THE BADLY WRITTEN QUIPS OF ATTY. VINLUAN

I've been watching the Sara Duterte impeachment trial this week, and I keep getting distracted by the same person. Not Sara. Her lawyer.

Atty. Mark Vinluan is one of the lead counsels for the defense. He runs his own practice, Vinluan Law Offices, and is part of Sara Duterte's 16-member defense team, which filed its entry of appearance under the Fortun, Narvasa and Salazar law firm. Vinluan himself left FNS as an associate back in 2015. He has been on his feet enough times this week that his name has become a fixture in the daily trial coverage. And the more he speaks, the harder it gets to figure out what exactly he is trying to do.

He is not some unknown figure pulled in at the last minute. But background and actual courtroom performance are two different things. And what has been happening inside that chamber this week has been, to put it plainly, a mess.

Each argument he delivers sounds reasonable for about thirty seconds. Then you think about it a little longer and the whole thing starts to fall apart.

THE "UNCONVENTIONAL BUT JUSTIFIED" LINE

The most talked-about moment came early in the trial. Sara Duterte, during a virtual media briefing on November 23, 2024, told people on camera that she had given instructions for someone to kill President Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and former Speaker Martin Romualdez if anything happened to her. She said "no joke, no joke" twice.

Vinluan's response to this? "While her response was unconventional, it was justified."

Think about that for a second.

A sitting vice president publicly states on camera that she has contracted a hitman for three named individuals, says it twice to remove any doubt about her seriousness, and her defense lawyer's best argument is that it was "unconventional."

Like showing up to a corporate job interview in tsinelas. Unconventional.

He then argued that Sara was not acting as a vice president when she said it. She was acting as "a wife, mother, daughter, and sister who only sought to protect her own life and the lives of her family members."

Here is my problem with that argument.

She called that virtual media briefing herself. She was in front of cameras, talking to the public, in her capacity as a public official under scrutiny.

The moment you do that, the private citizen defense walks out the door.

You cannot call a formal media briefing and then tell the court that whatever you said was personal and not official. That argument does not hold in a barangay hearing, let alone an impeachment trial.

THE OPERATION ROMANOV PROBLEM

Vinluan also argued that Sara's threats were a direct response to something called "Operation Romanov," which he described as a plot to eliminate the entire Duterte family. He compared it, symbolically, to the assassination of Russia's last ruling family.

Big claim.

Here is what Day 5 of the trial revealed. NBI Bangsamoro Regional Director Jeremy Lotoc told the court that the first time "Romanov" came up was during a Maisug rally in Davao, when Davao City Mayor Sebastian "Baste" Duterte looked at the Marcos camp and said: "Mr. President, remember what happened to the Romanovs. When you go to bed tonight, think about the Romanovs."

Read that again. The Romanov reference originated as a Duterte warning directed at the Marcos family.

The NBI found no validated evidence that an Oplan Romanov targeting the Dutertes ever existed.

The NBI classified the claim of a Romanov operation against Sara as "unvalidated."

So Vinluan leaned on a label that started as a warning from Baste Duterte to Marcos, then got recycled and amplified by a friendly vlogger during Sara’s November 2024 online briefing.

In that livestream, Princess Maui floated “Operation Romanov” as an alleged plot to kill the Duterte family and asked Sara if she feared for her safety.

Sara answered by saying people should not worry because she had already spoken to someone who would kill the President, the First Lady, and the former Speaker if she herself were killed.

In the trial, the defense now treats that unvalidated “Operation Romanov” narrative—born in rallies and vlogs, not in official intelligence reports—as a core justification for her assassination remark.

Senator-judge Ping Lacson was visibly taken aback when this came out in court.

He pointed out that the Romanov threat had been consistently framed as a plot aimed at the Dutertes, and it was only during cross-examination that the record showed it originated the other way around.

THE CAYETANO ASSIST

The "warning not a threat" line did not come from Vinluan alone.

Senator-judges Alan Peter Cayetano and Pia Cayetano stepped in on Day 5 to argue that statements linked to Baste Duterte, and by extension Sara Duterte, should be read as warnings rather than threats.

Alan Peter Cayetano argued there is a "thin line between a warning and a threat" and said the terms "Romanov" and "Oplan Romanov" should not automatically be read as declarations of violence.

He also urged the court to "be fair to the Dutertes" while pushing the "conditional threat" framing the defense has been riding all week.

The problem with this argument is the same problem Vinluan runs into every time.

Baste Duterte told the president to think about the Romanovs before he went to bed.

Lotoc confirmed that is what was said. You can call that a warning. But when the NBI investigates it as a threat, when it ends up cited in the context of Sara's on-camera contract killing statement, the "just a warning" defense requires the court to ignore the full chain of events and take the Duterte family's framing at face value.

