A former Malacañang official, one who has since fallen out spectacularly with the President, has a curious request for Washington: help track down and arrest a fugitive congressman-turned-overseas escapee because that lawmaker is sitting on evidence that international war crimes investigators took bribes.

The backstory, for those just tuning in: the fugitive solon made headlines last year when he accused a team of foreign tribunal investigators of pocketing millions funneled through a sitting senator — money meant, he claimed, to grease the wheels of a probe into a former president’s deadly anti-narcotics campaign.

The ex-lawmaker said his own security detail, whom he nicknamed his “bagmen,” had hand-delivered the cash. The senator and the tribunal have both denied it, loudly.

Now the former Palace man is reviving the claim, dressing it up as a favor to Washington.

He argues that hauling the fugitive congressman in for questioning “would swiftly accomplish” what the US Secretary of State acting, he says, on orders from the top, has been trying to do: take apart the international tribunal “brick by brick.”

He quoted the secretary’s description of the tribunal’s leadership as “crazy and lunatic,” framing this as vindication of the former president’s own long-running broadsides against the court.

He wants an affidavit from a group of Marines, one that implicates both the tribunal and high government officials in the alleged payoff scheme, forwarded to the State Department as corroborating evidence. He named two specific investigators and a lead prosecutor as the alleged recipients of a nine-figure-peso bribe, allegedly channeled through an anarchist former senator when the team touched down in the Philippines in the closing weeks of 2023 to probe a drug war body count north of three thousand.

He added, for good measure, that the visiting investigators were billeted in upscale Makati hotels on the fugitive congressman’s dime, which were public funds.

He closed by echoing Washington’s broader skepticism of the tribunal’s authority — that it isn’t even clear who sits on the bench or wields the gavel there, and that any American facing charges ought to answer to a jury of his actual peers, not an international body Washington doesn’t recognize.