good and it is definitely illegal.)

"I'm a member of the Duterte Cabinet. I will not take this lightly, ganoon din po si (and so will) Secretary Jun Esperon," he added.

Andanar acknowledged that Robredo herself may have no hand in the alleged ouster plan because she was not in the conversation thread. "It's possible she didn't know," he said.

He said he will raise the issue during Duterte's meeting with his Cabinet on Monday.

Robredo has repeatedly denied joining any move calling for the President's ouster.

On Monday, her spokesperson, Georgina Hernandez, denied that Robredo is part of the aforementioned Yahoo! group.

"No, she is not part of that public Yahoo! group," she said

Hernandez said Robredo had "very limited time to really look into the matter," but their camp maintains that the alleged plot to unseat the president is not directly connected to their office.

"She has been in the field, she has been in different places in Bicol and Marinduque, but she has heard about this but only in bits and pieces and as she clearly said, this is really independent, this is not directly linked to the Office of the Vice President," she said.

Hernandez also asserted that the aforementioned conversation thread was public and "there should be no malice put into the information that was brought out in social media."</s>In 2016, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte placed his country prominently on the global radar screen—too prominently, in the opinion of some Filipinos. This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

Duterte’s campaign to rid the Philippines of drug users and pushers through extrajudicial executions elicited shock even among the most hardened observers. And his now legendary cursing of President Obama as a “son of a bitch”—part of an angry farewell to a long-standing alliance with Washington and an embrace of China—upended Asian geopolitics.

Despite his bloody reign, Duterte remains popular, with the latest domestic poll giving him a trust rating of “excellent.” What makes Duterte tick? What drives many of his admirers to exclaim that they’re ready to die for him?

Fascism comes in different forms in different societies, so people expecting fascism to develop in the “classic” way often fail to recognize it even when it’s already upon them. In 2016, fascism came to the Philippines in the form of Duterte, but this event continues to elude a large part of the citizenry—some because of their fierce loyalty to the president, others out of fear of admitting that naked force is now the ruling principle in Philippine politics.

At a panel I was part of last August, one month after Duterte ascended to the presidency, there was considerable hesitation in using what panelists euphemistically called the “F” word to characterize the new executive. There is an understandable reluctance to use the term “fascist,” undoubtedly because the word has been applied very loosely to all kinds of movements and leaders that depart, in some fashion, from liberal democratic practices.

However, there are a few broad characterizations of a fascist leader that could unobjectionably apply to Duterte. In this scheme, a fascist leader is (a) a charismatic individual with strong inclinations toward authoritarian rule who (b) derives his or her strength from a heated multiclass mass base, (c) is engaged in or supports the systematic and massive violation of basic human, civil, and political rights, and (d) proposes a political project that contradicts the fundamental values and aims of liberal democracy or social democracy.

If one were to accept these elements provisionally as the key characteristics of a fascist leader, then Duterte would easily fit the bill.

Having said that, Duterte is nevertheless an original sort of fascist personality.

