AMID renewed calls for her resignation after she admitted having an affair with her married driver-bodyguard, Senator Leila de Lima stood firm Wednesday, saying, “No one can force me to resign.”
“So that’s it, they’re feasting again on me. That’s what they like. Basta, resignation is a personal decision,” De Lima said.
The beleaguered senator said she would simply ignore the calls for her to step down, and said her accusers should be the ones to resign for using the entire government machinery to go after her.
“They have no qualms about doing all these things like using the resources of the executive department… [and] they are all focused on me,” De Lima said. “What kind of standards are these?”
She accused the President’s men of harassing, coercing and blackmailing witnesses to testify against her on allegations that she accepted drug money from crime lords detained at the New Bilibid Prison when she was Justice secretary.
On Tuesday, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo urged De Lima to resign after she admitted on national TV to having an affair with her driver-bodyguard Ronnie Dayan, whom President Rodrigo Duterte had tagged as the bagman who collected money from drug lords inside the NBP to fund De Lima’s senatorial campaign.
De Lima has denied accepting drug money, but said during her TV interview that it was “within the realm of possibility” that Dayan had used her name without her permission to extort money from the drug lords.
To save the Senate from further embarrassment, Panelo said De Lima should voluntarily resign.
He added that De Lima’s admission could bolster the drug charges against her. He said this also validates the accusation that she committed unlawful and immoral acts and opens her to a criminal charge of adultery.
“It opens her to expulsion proceedings in the Senate by the Senate ethics committee for immorality and grave misconduct in office, apart from opening herself to a disbarment proceeding as a member of the bar for immorality and unethical conduct,” Panelo said.
Drug lords who testified during the House hearings on the proliferation of illegal drugs in the NBP when De Lima was Justice secretary had corroborated Duterte’s assertion that Dayan was the senator’s lover who collected money from them.
Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II also demanded that De Lima resign, saying that her admission strengthened the government’s case against her.
But De Lima said her admission to having an affair with Dayan was not proof that she collected drug money through him for her senatorial campaign.
“What’s the connection? Theoretically, anyone can be a bagman,” she said.
“I know myself. I have nothing to do with it,” she said of allegations that she took money from the drug lords.
De Lima also said Dayan was already separated from his wife when they had the affair.
De Lima first admitted her long-time rumored relationship with Dayan in an exclusive interview by Winnie Monsod on GMA News TV Monday night.
When Monsod asked her why she fell for Dayan, who was just her driver and bodyguard, considering her intelligence and competence, De Lima described what happened as part of the “frailties of a woman.”
De Lima said she was being truthful about her affair in the same way she was truthful when she denied being a protector of drug lords.
“I can’t be truthful in one aspect, and untruthful in another. I’ve been very truthful about my innocence on the allegations against me about my alleged drug trade. I can’t be untruthful with respect to my personal life,” she said.
De Lima said she was asked directly so she answered directly.
“I don’t lie. I have difficulty lying so I opted to admit a past episode of my life,” she said.
:my marriage has been annulled and then [he was] separated when that happened at that time. Things happened. I can’t lie because that’s the truth,” she said.
“But the point of being romantically involved at some point in my life, that’s not relevant. They’re just insisting on that because it’s part of humiliating me, the misogynistic tendency of the President that he wants to portray me as an immoral woman. That’s when double standard in our society comes. Look who’s talking?” she said.
Asked if it was possible that Dayan had collected money for her without her knowledge, De Lima reiterated that while she believes that he would not do it, it was also possible that she was wrong.
“Because I cannot be 100 percent sure of anyone else except myself. I can only be 100 percent of myself because I know myself…. I know myself,” she said.
“Although I want to believe they won’t do it, but they did that before… I cannot be sure, I’m not their keeper. I can’t guarantee their integrity,” she further stated.
De Lima blamed her predicament to the administration’s “non-stop acts of persecution” against her.
Reacting to critics who called her immoral, De Lima said: “No one can judge me on my morality.”
De Lima also said she wouldn’t be surprised if the government cut a deal with suspected drug kingpin Kerwin Espinosa to link her to the illegal drug trade.
“They’re fabricating stories linking me to the drug trade, the inclusion of my name in the supposed list of the Espinosas—what they called the blue book, pink book, really, that’s totally fabricated,” De Lima said.
“Have you not noticed that all their efforts are focused on me. I am the only one being pinned down here. I am the only one charged here. They’re ganging up on me. Have you heard other cases under case buildup against other alleged protectors, alleged coddlers? The real protectors and coddlers?” she said.
At the Senate, De Lima expressed concern over the huge increase in the confidential and intelligence funds of the Office of the President in the proposed P3.35-trillion national budget for 2017.
During the plenary debate, De Lima noted how the proposed budget of the OP has dramatically ballooned to P20.03 billion which is around P17 billion more than its existing budget of only P2.87 billion for 2016.
“Why must the President spend more than ₱2 billion for confidential and intelligence expenses when there are agencies which specialize in intelligence operations?” she asked.
Under the proposed 2017 national budget, the President’s confidential and intelligence funds are given an allocation of ₱1 billion, four times bigger than the current ₱250 million.
De Lima pointed out that a bloated allocation of confidential and intelligence funds under the OP reveals the administration’s apparent distrust of the current intelligence operations.
“The President is the ultimate recipient of intelligence reports and not the one supposed to generate them. Why must he require considerable funds for confidential and intelligence expenses for operations that would render the intelligence operations of the [other] agencies useless?” she said.
“The President should instead make use of the intelligence reports of our agencies instead of generating them himself,” she said.