REVEALED: Presidential Tribunal’s Judgment Not Drafted by Tinubu Lawyers – PRNigeria Fact Check
The judgement of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT, over the outcome of the 2023 presidential election, delivered last Wednesday, was never drafted by the legal team of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a fact check by PRNigeria has just revealed.
A screenshot of the Presidential Election Tribunal’s Judgement bearing the Watermark of Tinubu’s Presidential Legal Team recently circulated online, claiming that the judgment was crafted by Tinubu’s lawyers. https://prnigeria.com/2023/09/10/fact-check-presidential-judgement/
But PRNigeria fact checkers concluded that the claim was misleading after carrying out a thorough verification.
The screenshot was accompanied by the following text, “????????The brilliant judgement was crafted for them. Copy and past they forgot to clean out the document title, just as they omitted 25% of Abuja ????????”
But an online search led PRNigeria fact checkers to a denial issued by Tinubu’s Presidential Legal Team (TPLT).
The TPLT coordinator, Babatunde Ogala, in a statement explained that they watermarked their copy of the judgment after collection from the Court of Appeal before circulating the scanned copies to members of their team.
“After the delivery of judgment in the 3 (Three) election petitions by the Court of Appeal on September 6, 2023, the Court directed its registry to make physical copies of same available on September 7, 2023.
“Accordingly, the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team applied for a Certified True Copy of the said judgment and paid the prescribed fee. Lawyers for PDP were present at the registry at the same time to collect the same judgment.
“In fact, the representative of the PDP collected the first copy that was made available by the registry.” The statement read in part.
With the observation that a certified through copy of the judgment without the watermarks was displayed on Arise TV Prime Time news by a TPLT Lawyer, PRNigeria fact checkers visited the official website of the Appeal Court to access an e-copy of the judgment.
An assessment of the consolidated copy of the judgment obtained on the official website of the court has no watermarks of any party on either the header or footer contrary to the copy circulating online with the TPLT watermark.
PRNigeria further used detection tools for detecting deleted items on the court’s website to ascertain if there was any previously deleted copy prior to the copy of the judgment that is now accessible on the Court’s official website.
Using Wayback Machine, a platform that captures and saves snapshots of thousands of websites regularly, currently, hosting a mind-boggling 818 billion web pages, making us believe that nothing gets deleted from the internet, PRNigeria fact checkers entered the URL of the Court but there was no old version of snapshot that suggestion anything was deleted on the page recently.
PRNigeria then cross referenced same URL with Archive Today, another website that displays all the snapshots of that website in reverse chronological order, and the results returned the same.
PRNigeria therefore concludes that the claim that the Judgment of the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal was drafted for it by Tinubu’s Lawyers because it had the TPLT watermark on it is MISLEADING.
