Bongbong camp on Robredo resignation: She has shown her true colors

The camp of former Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. on Monday said Vice President Leni Robredo "has shown her true colors" following her departure from President Rodrigo Duterte's Cabinet.

In a statement, Marcos' legal spokesperson Vic Rodriguez said Robredo's resignation was "long overdue" owing to her "very obvious adversarial attitude and opposite stance” against Duterte’s policies.

Rodriguez also slammed Robredo for floating the existence of an alleged plot to steal the country's second highest post from her. Robredo made the allegation on Sunday following her resignation from the Cabinet of President Rodrigo Duterte as chairman of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), saying she will not allow the will of the people to be "thwarted."

"Whether she was fired or she resigned from her post is definitely not the business of former Senator Bongbong Marcos. However we take strong exception to her statement on not letting the vice presidency to be ‘stolen’ from her and the will of the people to be 'thwarted,'"  Rodriguez said.

"Such pronouncement is the height of hypocrisy," he added.

Rodriguez said Robredo's departure from the Cabinet had nothing to do with the election protest "but has everything to do with her political ambition and that of her party’s desperate and despicable act of getting back into power."

"Long before the May 2016 elections, we were the first ones to reveal the Liberal Party's 'Plan B' which was to rob Senator Marcos of the vice presidency, install Mrs. Robredo in his stead and eventually work for the ouster of President Duterte. It is obvious that 'Plan B' is now in full swing," he said.

"She has shown her true colors indeed."

Stealing the vice-presidency

Marcos' camp turned the tables on Robredo, accusing her and the Liberal Party of stealing the vice presidency from the former senator, who lost in the May election by just 263,473 votes. 

Marcos already turned to the Supreme Court, sitting as the Presidential Electoral Tribunal, to unseat Robredo.

"It was they who thwarted the will of the Filipino people by depriving them of their real choice for the vice presidency," Rodriguez said.

"Her statement on the vice presidency is yet another affront to the Supreme Court as she is undermining the integrity and independence of Presidential Electoral Tribunal by casting doubt this early on, on all its future actions and processes," he added.

In his election protest, Marcos said Robredo had benefited from "massive electoral fraud, anomalies and irregularities."

The former senator cited alleged pre-shading of ballots, script change in the transparency server that supposedly altered the results, pre-loaded secure digital cards, misreading of ballots, malfunctioning VCMs, and an "abnormally high" unaccounted votes/undervotes for the position of vice president.

Robredo shrugged off Marcos' claims by asking the PET to dismiss the protest. —Virgil Lopez/JST, GMA News