COMMENT | Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s constant harping on Tommy Thomas and his supposed misdeeds while he was attorney-general under the Pakatan Harapan administration from 2018 to 2020 shows the bankruptcy of real ideas to lift the country up.

In his latest salvo of loud blanks without any bullets or substance, he said that Pakatan Harapan’s muted response to the result of a probe on Thomas’ book implied that the coalition was guilty.

“I do not know why they have been keeping quiet (in Thomas’ case). Usually, if people are guilty, they would be quiet. But that would be in the usual cases, I do not know if that is the case here,” he said two days ago.

That’s an unusual comment for him to make, especially since he does not specify what Harapan was guilty of. Thomas was appointed as AG by the PM at the time Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

That appointment meant that following upon investigations the AG was free, under the Constitution, to ask for more investigations and, if there was enough evidence, to charge anyone for offences committed if he felt that they could be held up in court. And he had sole prerogative over that.

There have been successful high-profile prosecutions and one of the most prominent was for offences involving RM42 million against former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak, who now languishes in jail as a result of successful prosecution.

Najib’s conviction was upheld by the High Court judge, unanimously by the Court of Appeal hearing involving three judges and unanimously by a five-judge bench at the Federal Court level. That means nine judges in all have found him guilty, not even one dissenting judge. What are the chances that all nine of them would be wrong?

In December, Ismail Sabri, obviously falling to pressure from the court cluster within Umno Baru, set up a cabinet task force to investigate Thomas. This was after...