His charisma is not the demiurgic sort like Hitler’s, nor does it derive so much from an emotional personal identification with a “nation.” Duterte’s charisma would probably be best described as carino brutal, a Filipino-Spanish term that denotes a volatile mix of will to power, a commanding personality, and gangster charm that fulfills his followers’ deep-seated yearning for a father figure who will finally end what they see as the “national chaos.” Sherrod Brown Is the First Senator to Say ‘No’ to Jeff Sessions A Lesson on How to Survive Trumpism—From the McCarthy Era Susan Collins Just Disgraced Herself at Jeff Sessions’s Confirmation Hearing Jeff Sessions Could Return Criminal Justice to the Jim Crow Era Duterte is not a reactionary seeking to restore a mythical past. He’s not a conservative dedicated to defending the status quo. His project is oriented towards an authoritarian future. He is best described, using Arno Mayer’s term, as a counterrevolutionary. Unlike Hitler or Mussolini, however, he’s not waging a counterrevolution against the left or socialism. In Duterte’s case, the target is liberal democracy—the dominant ideology and political system of our time. In this sense, he is a local expression as well as a pioneer of an ongoing global phenomenon: the rebellion against liberal democratic discourse that Francis Fukuyama had declared as the “end of history” in the early 1990s. Counterrevolutionaries aren’t always clear about what their next moves are, but they often have an instinctive sense of what would bring them closer to power. Ideological purity isn’t high on their agenda—they put a premium on the emotional power of their message rather than its ideological coherence. The low priority accorded to ideological coherence is also extended to political alliances. Duterte’s mobilization of a multiclass base while ruling with the support of virtually all of the elite is unexceptional. However, one of the things that makes him a fascist original is that he’s brought the dominant section of the left into his ruling coalition, something that would have been unthinkable with most previous fascist leaders. But perhaps Duterte’s distinctive contribution to fascism is in the area of political methodology. The stylized paradigm has the fascist leader or party begin with violations of civil rights, followed by a power grab, then indiscriminate repression. Duterte turns this “Marcosian model” of “creeping fascism” around. He begins with impunity on a massive scale—that is, the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug users and pushers—and leaves the violations of civil liberties and the grab for absolute power as mopping up operations in a political landscape devoid of significant organized opposition. Duterte’s ascendancy cannot be understood without taking into consideration the debacle of the EDSA liberal democratic republic that was born in the anti-Marcos uprising of 1986. (It’s named EDSA for the long thoroughfare in Metro Manila where the main actions of the rebellion took place.) In fact, EDSA’s failure was a condition for Duterte’s success. What destroyed the EDSA project and paved the way for Duterte was the deadly combination of an elite monopoly of the electoral system and neoliberal economic policies with the priority placed on foreign debt repayment imposed by Washington. GET A DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION FOR JUST $9.50! Subscribe By 2016, there was a yawning gap between the EDSA republic’s promise of popular empowerment and wealth redistribution and the reality of massive poverty, scandalous inequality, and pervasive corruption. The EDSA republic’s discourse of democracy, human rights, and rule of law had become a suffocating straitjacket for a majority of Filipinos, who simply could not relate to it owing to the overpowering reality of their powerlessness. Duterte’s discourse—a mixture of outright death threats, coarse tough-guy talk, and frenzied railing coupled with disdainful humor directed at the elite (whom he called “conos,” or cunts)—was a potent formula that proved exhilarating to his audience, who felt themselves liberated from the stifling hypocrisy of the EDSA discourse. Probably no fascist personality since Hitler has used the mandate of a plurality at the polls to reshape the political arena more swiftly and decisively than Duterte in 2016. Even before he formally assumed office, the extrajudicial killings began; the elite opposition disintegrated, with some 98 percent of the liberal “Yellow Party” joining the Duterte Coalition; and Duterte achieved total control of both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court, shying away from a confrontation, chose not to challenge the president’s decision to have the former dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, buried in the national Heroes’ Cemetery. A traditional bulwark of defense of human rights, the Catholic Church, exercised self-censorship, afraid that it would be a sure loser in a confrontation with a popular president who threatened to expose bishops and priests with mistresses and clerical child abusers. A novice in foreign policy, Duterte was able to combine personal resentment with acute political instinct to radically reshape the Philippines’ relationship with the big powers, notably the United States. What surprised many, though, was that there was very little protest in the Philippines at Duterte’s geopolitical reorientation toward China, given the stereotype of Filipinos being “little brown brothers” to Washington. What protest there was came mainly from traditional anti-American quarters which evinced skepticism about the president’s avowed intentions. Here, Duterte again showed himself to be a masterful instinctive politician. While ordinary Filipinos often admire the U.S. and U.S. institutions, there’s a strong undercurrent of resentment at the colonial subjugation of the country by the U.S., the unequal treaties that Washington has foisted on the country, and the overwhelming impact of the “American way of life” on local culture. One need not delve into the complex psychology of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic to understand that the undercurrent of the U.S.