The State Attorney General has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court in which he questions the search of more than ten hours carried out by the Civil Guard in his office. A writing, advanced this Thursday by The Countryin which the State Attorney representing Álvaro García Ortiz denounces that the case against him suffers from a “total decontextualization” and that the massive seizure of emails and messages from his electronic devices has included “information that could compromise the security of the State”.
Magistrate Ángel Hurtado took charge of the proceedings against the attorney general, originating from a complaint by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner for the leak of information about the agreement that her lawyer was seeking to avoid jail in exchange for recognizing her tax fraud. and his first move was to place the case under summary secrecy. He then sent the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to the Attorney General’s Office to seize the emails, messages and any type of communication from Álvaro García Ortiz’s cell phones, computers and tablets. He then backed off and temporarily limited the search to several days in March of this year, although with the material already seized and in the hands of investigators.
The attorney general, through the State Attorney’s Office, has appealed the order that allowed the search. An appeal that questions the proportionality of the measure compared to other less invasive possibilities, which denounces that media such as El Mundo had already published the content of Alberto González’s emails before the prosecutor received them in his email, and finally that the cloned Indiscriminate use of his devices has taken information from his phone and email “that may compromise the security of the State.”
It is one of the complaints that sources from the Prosecutor’s Office have been denouncing in recent weeks. The information seized by the Civil Guard may compromise, alleges the attorney general, “the activity of other institutions, national interests, commitments with third parties and, ultimately, the structure of the Prosecutor’s Office as a whole.” That public interest, he denounces, has not been taken into account by Judge Hurtado. There is, according to the attorney general, neither an “exceptionality” nor a “necessity” that would require such an invasive procedure to be launched, and the journalists who had access to that information could be called to testify, he alleges.
García Ortiz also reproaches Judge Hurtado in his appeal for the fact that the record of his office was also leaked to public opinion and, however, he did not open any investigation in this regard. It was published “prior to or simultaneously with the beginning of the registry” without stating, according to the complaint, “the adoption of any measure in order to investigate said leak.”
The “decontextualization” of the case
Hurtado’s entry and search order, he adds, suffers from a “total decontextualization” by omitting, he explains, that before he obtained those emails from the prosecutor Julián Salto, a media outlet had already disseminated their content verbatim: the newspaper The World. “Many other people,” he adds, had had access to them by then, including “people around” Alberto González Amador. All these possibilities, he explains, make the intervention of his telephone, his computer and all his messages from the last half year a disproportionate measure.
Initially, the criminal investigation revolved around the statement that the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office issued on March 14 to deny false or biased information about the conversations that the lawyer of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner had with the Public Ministry. But once the filter of the Supreme Court had passed, the object changed and focused not on the statement, which is not considered criminal, but on the possible prior leak of those emails to the press.
By the time the attorney general had access to them, he alleges, the matter “had already reached the media” and the dissemination of misinformation about the judicial process against Alberto González Amador put the actions of the Prosecutor’s Office at “serious risk.” There was, he concludes, a “full justification” for the “institutional reaction” of collecting the information and issuing the statement.
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