Israel Khan, SC, who is representing Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar in the e-mail probe, yesterday voiced his dissatisfaction with the police, accusing them of dragging their feet on the investigation. He said so at a news conference at his chambers, Abercromby Street, Port-of-Spain. He made the complaint on the basis of the police’s failure to respond to a June 10 letter he wrote to them, in which he said Persad-Bissessar was willing to co-operate fully with the investigators by providing access to her computer and other electronic devices. The one caveat in the letter was that the checks should be done in the presence of Persad-Bissessar’s attorneys and her IT expert. But Khan complained yesterday that although he had written to acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams on the matter since June 10, to date there had been no word from the police.
He added: “I don’t know why the police are dragging their feet on this. “Since June 10, the Prime Minister sent a signed statement to the investigators indicating she was willing to surrender all her equipment to be examined by (police) experts. “It has to be done in presence of her attorneys and our IT expert in order to protect the integrity of those instruments.” He said as a first priority, the police should have asked to have the Prime Minister’s computer and other electronic devices examined to determine whether the e-mails were false or not. Describing the matter as “only about politics,” Khan said if it was determined the e-mails were false there would be far-reaching consequences, including criminal charges. “If the e-mails are true, well then, arrest the Prime Minister and the attorney general,” Khan said.
He accused Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley of being irresponsible for “running his mouth in Parliament” before verifying the e-mails, noting the allegations were of a serious nature. “This is a very serious offence...to accuse a Prime Minister of conspiracy and to procure a judgeship just because you hungry after power. “You don’t destroy a country like that. All this is about politics and nothing more,” he said. Khan called yesterday’s press conference so that American IT specialist Jon Berryhill, whom he hired to help build his defence, could give his findings on the 31 e-mails. Berryhill, a computer forensic expert, told the media he could not definitively say whether the e-mails disclosed in Parliament by Rowley were true or false.
He concluded, however, that the e-mails which Rowley presented in the House should be seen as a document, since he believed they were put together and some of the e-mail addresses were clearly fake. He said he could not verify the authenticity of those e-mails which appeared to be genuine, since he wrote to Google around June 10, the same time he submitted the report to Khan, seeking clarification on the authenticity of the e-mail addresses but was unsuccessful in getting the information. He said he was told the company did not provide such information to private individuals and such a request ought to come through police or government officials. Berryhill said he received the e-mails, via a PDF-format document, which had been scanned from the original documents Rowley presented and sent to him by someone at the Prime Minister’s Office.
“I was e-mailed a single PDF, which was ten pages of scanned pages. When I enquired as to where this PDF came from, what I was told was someone in the Prime Minister’s Office took the pieces of paper that had been presented to them, scanned them into a PDF and sent them to me,” Berryhill said. He said because of the many anomalies and inconsistencies in the e-mails which he picked up during his six-hour analysis of the document, he concluded they should be described as “documents” as in his opinion they did not exist. He added: “As far as the body, I make no analysis of the content. There are some issues with formatting and layout of the body but in terms of what it said, I made no analysis of what it said. “They’re not e-mails. There’s nothing to check. Calling them e-mails is only from the standpoint of when you look at the piece of paper that looks like an e-mail, when in reality it is a document which is a cut-and-paste job and actually a rather bad cut-and-paste job.”
Asked whether he had made any attempt to verify the e-mails through IP addresses, Berryhill said he could not. “There are no IP addresses, so there are no IP addresses to be looked at,” he said. On whether it was possible to examine particular servers, computers or other electronic devices and determine the source of the e-mails, Berryhill said a particular e-mail from which the information was generated would not be found. He added: “To say if we can examine the servers on this machine or that machine or this computer or that computer, you’re not going to find it in e-mail. “If you look at the right computer you might find evidence of who created a document but in that sense it is just a document. Did they start with an e-mail to cut and paste? Yes, they probably did. “But it is so heavily edited at that point, where incorrect e-mail addresses have been put in, and dates have been changed, that there is nothing that is believable in any of it.” Berryhill, at the end of his investigation, presented a ten-page report to Khan which has been passed on the Prime Minister. He said the purpose of his report was to point out the significant problems in the document Rowley presented to the House. Saying he also welcomed another “reputable expert” examining the e-mails, Berryhill said he was confident the same conclusion would be arrived at.