-Philippine relationship has been the “struggle for recognition” of the dominated party. Duterte has been able to tap into this emotional underside of Filipinos in a way that the left has never been able to with its anti-imperialist program. The anti-American comments from Duterte supporters that filled cyberspace following President Obama’s criticism of Duterte’s executions were just as fierce as their attacks on local critics of his war on drugs. Like many of his authoritarian predecessors elsewhere, Duterte has been able to splice nationalism and authoritarianism in a very effective fashion, though many progressives have seen this as mainly motivated by opportunism. What are the chinks in Duterte’s armor? And what are the prospects for the opposition? One vulnerability is the health of the president. Duterte has been candid about his medical problems and his dependence on the drug Fentanyl, reportedly a strongly addictive substance that is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine and has the same effects as heroin. The age factor is not unimportant either, considering that the president is turning 72. Hitler became chancellor at 44 and Mussolini became prime minister at 39. For the successful pursuit of an ambitious political project, one’s energy level is not unimportant. More problematic is the issue of institutionalizing the movement. The force driving Duterte’s electoral insurgency has not yet been converted into a mass movement. So Duterte is leaning on Jun Evasco, the secretary of the cabinet and a longtime Duterte aide, to fill the breach by coalescing a “Movement for Reform,” which was launched in August 2016. Evasco’s vision is apparently a mass organization along the lines of those of the left-wing National Democratic Front, where he cut his political teeth. This won’t be easy since, as some analysts have pointed out, he would have to contend with competing projects from Duterte’s political allies—like the Pimentels, the Marcoses, and the Arroyos—who would prefer an old-style political formation that brings together elite personalities. Needless to say, a political formation along the lines of the latter would be the kiss of death for Duterte’s electoral insurgency. A bigger hurdle would be failure to deliver on political and social reforms. Practically all of the key political and economic elites have declared allegiance to Duterte, so it’s difficult to see how he can deliver on his political and economic reform agenda without alienating key supporters. The Marcoses, who still have their ill-gotten wealth stashed abroad; the Arroyos, who have been implicated in so many shady deals; and so many other elites, many of whom have cases pending, are not likely to be disciplined for corruption, especially given their very close links to Duterte. Nor will the Visayan Bloc, which has come in full force behind Duterte, agree to a law that will extend the very incomplete agrarian reform program. Nor will the big monopolists like Manuel Pangilinan and Ramon Ang, who have pledged fealty to Duterte, submit without resistance to being divested of their corporate holdings. This is not to say that Duterte is a puppet of the elites. Having a power base of his own that he can easily turn on friend or foe, he is beholden to no one. Indeed, one can argue that most of the elite have joined him mainly for their own protection, like small merchants paying protection money to the mafia. The issue, rather, is how serious he is about social reform and how willing he is to alienate his supporters among the elite. The same goes for economic reform. Ending the increasing contractualization of Philippine employment (or ENDO, for “End of Contract”), one of the president’s most prominent promises, is currently bogged down in efforts to arrive at a “win-win” solution for management and labor, and all the major labor federations are fast losing hope the administration will deliver on this. As for macroeconomic policy, any departure from neoliberal principles on the part of orthodox technocrats like Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and National Economic Development Authority Director General Ernesto Pernia is far-fetched. Again, the question lies in how convinced Duterte is that neoliberalism is a dead end—and how willing he is to incur the loss of confidence on the part of foreign investors by pursuing a different program. Social and economic reform is Duterte’s Achilles heel, and the president himself is aware that popularity is a commodity that can disappear quickly in the absence of meaningful reforms. Dissatisfaction is fertile ground for the build-up of opposition. This spells danger for the country in the medium term. Even if he’s able to quickly create a mass-based party, Duterte would likely still need to resort to the repressive apparatuses of the state to quell discontent and opposition. This may not be too difficult a course to follow. Having led a bloody campaign that’s already claimed over 6,000 lives, the suspension of civil liberties and the imposition of permanent emergency rule would be in the nature of “mopping up” operations for Duterte. It would be a walk in the park. Does the opposition matter, though? The elite opposition is extremely weak at this point, with most of the Liberal Party having joined the Duterte bandwagon out of opportunism or fear. An opposition