A judge of the Supreme Court has justified the seizure of the mobile phone and email of the State Attorney General in the need to clarify who made a leak to a media outlet, a publication that served to demonstrate the nature of a hoax that had previously been spread by the Government of the Community of Madrid. This lie from the Madrid president’s chief of staff tried to confuse the crimes formally assumed by businessman Alberto González Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The decision of Judge Ángel Hurtado is unprecedented. His order to the Civil Guard occurs in the context of an investigation of the attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, in his capacity as a registered attorney, a figure reserved in democracy for representatives of the State institutions to protect them from the spurious spirit of the complaints that are presented. against them in the ordinary courts.
This Wednesday, the judge of the Supreme Court ordered the Civil Guard to enter the office of the attorney general following complaints from the confessed criminal Alberto González Amador, from several far-right associations and from the Madrid Bar Association, whose board of directors is the result of the triumph of one of the conservative candidates in the last elections.
On Wednesday, agents from the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard occupied the office of the attorney general – also that of the chief prosecutor of Madrid – cloning email accounts, tablets and mobile phones. “The telephone or mobile phone of the interested party will be seized,” the judge wrote in writing. Not even González Amador’s defense aspired to that much.
In a document presented before the Superior Court of Justice in July, González Amador’s lawyer limited the diligence to requesting from Google the emails from García Ortiz’s personal account that contained the text of his client’s confession, as well as the emails exchanged. from his account with prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez between March 5 and 18.
In addition, the defense asked the technology company for verification of possible emails deleted between those dates. For Judge Hurtado, this delimitation in such an invasive measure has not been necessary: the Civil Guard had to seize the telephone of the State Attorney General.
The result of this intervention in García Ortiz’s communications will be freely accessible to the parties in person when the judge lifts the secrecy of the summary. Far-right associations such as Clean Hands will enjoy the content of the attorney general’s phone with the restrictions set by the judge, if he imposes them.
In Judge Hurtado’s decision, it has not been weighed that the email that was the subject of the investigation was not even the first to make it to the media that make up the list of messages exchanged between González Amador’s defense and the Prosecutor’s Office.
On the night of March 13, the Ser network published an email that showed that Alberto González Amador had offered an agreement to the Prosecutor’s Office to recognize his crimes and avoid a sentence that would involve going to prison. El Mundo and other media had spread a hoax consisting of publishing another email, decontextualized, making it believe that the pact initiative came from the Public Ministry, when it was the other way around.
Hours before Cadena Ser broadcast the email that showed that the conformity agreement had come from the defense of González Amador, the chief of staff of the regional president, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, had dedicated himself to sending messages from his personal phone to different media with another of the emails exchanged by the prosecutor in the case, Julián Salto, and the commission agent’s defense.
Rodríguez first sent the message to a journalist El Mundo and then forwarded it via WhatsApp to other media outlets such as Libertad Digital, El Debate and Vozpópuli, as revealed by elDiario.es. This leak is not being investigated and the proven fact that it occurred has not influenced Judge Hurtado’s decision to seize the mobile phone of the representative of one of the most relevant institutions in the State.
Key decisions in favor of the PP
Ángel Hurtado is a conservative judge who came to the Supreme Court by election of the General Council of the Judiciary who was already serving two years of expired mandate. Due to the Popular Party’s refusal to agree to the renewal, that Council, with an overwhelming conservative majority, continued to make appointments, some as important as the one now revealed with Hurtado.
Judge Hurtado was at the center of one of the most significant judicial episodes in the end for Spanish politics. It was his turn to preside over the court and write the sentence for the first major trial of the Gürtel case. Another conservative magistrate, Julio de Diego, and the progressive José Ricardo de Prada completed the court. During the trial, he opposed calling the then President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, to testify as a witness.
Hurtado tried to ensure that the sentence did not refer to the irregular financing system that existed in the PP for at least two decades, but the opposition of the other conservative magistrate and the progressive one meant that he was in the minority and had to give way to the wording of the sentence. That ruling, and his allusions to cheating for more than twenty years in the financing of the party in Government, motivated a motion of censure that made Pedro Sánchez president of the Government.
Subsequently, Ángel Hurtado faced the majority of his colleagues from the Criminal Chamber of the National Court to defend in a dissenting opinion that neither Enrique López nor Concepción Espejel were contaminated and that they could judge the PP in another Gürtel trial. the one who fully entered box B of the game. Espejel and López were removed from the court for having the necessary appearance of impartiality with respect to the PP.
Against the progressive prosecutor
The registration in the attorney general’s office is the culmination, until now, of the hostility with which the conservative leadership of the fiscal career and the judiciary received Álvaro García Ortiz as attorney general of the State from the first moment. And not only because he was appointed by a left-wing government. Former president of the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF), García Ortiz had reached the highest category of the prosecutor’s career when he was appointed by his predecessor, Dolores Delgado, head of its Technical Secretariat. Hardened in Galicia, García Ortiz was a stranger on the carpets of Madrid’s fiscal and judicial elite.
The association to which he belonged before becoming attorney general released a statement on Wednesday afternoon in which it expressed its “deep concern about the highly harmful consequences” that it may have for the institution of the Prosecutor’s Office and “justice as a whole.” the decision to ”not file the case outright” against the attorney general and the prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez. The UPF insists that “all the actions” carried out by both “were carried out under legal and statutory protection, were legitimate and, furthermore, necessary.”
The State Attorney General is currently the subject of a judicial investigation for a revelation of secrets supposedly committed in the framework of a case against businessman Alberto González Amador, accused of defrauding the public treasury of more than 350,000 euros and falsifying documents. González Amador, accused for more than seven months, has not even testified in court yet.
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