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The head of the House Committee on Justice believes Vice President Sara Duterte’s own legal team may have just revealed where the impeachment case is headed—straight to a Senate trial.

Batangas Rep. Gerville Luistro said the defense camp’s public statements about answering allegations only during a Senate proceeding sound less like a strategy and more like an admission that the case will move forward.

Speaking in an interview on Facts First with Christian Esguerra, Luistro pointed out that calls from Duterte’s camp for cross-examination and deeper scrutiny suggest they are already preparing for a full-blown trial.

“To me, it appears they’re acknowledging this will reach trial,” she said. “And in a way, they’re aligning with the justice committee’s position that a trial is necessary—after we determine probable cause.”

Luistro emphasized that the current stage is not about deciding guilt, but simply whether there is enough basis to proceed. The threshold, she noted, is relatively low.

“We’re only determining probable cause,” she explained. “That’s far from a final judgment.”

She also questioned the need for Duterte’s camp to elevate the matter to the Supreme Court, arguing that the committee is merely doing its constitutional duty to assess whether the case should advance.

For Luistro, even a single issue—such as the handling of confidential funds—could already meet that threshold.

She cited findings from the Commission on Audit, which confirmed that ₱73 million in confidential funds from the Office of the Vice President in 2022 had been disallowed due to lack of proper documentation. On top of that, another ₱375 million in spending from 2023 has also been flagged, bringing the total potentially subject to return to ₱448 million if rulings become final.

But Luistro made it clear that these audit findings serve a different purpose from impeachment.

“The COA process is about restitution—getting public funds back,” she said. “Impeachment, on the other hand, is about accountability. It can remove an official from office and bar them permanently. They run in parallel, but they are not the same.”

Another major issue raised during hearings is the question of unexplained wealth. Luistro pointed to the Anti-Money Laundering Council report detailing ₱6.7 billion in transactions linked to Duterte and her husband Mans Carpio between 2006 and 2025.

What stands out, she said, is that these transactions do not appear in Duterte’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALNs).

“That amount—₱6.7 billion—is not reflected in her SALN,” Luistro said. “Many of these are cash-related transactions that should have been disclosed. What becomes clear right away is non-disclosure.”

She added that if the sources of these funds cannot be properly explained, the committee has enough ground to consider the possibility of ill-gotten or unexplained wealth. Even if the defense argues that transaction volume does not directly equate to actual wealth, Luistro said the gap between declared assets and recorded activity remains difficult to ignore.

The panel also noted that multiple transactions presented earlier by former senator Antonio Trillanes IV were confirmed by the AMLC to match their own records—both in date and amount.

For Luistro, all these pieces—documents, audit findings, and financial records—are building toward one direction.

“The numbers are there. The records are there,” she said. “The question now is whether we move forward—and from how it looks, even the defense seems to expect that we will.”