Muscat’s Plan A: magisterial inquiry. His Plan B: ‘It was the Russians’

Joseph Muscat – I feel a little odd calling him the Prime Minister at this stage and given his weird behaviour that is oh-so-reminiscent of his former boss Alfred Sant – has spent the past month bullishly saying that the magisterial inquiry will vindicate him and that Simon Busuttil will have to resign.

The closer the election date drew, the more aggressive Muscat’s statements became about the magisterial inquiry. This in and of itself is completely abusive, because statements like those were designed to pile pressure on the magistrate to not only close the inquiry prematurely but to give Muscat the result he wants.

Last week, the ‘inquiry is closed’ statements reached a crescendo, with memes and stories circulating rapidly on Facebook saying that the inquiry report was about to be published and that ‘Joseph’ would emerge victorious while ‘Simon’ would have to resign. When some people sent them to me in a panic, I explained that this was a classic tactic used in all forms of warfare, designed to raise morale among the supporters of those who use it while sabotaging the fighting spirit of the enemy side. It was also intended to put intolerable pressure on the inquiring magistrate and should be classified as a form of unacceptable abuse.

Think rationally, I said: it is impossible to carry out an inquiry of this scale and nature – a money-laundering inquiry – in four weeks. So what we are looking at here is abusive behaviour by the Prime Minister and his supporters. There are people who have still to testify before the inquiring magistrate, documents that have still to be collected – so the rumours and Facebook posts coming out of the Labour Party are actual fake news.

Things became so bad in this regard that pro-government sources a few days ago took the extreme measure of feeding an entirely false story to Malta Today’s sister newspaper, Illum – which published it. The inquiry is closed, that newspaper’s editor claimed, but for some reason the report has not been sent to the Attorney-General. The result was that the inquiring magistrate summoned the editor to explain himself, and probably also to deliver an admonition. The editor, Albert Gauci Cunningham, certainly looked chastened when he emerged.

Now, faced with the fact that the inquiry will not be concluded before the general election, because it is a logistical and chronological impossibility and not because there is a plot against Joseph Muscat (who demanded the inquiry in the first place, and who should have foreseen this but in his panic did not), they have come up with an outrageous Plan B: the Russians did it.

It is a Russian plot to get rid of Joseph Muscat and elevate Simon Busuttil to power. Because it is the Nationalist Party, of course, which has been historically close to, and chummy with in the present, the Soviet Union and Russia. It is the Nationalist Party which is selling Maltese/EU passports to powerful Russians. And it is Simon Busuttil’s chief of staff (does he have one?) who deals constantly with Russians below the radar.

If the Maltese government is not the recipient of a formal complaint by the Russian government – delivered through diplomatic channels and known as a demarche – in the coming days, it would be only because of the nature of that relationship. And that makes Muscat’s tinfoil-hat theory all the more irresponsible.