Vice President Sara Duterte on Tuesday, Nov. 26, insisted that the remarks she made about having hired someone to kill President Marcos is not an active threat, but was simply “taken out of its logical context.”
President Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte (Photos from the Presidential Communications Office)
In a response to Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin’s statement on Nov. 24 about viewing her words as an “active threat” to the life of President, the official stressed that such insistence is “ominous.”
“I raise this caution as the President and his sycophants aggressively sell a narrative based entirely on my statement, which is taken out of its logical context,” she said.
“There is absolutely no flesh on the bone, and despite the absence of a reliable investigation, authorities were quick to consider this a national security concern,” she added.
Duterte also criticized the use of the word “assassin” in statements and reports because it turned the issue “even more terrifying,” stressing that she never used the term “during my recent consternation against the Marcos administration's failure to serve the Filipinos while it masterfully persecutes political enemies.”
“Common sense should be enough for us to understand and accept that a supposed conditional act of revenge does not constitute to an active threat. This is [a] plan without a flesh,” Duterte said.
The official, who won in tandem with Marcos in the 2022 polls, lamented that the government’s reaction to her statement was incomparable to how it treated the alleged threats to her life.
“The diametric contrast and inaction are displayed when I have expressed in previous months threats to my person and continuing threats to the life of OVP personnel,” she said.
The Vice President expressed confidence that “an honest scrutiny” into the issue “would easily expose this narrative to be farce, imagined, or nothing at all.”
On Tuesday, Nov. 26, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) served a subpoena to Duterte for the threats she made in a Zoom press conference over the weekend against Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez.
In the subpoena, the Vice President was requested to appear before the NBI on Friday, Nov. 29, to explain her side.
However, in an interview at the Veterans Memorial Medical Center (VMMC), where Duterte is staying with OVP chief-of-staff Zuleika Lopez, the official refused to comment on the subpoena as she hasn’t seen it yet.