led by Vice President Leni Robredo, who resigned from Duterte’s cabinet after being told not to attend meetings, is not likely to be viable. While undoubtedly possessing integrity, Robredo has shown poor judgment, receptiveness to bad advice, and little demonstrated capacity for national leadership—and is, in the view even of some of her supporters, largely a creation of Liberal Party operatives who wanted to convert the name of her deceased husband, former Department of the Interior and Local Government head Jesse Robredo, into political capital. Moreover, her continuing ties to the double-faced Liberal Party and the former administration easily discredit her among both Duterte supporters and opponents. This brings up the left. Duterte’s rise to power created a crisis for the left. For one sector of the left—like Akbayan, the social democratic party that had allied itself uncritically with the neoliberal Aquino administration—Duterte’s ascendancy meant their marginalization from power along with the Liberal Party, for which they had essentially become the grassroots organizing arm. For the traditional left, or what some called the “extreme left,” Duterte posed a problem of another kind. While the National Democratic Front and Communist Party had not supported Duterte’s candidacy, they accepted Duterte’s offer of three cabinet-level positions dealing with agriculture reform, social welfare, and anti-poverty programs. They also accepted the president’s offer to initiate negotiations to arrive at a final peace agreement between the government and rebellious Communist factions. For Duterte, the entry of personalities associated with the Communist Party into his cabinet provided a left gloss to his regime, a proof that he was progressive—or “a socialist, but only up to my armpits,” as he put it colorfully during his victory speech in Davao City on June 4, 2016. It soon became clear that Duterte had the better part of the bargain. As the regime’s central policy of killing drug users and pushers without due process escalated, the left’s role in the cabinet became increasingly difficult to justify. This dilemma was compounded by the fact that no new land reform law was passed that would allow agrarian reform to continue, there was little movement in the administration’s promise to end contractualization, and macroeconomic policy continued along neoliberal lines. The stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox. The left, however, found it hard to shelve the peace negotiations, from which they had already made some gains, and to part from heading up government agencies that gave them unparalleled governmental resources to expand their mass base. Duterte had again displayed his acute political instincts. Knowing that the traditional left was at ebb in its fortunes, he gambled that they would accept his offer of cabinet positions. And having accepted these, he knew, they would find it extremely difficult to part from them. The price, the leaders of the left realized, was their association with a bloodthirsty regime. The Communist Party and its mass organizations tried to alleviate the contradiction by issuing statements condemning Duterte’s bloody policies. But this only made their dilemma keener, since people would ask why they continue to provide legitimacy to the administration by staying on in the cabinet. Unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Duterte brought the left into his regime—and in doing so, he’s been able to sandbag it and subordinate it as a political force. So far, that is. Whether he’s fully conscious of it or not, Duterte’s ascendancy has severely shaken all significant political institutions and political players in the country, from right to left. Where real opposition to Duterte has developed over the last six months has been from civil society. A leading force is I Defend, a broad grouping of over 50 people’s organizations and non-governmental organizations, that has waged an unremitting struggle against the extrajudicial killings. Another is the coalition against the Marcos burial. While Duterte has painted these formations as “yellow,” the reality is that most of their partisans are progressives that are as opposed to a neoliberal “yellow restoration” as they are to Duterte’s policies. Others are newer and younger forces drawn from the post-EDSA and millennial generations that have become alarmed at Duterte’s fascist turn. This growing opposition doesn’t seek a reprise of 1986, when an uprising toppled the dictator Marcos—perhaps heeding Marx’s warning that history unfolds “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” It’s increasingly realizing that the fight for human rights and due process must be joined to a revolutionary program of participatory politics and economic democracy—to socialism, in the view of many—if it is to turn back the fascist tide. There is no going back to EDSA. What the opposition still has to internalize is that opposing fascism in power will not be, to borrow a saying from Mao, “a dinner party.” It will indeed be exceedingly difficult and demand great sacrifices. Moreover, there is no guarantee of success in the short or medium term. Fascism in power can be extraordinarily long-lived. The Franco regime in Spain lasted 39 years, while Salazar’s Estado Novo in neighboring Portugal went on for 42 years. Like the anti-Marcos resistance four decades back, the only certainty members of the anti-fascist front can count on is that they’re doing the right thing. And that, for some, is a certainty worth dying for.</s>The Cabinet of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte will investigate an alleged email leak that reportedly reveals that the country’s vice president has been involved in efforts to overthrow the controversial leader.