Two senator-judges essentially became defense lawyers for a day (maybe more).

That tells you something about how much the actual defense needs help.

THE HODGEPODGE LINE

During his closing remarks on Day 3, Vinluan told the court that the prosecution was attempting to establish what he called a "stretch narrative" through a collection of materials that did not directly prove Sara had hired an assassin.

"Trying to prove this stretch narrative using a hodgepodge of materials is a waste of this honorable court's time and the Filipino people's money," he said.

The word hodgepodge is not a legal argument.

It is a taray one-liner that sounds like it belongs in a courtroom drama, not in actual proceedings before 24 senator-judges.

And Rep. Terry Ridon of Bicol Saro responded to this kind of performance: if Sara did not contract a hitman, then her statements were lies. If the statements were true, she made real threats. Either she is a liar or she is a threat.

Vinluan has been trying to find a third door for days now, and there is not one.

THE TYPO STRATEGY

On Day 4, Vinluan spent significant time pointing out that NBI documents had date inconsistencies and mismatched docket numbers.

Specifically, an Investigation Data Form was subscribed and sworn to on February 12, 2025, but bore a DOJ receiving stamp dated January 30, 2025. A 13-day gap.

He also flagged that the docket number on the NBI's own copy, ending in "048," did not match the DOJ's certification, which used "049."

These are real inconsistencies. Legitimate questions. In isolation, they are fair game for any defense lawyer.

But here is where the movie script falls apart.

Lotoc was asked whether those errors changed the NBI's findings. His answer was no.

The typos were administrative errors. The substance of what was investigated, that Sara Duterte made statements about having people killed on camera, was never in question.

Nobody denied the video exists. Nobody denied she said the words.

Vinluan spent hours poking at paperwork errors in a case where the central piece of evidence is a video the whole country has already watched.

THE BAR EXAM GRADES STUNT

This is the one that got him admonished on record, and it deserved a louder response than it got.

On Day 4, while cross-examining Lotoc, Vinluan slipped in a comment about Sara Duterte's qualifications.

He told the court she earned her law degree and passed the Bar Exam on her first attempt with a rating of 80 percent. Then he added: "She has a higher grade than most of the lawyers here."

Sara passed the 2005 Philippine Bar Examinations with a General Weighted Average of 80, five points above the passing mark of 75. She confirmed this herself in a public statement in April 2026.

Prosecutor Amando Virgil Ligutan objected immediately, calling the remark "unprofessional" and "foul."

Presiding Officer Chiz Escudero stepped in and formally admonished Vinluan, telling him plainly: you don't know what their grades are.

The correct response. Because what, exactly, was the point of saying it?

The problem is that Vinluan was flexing Sara's 80 percent in a room that happened to include Rep. Leila de Lima, who placed 8th in the 1985 Philippine Bar Examinations with a rating of 86.26 percent.

The Oposisyon PH post that went viral on July 14 said it frankly: "Not in front of Rep. Leila de Lima."

A bar rating is not a lifetime pass to act above the law.

A score on a licensure exam says nothing about moral character, and it says even less about whether you threatened to have three people killed.

What the court is evaluating is whether the vice president committed impeachable offenses.

Her 2005 bar score has no bearing on that question.

What Vinluan did was try to reframe Sara as a qualified, intelligent public servant being ganged up on by lesser legal minds.

It was a character argument masquerading as a credential.

It backfired the moment Escudero called him out in open court, and it backfired further the moment the internet remembered who else was in the room.

THE BIGGER PROBLEM

Look at the full picture of Vinluan's performance this week and a pattern appears that is more uncomfortable than any single bad line.

The defense is not trying to win on facts. They conceded early that the video does not prove Sara contracted a hitman.

Vinluan said it himself. So the only play left is to reframe the meaning of what everyone already heard with their own ears.

Sara was not a vice president, she was a mother.

The threats were not threats, they were a response to trauma.

The betrayal was not betrayal, it was representation.

The "no joke, no joke" was not literal, it was emotional.

The Romanov conspiracy was not invented by her brother as a warning to the president, it was a real plot against the Dutertes.

Every line from Vinluan is a reinterpretation of something already on tape, and every reinterpretation comes with a new piece of movie dialogue attached.

Lines that sound written for a courtroom drama but read like a badly photocopied script being recited in a council meeting.

Rep. Ridon's challenge remains unanswered.

If the defense wants the court to believe Sara told the truth in that video, she made real threats.

If she did not tell the truth, she lied to the public she claims to represent. Vinluan keeps choosing a third option, which is to change the subject every time that question comes up.

The senators now have to decide on actual constitutional grounds whether what Sara Duterte did rises to an impeachable offense under the accountability provisions of the 1987 Constitution.

That is a legitimate, serious legal debate, and reasonable people can disagree about where the line is.

But Vinluan is not helping her get there.