COMMENT | Timing is everything. When Sheila Majid tweeted about the high cost of living, she was saying nothing new. Many people who moaned about rising prices before had largely been ignored.

But this time, all hell broke loose.

The day after her tweet, Rizal Mansor, the aide to the self-styled “First Lady of Malaysia” took aim at the singer, and others followed suit.

This Sheila onslaught is Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak's red herring.

First, the distraction. Criticising Sheila was to deflect the rakyat from the real story, which is the announcement by the US attorney-general Jeff Sessions the day before about 1MDB being kleptocracy at its the worst in history.

Second, when Najib paid homage to Donald Trump last September, he was probably hoping that buying Boeing jets and investing EPF money in the US would somehow influence the US president, or the Department of Justice (DOJ), to slow down the investigations into 1MDB. It failed.

Celebrities are very influential people and Sheila may have a powerful message for her fans, but Najib had a more immediate worry: the DOJ.

Najib relied on his foreign advisers, who probably thought that the Washington trip would increase his popularity at home. That too failed.

When the previous US attorney-general Loretta Lynch stepped down, Najib was probably hopeful, perhaps, unaware that the DOJ is largely independent from the office of the American president.

In Malaysia, the Prime Minister's Department (PMD) has its pudgy fingers in every pie - from religion to defending Sabah's eastern seaboard. The heads of the various departments under the PMD cannot belch without Najib knowing about it.

Najib's Washington trip backfired, as evidenced by Sessions' much-reported announcement about 1MDB being the worst kleptocracy, Najib has also failed to halt the DOJ investigation...