The emails, which have been dubbed ‘LeniLeaks’ online, purportedly show supporters of Vice President Leni Robredo calling for rallies against Duterte’s administration.

Those involved in the exchanges, which were posted online by bloggers, were Filipino-American members of a Yahoo! group called Global Filipino Diaspora Council, which is allegedly plotting to oust Duterte.

Billionaire philanthropist Loida Nicolas-Lewis and her sister, former Commission on Filipinos Overseas Chair Imelda “Mely” Nicolas, were both reportedly involved in the exchanges.

“[Duterte] asked for an extension of another six months. Extension denied! Join Duterte Resign Movement,” one of the emails from Nicolas-Lewis allegedly reads, referring to Duterte’s admission that he could not solve the country’s drug problem in six months, as previously promised.

Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre said on Monday that he is convinced Robredo is connected to the group.

On Sunday, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. called the allegations against Robredo “serious” during a podcast of presidential communications secretary Martin Andanar.

“I need to look into it, this looks like a serious matter that needs an in-depth probe,” Esperon said, as quoted by CNN Philippines.

However, GMA News quoted Esperon as saying that a discussion of the emails is not on the agenda for the first Cabinet meeting of 2017.

“We have a Cabinet meeting. It happens that it is not one of the matters to be taken up. That just tells you that we have other more important matters [to discuss],” Esperon told reporters. He did state, however, that the administration would look into the emails at some point.

Robredo denied the allegations in an interview transcript released by her office on Monday. She went on to slam Justice Secretary Aguirre for previously accusing her of staying in Lewis’ house during her recent trip to the US. Though she admitted that Lewis supported her during her campaign for Congress in 2013, she said she has not heard from her since.

Duterte has come under fire since taking office in May of 2016 on a promise to wipe out drugs and dealers in the country.

His controversial ‘war on drugs’ has so far led to the death of almost 6,000 people, according to statistics released by the national police in December. Most of those were reportedly killed in vigilante or extrajudicial killings, while others lost their lives in police operations.

Duterte’s campaign has been sharply criticized by the US, the European Union, and the United Nations. The president has lashed out at each of his critics, calling President Barack Obama a “son of a bi**h/whore” in September. He also gave the EU a “f**k you,” telling the bloc it is only criticizing his war on drugs in “atonement” for its own sins, and called UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a “devil.”</s>An opposition lawmaker from the Liberal Party on Monday denied that the alleged “LeniLeaks” controversy is a plot of Vice President Leni Robredo to unseat President Rodrigo Duterte.

In a statement, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman said a “plain reading” of the email thread that went viral “does not manifest a design to destabilize the government or oust President Duterte.”

But the controversy has become a tool for the administration to censure any forms of dissent, Lagman said.

Robredo became a subject of online backlash after her rabid online critics and trolls on Facebook spread screenshots of supposed emails from Robredo’s known supporters calling for Duterte’s resignation and protests against the President’s support for the hero’s burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Another viral post showed an alleged email from the Office of the Vice President’s social media unit urging its trolls to launch a counteroffensive against Duterte, social media personalities who were Robredo’s rabid critics, and defeated vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos, who filed an electoral protest against Robredo.

Lagman said the alleged emails were part of the exercise of freedom of expressions as protected by the Bill of Rights and an important part of democracy.

Lagman said the emails only suggest resignation and not any radical ouster plot to end Duterte’s term.

“While some of the emails may suggest the resignation of Duterte for an erratic decision favoring the burial of the late dictator Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani and for failure to solve the drug menace, they express honest opinions and do not recommend any radical action or upheaval to pre-terminate Duterte’s incumbency,” Lagman said.

Lagman said “LeniLeaks” only shows the administration’s imagined fear of an impeachment or ouster plot being used to justify censorship of any form of dissent.

“If the President’s men believe that Duterte is rendering fealty to his mandate, then their phobia of his impending ouster is grossly misplaced and is conveniently used as a pretext to discourage and censure critical dissent,” Lagman said.

 READ: ‘Duterte ouster plot’ shows how admin is ‘twisted, paranoid’—solon

While the Office of the Vice President has not yet issued a statement about it, Robredo denied being part of any ouster moves against Duterte.

READ: I am not a part of any plot to oust Duterte’—Robredo

Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said he has asked National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. to investigate the alleged ouster plot.

Robredo resigned from the Cabinet after she was ordered by Duterte to desist from attending Cabinet meetings due to irreconcilable differences.

Duterte later said he asked Robredo to stop attending the meetings following allegations Robredo had joined protests against Duterte, an accusation the vice president denied.

Robredo has criticized Duterte’s support for the burial of Marcos at the Libingan, as well as the administration’s bloody war on drugs, which has claimed over 6,000 lives. IDL/rga</s>President Rodrigo Duterte is not cowed by the alleged conspiracy to remove him from power after he was informed of the “#LeniLeaks” controversy.

