Attorney General Anand Ramlogan may have lodged a strong perceptual win in the matter of E-mailgate, but the report he's managed to squeeze out of Google hardly constitutes a reason to end the probes that are under way in the matter.
The Attorney General has framed the result of his legal proceedings against the Internet search giant as definitive proof that the e-mails read into the Parliamentary record by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley were, as he describe it, part of "a malicious political conspiracy."
Still, by the Attorney General's own admission, his business with Google is not over. He claims that both the Prime Minister's e-mail account and his own have been searched but that Google's response falls short of his own legal request for a sworn and signed affidavit declaration.
Ramlogan has since quite publicly advised that he intends to sue the Opposition Leader on receipt of that document, but he has also forwarded the information that he has gathered from Google to the Integrity Commission in order to "help" that investigation along.This has been the most troubling aspect of the Attorney General's efforts to win information about E-mailgate from Google.
Regardless of the actual information he has gathered, Ramlogan is a learned-enough legal mind to be able to both understand and accept that the results of an investigation launched by someone accused of potentially criminal acts demand rigorous cross examination and verification by an independent, unaffiliated party.
At least one aspect of this E-mailgate case is the enormity of the accusations, which named as political targets for potentially dangerous mischief, the Director of Public Prosecutions and a T&T Guardian journalist working the political beat.These allegations were so dastardly and disturbing that the Attorney General should be keen to have the probes into the matter launched by the Integrity Commission and the Police Service proceed without interference to their logical conclusions.
Regardless of the certainties that his own investigation have raised in his mind, Ramlogan must also understand that such assurances are his own, and not those of either the members of the commission, the investigating officers assigned to the case by the Police Commissioner or, most compellingly, the general public.
The probe by the Integrity Commission and the Police Service will also embrace the accusations and possible e-mail trails of others named in the documents, including the Prime Minister, Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Dr Suruj Rambachan and Mr Gary Griffith.More than a year after the explosive revelation of these documents, their provenance remains unverified and the public is keen to have closure in the matter.
That can only come through independent investigation and professional evaluation of the evidence.To that end, the independent probes by the Integrity Commission and the Police Service should continue to completion, ensuring that the information they gather is untainted by political allegiance and that the conclusions reached are fair and transparent to all parties involved.
The citizens of T&T are entitled to some closure after the yearlong instability occasioned by the revelation of those documents, and they need to be settled once and for all and the parties found to have erred under law called to answer for their actions.