Philippine investigators summon VP over public threats against president

Philippine authorities handed a subpoena to Vice President Sara Duterte’s office Tuesday, inviting her to answer investigators’ questions after she publicly threatened to have the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker assassinated if she were killed in an unspecified plot herself.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Monday described her threat as a criminal plot and vowed to fight it and uphold the rule of law in the country in a looming showdown between the country’s two top leaders.

The national police and the military expressed alarm and immediately boosted Marcos’s security. National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano said the threats were a national security concern.

Duterte, a 46-year-old lawyer, said her remarks were not an actual threat but an expression of concern over her own safety due to unspecified danger to her life. The Marcos administration’s statements against her were “a farce” and part of efforts to persecute critics like her, Duterte said.

The subpoena ordered Duterte to appear before the National Bureau of Investigation on Friday to “shed light on the investigation for alleged grave threats.”

Duterte said Monday she was willing to face an investigation but demanded the Marcos administration also respond to her questions, including alleged irregularities in government.

Under Philippine law, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or their family and are punishable by a prison term and fine.

Relatedly, Justice Undersecretary Jesse Andres said in a statement late Tuesday that investigators were also looking into a potentially seditious remarks by former President Rodrigo Duterte, the father of the vice president.

The former president expressed support to the vice president in a news briefing Monday night but said civilians like them would not be taken seriously by the government when they raise issues about corruption and irregularities in government.

“There is a fractured governance,” the former president said. “It is only the military who can correct it.”

Duterte clarified that he was not calling on the military to stage an uprising but stating that the civilian government would only listen when the military speaks. He also asked how long the military could still serve under a commander in chief “who is a drug addict” — an accusation Duterte has made often and that Marcos has repeatedly denied.

Andres said the ex-president’s invitation to the military “to have a part in seeking remedy is bordering on sedition and is legally actionable.”

An ongoing investigation would look at the possibility that the separate remarks by the ex-president and his daughter as the incumbent vice president may be “`part and parcel’ of the supposed destabilization plot against the administration.”

Marcos ran with the younger Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in 2022 elections and both won landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity. In the Philippines, the two positions are elected separately.

The two leaders and their camps, however, soon had a bitter falling out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea and views on the elder Duterte’s deadly anti-drugs crackdown that left thousands of mostly poor suspect dead.

Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body and became one of the most vocal critics of the president, his wife and his cousin Martin Romualdez, who heads the House of Representatives.

The House has been investigating alleged misuse of confidential government funds by Duterte as vice president and when she headed the Department of Education.

She has denied any wrongdoing and added such congressional investigations aim to muzzle government critics like her from exposing government corruption and anomalies. Andres said the country’s justice system and courts were functioning fully and could address any such concerns.