“I wish them all the success,” Duterte was quoted as saying by Communications Secretary Martin Andanar.

Andanar said the President was informed of the alleged leaked emails calling for his resignation at the sidelines of the Cabinet meeting in Malacañang on Monday.

#LeniLeaks went viral on the internet after Vice President Leni Robredo’s critics on Facebook spread screenshots of supposed emails from Robredo’s known supporters calling for Duterte’s resignation and for his ouster.

READ: ‘I am not a part of any plot to oust Duterte’—Robredo

Another viral post showed a purported email from the Office of the Vice President’s social media unit urging its trolls to launch a counteroffensive against Duterte, the Robredo’s critics, and defeated vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos.

National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon said the ouster plots against the Chief Executive were not discussed during the Cabinet meeting.

“We have other more important matters…This should not be the flavor of the day or the month since this is just something that we already know,” Esperon said.

“The best way to address this is to show that we are effective in anti-drugs, that we could address the problems that they are concerned with,” he added. CDG/rga

READ: Drilon on alleged plan to unseat Duterte: Just crap</s>The alleged plot to unseat President Rodrigo Duterte being attributed to Vice President Leni Robredo showed how “twisted and paranoid” this administration has become, an opposition lawmaker said.

“’LeniLeaks’ again show us how twisted and paranoid the demigods under the Duterte administration has become,” Akbayan Rep. Tom Villarin said in a statement on Monday.

Villarin, an ally of Robredo, criticized the administration for spreading “hateful rumors” only to cover up their own fears.

“Why burden the public with hateful rumors? What good will it bring to put down a good person except to assuage their own fears and insecurities,” Villarin said.

Villarin appealed to the administration to call for unity of principle and decency during the new year.

“Let the new year be a chance for our country to be united along principles of decency and tolerance, not drown by lies and deceit,” Villarin said.

Robredo became a subject of online backlash after her rabid online critics and trolls on Facebook spread screenshots of supposed emails from Robredo’s known supporters calling for Duterte’s resignation and protests against the President’s support for the hero’s burial of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Another viral post showed an email from the Office of the Vice President’s social media unit urging its trolls to launch a counteroffensive against Duterte; social media personalities who were Robredo’s rabid critics; and defeated vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos, who filed an electoral protest against Robredo.

While the Office of the Vice President has not yet issued a statement about it, Robredo denied being part of any ouster moves against Duterte.

Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said he has asked National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. to investigate the alleged ouster plot.

Robredo had resigned from the Cabinet after she was ordered by Duterte to desist from attending Cabinet meetings due to irreconcilable differences.

Duterte later said he asked Robredo to stop attending the meetings over allegations that she joined protests against him, an accusation the vice president vehemently denied.

Robredo has criticized Duterte’s support for the burial of the dictator Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, as well as the administration’s bloody war on drugs, which has claimed over 6,000 lives already, including those killed in the crossfire. JE</s>“They are just making noise,” Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II said on the alleged move by rich Filipino-American critics to oust President Rodrigo Duterte.

Members of the Global Filipino Diaspora Council (GFDC), including billionaire philanthropist Loida Nicolas-Lewis and her sister, former Commission on Filipino Overseas chairwoman Imelda “Mely” Nicolas, were reportedly pushing for Vice President Leni Robredo to become president in a “conspiracy” to oust Duterte.

In one of leaked emails dated Dec. 4, 2016 which was first posted online by a blogger, Lewis supposedly told GFDC members that the only way to fight an “evil plot” to unseat Robredo is to call for Duterte’s resignation.

“After all, he promised to resign in six months if he has not solved the drug epidemic in the Philippines,” the leaked email stated.

Aguirre said “she is calling for the Vice President to become president. She is calling for the resignation of the President. She is a dreamer. There are only few who are making a noise although they have money.”

The justice chief believed that both Robredo and Senator Leila De Lima, the staunchest critic of Duterte, stayed at Lewis’ home during their visit in the US last year.

READ: ‘I am not a part of any plot to oust Duterte’—Robredo

As far as the DOJ is concerned, he said there is no investigation being conducted.

However, he said he is not sure if the National Security Agency (NSA) is doing its own investigation./rga</s>It's easy to talk about human rights, but discussion can get dicey when you look for a fail-proof definition or talk about which humans have more rights. What about the Philippine general public, more than 100 million people?

