March 11, 2023
Keith Rowley is the poster-politician for someone having absolutely no understanding of leadership or ability to offer leadership to T&T; he is a lesson for those who do not understand the difference between taking responsibility and bearing responsibility.
On Thursday evening, Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley mounted the PNMs political platform in Barataria and once again resurrected Emailgate, his 2013 reckless and treacherous plan when he used and abused his parliamentary privilege as Opposition Leader in an attempt to destroy the People’s Partnership Government.
Why would Rowley bring up this ten-year old story?
After investigations by the TTPS, Integrity Commission, Google, the FBI, the US Department of Justice and several independent technology expert investigations, it was proven that Rowley deceived not only the country but MPs within his own party.
Rowley used fabricated emails in a presentation in Parliament to accuse then Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Cabinet Ministers of a conspiracy to undermine the justice system and harm a journalist and was an attempt to bring down the Government; 10 years later Rowley continues to pontificate on the worst abuse of Parliamentary privilege.
On Thursday, it was vintage Rowley all over again. He accused the Opposition Leader Persad-Bissessar of a “boldface revision of history with respect to the Emailgate matter,” telling his party faithful he did not know where the Persad-Bissessar got the notion that she was “exonerated” by Google.
Was Rowley advised about a response from Chi Nguyen, the custodian of records at Google Inc which stated, “a diligent search and reasonable inquiry of Google’s records produced no information regarding the email anan@gmail.com.” or did he choose to ignore this?
Instead, Rowley has continuously relied on the advice of the very partisan, pro-PNM Deputy DPP Joan Honore-Paul who from the very beginning of the investigations, continued to venture out of her constitutional remit by pronouncing on the on-going, parallel investigation of the Integrity Commission over which her office had no jurisdiction. The Deputy DPP’s actions caused her “professional” responsibility to be tainted which did not show her as being fair and politically neutral… indeed, it was quite the opposite.
Rowley quoted Honore-Paul’s report which stated, “It is noteworthy that notwithstanding the apparent form and structure of the emails themselves, their content when matched against evidence of prevailing circumstances in T&T was sufficient to reach the standard of probable cause.”
In other words, Honore-Paul was echoing former AG Faris Al-Rawi’s most troubling response to the emails read out by Rowley in Parliament, i.e. “the investigation into must go beyond the four corners of the evidence by adopting the form vs. substance argument; even if the emails are fake, the investigation ignore the spuriousness of the source and proceed to investigate the contents. Finding nothing of substance is different from finding nothing at all.”
And here we are, ten years later, with every legal authority pronouncing that Emailgate was a fake and sham, its architect Keith Rowley keeps bringing up the subject, using the same set of false data, documents and information to appeal to his base and those who are always looking to spread his propaganda.
Keith Rowley is the poster-politician for someone having absolutely no understanding of leadership or ability to offer leadership to T&T; he is a lesson for those who do not understand the difference between taking responsibility and bearing responsibility.
Keith Rowley does not care about good governance or the people of Trinidad and Tobago except for his three F’s… family, friends and financiers. His only political goal and aspiration is to continue to in office.
This is the person who is the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago!