Acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams yesterday made it clear he will be “deliberately avoiding” any reporter who falsifies information or misrepresents what he says. Williams was speaking at a press conference at the Police Administration Building, Port-of-Spain, where he denied an Express newspaper report which on July 7 quoted him as saying the 31 e-mails read by Opposition Leader Dr Keith Rowley into the Hansard in Parliament on May 20 were fake.
“Those documents are purporting to be e-mails but they are not. They are fake,” the report had quoted Williams as saying. The e-mails were alleged to have come from addresses belonging to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, Local Government and Works and Infrastructure Minister Surujrattan Rambachan and security adviser to the prime minister Gary Griffith, and purportedly discussed plans to silence a reporter and bug the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
Persad-Bissessar and her colleagues have denied any knowledge of the e-mails and claimed they were fabricated. But the PM ordered Williams to probe the matter, and he in turn appointed DCP Mervyn Richardson to head a six-man investigating team. Yesterday, Williams said at no time during the interview with the Express did he say the e-mails were fake. “I never said the e-mails were fake,” he said.
“Seeing this headline, this was very shocking, because I would have to be someone going out of my head, insane, to tell a reporter that the e-mails are fake. “It is a deliberate misrepresentation of what I shared in an interview. There was no way in the discussion I would have made any reference to false e-mails.” He said what he did say was “these were not e-mails” but documents which are being investigated to make a determination on whether the contents were consistent with e-mails.
“Now tell me, how somebody could jump from that to say e-mails are fake?” Williams questioned. Saying reporters did not have to grab headlines by creating falsities, Williams said he had always made himself available to speak to the media. He said: “I have tried to be as accommodating as possible to all media houses. But I will deliberately avoid any reporter who falsifies stories or deliberately misrepresents anything I say, because I would not be in a position to effectively trust those reporters.”
He said he had no issues with the electronic media but faced challenges with the print media. Williams also chastised Deputy Director of Public Prosecution Joan Honore-Paul, who last week criticised his reported comments. He said she could easily have contacted him by phone to clear up the matter rather than issue a media release. “It is rather unfortunate that the deputy DPP acted on a publication in the newspaper, acting on the assumption it is correct,” he said.
“I say unfortunate because the deputy DPP could have simply contacted me by telephone and verified whether I made the utterance or not before she made a release.” Honore-Paul had described Williams’ reported comments as “shocking, irresponsible and grossly reckless.” Asked why he did not clear up the issue immediately after its publication, Williams said he left the country for two weeks, returned to work on Monday and wanted to address it in person rather than reply through a release.