Powerful voices from Europe, the United States and the United Nations say Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is violating human rights by letting police kill drug dealers. Separately elected Philippine Vice President Leni Robredo quit the cabinet last month partly because of those killings, which total between 5,000 and 6,000 according to her office and local media reports.

Some of the dead might have been just druggies or their children, not the hardcore upstream dealers. It’s another problem in the urban Philippine streets already choked in some places by shanties and troupes of child beggars.

But just about every time you talk to common people in the Philippines, the say they feel safer and don’t mind the extrajudicial killings. They want to focus free of fear on getting a piece of the fast-growing Philippine economy. No wonder Duterte earned approval and trust ratings of 86% in October from Asia Pulse. There’s even a cute-ism for extrajudicial killings, EJK. Just half a year ago a lot of those humans hesitated to go outside and pass the shady characters standing on the neighborhood street corner. Drug dealers, along with burglars and even illegally parked vehicles, don’t show up anymore as they did before Duterte took office June 30 on pledges to control crime, you hear again and again.

“Our laws, they are fully implemented right now,” says Clarence Minao, an ebullient Cagayan de Oro dweller who described the changes in her southern city of 675,000 people while hanging out with her fifth-grade daughter in a crowded park. “And I’m happy with the curfew for minors. Before there was no implementation of that. So it’s safer for the kids and for those adults. Because during night time there were a lot of bystanders. So you didn’t know if they were on drugs or doing bad things to you.”

The new sense of safety doesn’t come just from anecdotes. Crime went down overall in Duterte’s first five months in office, according to Philippine National Police figures cited in local media. The country’s index crime volume fell to 55,391 from July through November from 81,064 in the same period of 2015. Not so oddly enough, murder cases rose 51% to 5,970. In the second half of last year, 2,041 “drug suspects” were killed by police, according to the ABS-CBN Investigative and Research Group.

Duterte resents the critics overseas. He has name-called some and cozied up to countries such as China that don’t give him grief about human rights. Should foreign governments criticize? You can argue for stamping out the drug trade through court trials for dealers and more rehab programs for users of the Philippine drug of choice, “shabu” methamphetamine. That approach preferred in the West would take the Philippines longer to clean up crime but give not-so-hardened criminals and their families a right to keep living – probably better than before.

But if you count street safety as a human right, Filipinos in the cities are suddenly confident they already have it.</s>Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo on Monday denied allegations that she is part of a group plotting the ouster of President Rodrigo Duterte, calling such accusations ridiculous.

In a chance interview with reporters in Marinduque where she visited victims of Typhoon Nina, Robredo clarified that the supposed e-mail exchange among her supporters led by philanthropist Loida Nicolas Lewis did not involve her or her office. She said Lewis had been her supporter since 2013 when she decided to run for a congressional post as representative of Camarines Sur.

“She [was]one of my supporters when I ran for Congress because she is also from Bicol. I have talked to her way back, I think even before the [vice presidential]campaign started. But since I won [as Vice President], we haven’t seen or talked to each other. It is not true that we met in the US,” the Vice President said, referring to her Christmas vacation in the US where she attended a family reunion with her three daughters Aika, Tricia and Jillian.

“We did not have a personal meeting, and we did not even have a phone conversation or see each other in the US. So those things you’ve heard about that topic are false,” Robredo pointed out.

“I am not involved in those e-mail exchanges. These e-mails mentioned my name, which are not surprising because I am the Vice President and I have supporters who respond to attacks on me. I have been at the receiving end of fake news and falsehoods, and the e-mails were an apparent response,” she said.

The leaked emails that supposedly showed a plot to undermine President Duterte were posted online.

 “Most of the things thrown at me are really purely ridiculous,” she said in a separate speech.

On Monday, Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre 2nd claimed that Robredo stayed in Lewis’ house in the US.

 But the Vice President slammed Aguirre for lying.

“It’s sad that even our Justice secretary is a part of those lies. He is the Secretary of Justice, so I wish that he won’t say lies because that claim [that I stayed in Lewis’ house]is a lie. I have never talked to her and never saw her in the US,” Robredo said.

She added that the accusations thrown her way had not dampened her resolve to fulfil her mandate.

 “There is a lot of viciousness in the Internet, but I have a mandate to serve. I’d rather focus on my mandate,” Robredo said.

Although the “LeniLeaks” controversy was tackled during a Cabinet meeting on Monday, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon said the issue will be investigated.

Speaking to reporters at the sidelines of the oath-taking of newly-appointed government officials in Malacañang, Esperon added that they are not taking the issue lightly.

“LeniLeaks? We have a Cabinet meeting today, it happens that it will not be one of the matters that will be taken up. It just tells you that we have other more important matters [to discuss],” he said.

“[But] It doesn’t mean also that if we don’t talk about it in the media, we do not give it importance. It is important in the sense that we have to know the veracity of some things, as they affect our stability, Esperon added.

Lewis has already denied concocting a plan to remove Duterte from office. She also clarified that her call for Duterte to quit was based on the President’s promise that he would resign if drugs were still rampant six months after his inauguration in June last year.

But Esperon defended the extension, saying it is immaterial in the overall scheme of things.

“What are their charges? What don’t they want? Sabi nila, one, bakit daw in-extend ng more than three months yung anti-drug campaign [They say, for one, why was the Duterte admnistration’s drug war extended for more than three months]? My golly, if they are from the Americas, wherever North or South or the USA, there are a lot of drug wars, going on in their vicinity. Meaning, neighboring countries at alam naman nilang decades… ang labanan doon tungkol sa droga ay inaabot nang matagalan. So bakit sila mag-aapura ng three months kaagad [They know that fighting drugs take decades. So why are they rushing]?” the security adviser said.

He added that the administration will look into the identity of the bloggers behind the “LeniLeaks.”

“That could be part of the overall work but as I said, this should not be the flavor of the day or the month, this is something that we already know. And the best way to address this is to show that we are effective in anti-drugs, that we could address the problems that they are concerned with,” Esperon said.

Senate President Pro-tempore Franklin Drilon also dismissed the supposed plot against Duterte as “crap.”

 Drilon said Malacañang should not take issues posted in social media seriously.

“This is all crap,” the senator told reporters. “I don’t think we should decide on the basis of what appears in social media. We can get misled.”

The senator said he had not discussed the issue with Robredo but that the alleged plot is farthest from her mind.

 “There is no such thing, I can assure you,” he added.</s>President Rodrigo Duterte has shrugged off a supposed ouster plot against him that is allegedly organized by and linked to Vice President Maria Leonor “Leni” Robredo’s allies.

In an interview on Tuesday, Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said that Duterte, at the sidelines of Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, had been able to discuss with him, National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and Information and Communications Technology Rodolfo Salalima a supposed leaked conversation, now dubbed as “LeniLeaks.”

During their talk, Andanar added, the President had wished his opponents “success” in destabilizing him.

“I wish them all the success,” Duterte told Robredo’s supporters planning to kick him out of office as quoted by Andanar.

The alleged ouster plot came to fore after a blogger posted over the weekend emails that allegedly showed exchanges between some supporters of the Liberal Party such as immigration lawyer Ted Laguatan and certain individuals in the Philippines.

The emails were supposedly posted on the Yahoo! group Global Filipino Diaspora Council, whose members reportedly include Loida Nicolas-Lewis.

Lewis has denied concocting a plan to remove Duterte from Malacañang even as she clarified that her call for Duterte to quit was based on the President’s promise that he would resign if drugs are still rampant six months after his inauguration in June last year.

Esperon has said “Lenileaks” was not on the agenda of the Cabinet meeting on Monday because Duterte and the secretaries had more important matters to discuss.

“We have other more important matters… This should not be the flavor of the day or the month since this is just something that we already know,” Esperon said.

In a news conference, Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said the “LeniLeaks” issue was not taken up during Monday’s Cabinet meeting.

“No. There was no discussion there and if there was any pull-aside, I was not privy to it,” Abella told reporters. “It was not mentioned at all. Not during the Cabinet meeting.”

But Andanar, in another interview, said he discussed the “LeniLeaks” with the President together with Esperon and Salalima.

“It was discussed in the Cabinet pull-aside. This was when we pulledthe President to one side and we talked to the President privately,” Andanar told ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC).
The cabinet of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte investigates an email leak that allegedly indicates the involvement of the vice president Leni Robredo in attempts to overthrow Duterte.