Juan Lobato’s testimony in the Supreme Court regarding the leak of emails from Alberto González Amador’s lawyer has managed to clear up several unknowns about how those emails came into his hands. Also about whether, by the time he presented them to Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Madrid Assembly, they had already been published by various media outlets. But they do not fill in one of the big gaps in the story: how they came into the hands of their interlocutor, then an advisor in Moncloa, before they were made public in several digital newspapers.
The former general secretary of the Madrid socialists arrived this Friday at the Supreme Court alone, without making statements and with a white folder in which he brought the messages and documents that he recorded before a notary a few weeks ago. A folder with the PSOE logo in red. An hour and a half later he left the court and, after Judge Ángel Hurtado warned the parties against giving information about the case outside those four walls, he limited himself to confirming that he had handed over his cell phone so that his messages could be compared. “The socialists, the truth and the law ahead,” he stated to the microphones.
His witness statement – without a lawyer and forced to tell the truth – came with several unknowns about this new derivative of the case of the emails of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner. Until now, the Supreme Court had focused on knowing whether the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, had played any role in the publication of Alberto González’s confession in the media. Now it also analyzes whether in those days of March the emails not only circulated in the newsrooms but also on the mobile phones of people linked to the PSOE and Moncloa.
Lobato has declared before the judge, as he had already done publicly, that he went to the notary to record those messages a few weeks ago to demonstrate that at no time did he disseminate anything that had not already been published by the media. Ultimately, avoid the criminal case for the leak in which the attorney general is accused. The messages provided support his version in essence and refute some aspects affirmed until now. For example, in his conversation with Pilar Sánchez Acera it was mentioned that they themselves were going to leak the document to El Plural.
The Supreme Court is investigating whether between the night of March 13 and the morning of the next day the Prosecutor’s Office leaked those emails. The messages that Lobato has provided to Judge Hurtado, which elDiario.es has been able to examine, start one minute before half past eight in the morning of the 14th of that month. That day Isabel Díaz Ayuso appeared for the first time before the plenary session of the Madrid Assembly after elDiario.es revealed her partner’s double tax fraud. After a turbulent night in which, after some false information, it had emerged that Alberto González Amador not only did not consider himself a victim of a “hunt” by the Treasury, but that he had acknowledged his crimes to avoid prison.
At that time, Pilar Sánchez Acera – then Óscar López’s chief of staff in Moncloa and today his advisor as minister – sent him the email and urged him to take it out in her speech in the Assembly a couple of hours later, asking for “care” with the personal data that appeared in the document. Lobato asked to know where the documentation came from to prevent it from appearing “that the Prosecutor’s Office gave it to me” and her interlocutor replied: “Because it arrives, the media has it.”
After that conversation, one minute before half past nine in the morning, Sánchez Acera sent him a link where the digital The Plural I had published the email a while ago, at nine hours and six minutes in the morning. “That’s it,” said the then advisor in Moncloa. An hour later, Juan Lobato received applause from the opposition when he stood up, showed the email with Alberto González Amador’s confession and accused Ayuso of lying. Eight months later he entered through the door of a notary in Madrid to record those messages.
The origin of the emails
Lobato’s appearance clears up some unknowns and endorses, in general terms, what he has defended in public for days: his interlocutor from Moncloa told him that this document was in the media and he did not take out the printed email in the Assembly until quite after its publication. It also denies, at least based on those emails, that the messages demonstrate that Moncloa or the PSOE are behind the leak, also taking into account that the previous night several media outlets collected their content even though they did not broadcast the document.
What it does not clarify is an aspect that can only be explained by Pilar Sánchez Acera herself if she is called to testify by Judge Hurtado, in case the instructor understands that it is necessary to investigate further into this branch of the case. The first media outlet to publish the document, a few minutes after nine in the morning, was El Plural, half an hour after Sánchez Acera bounced the emails from Ayuso’s partner via WhatsApp to Juan Lobato.
The investigation into this leak is at a key moment. After the elite unit of the Civil Guard has analyzed the emails seized from the provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, the judge waits for the agents to send their report on the emails and messages seized on the prosecutor’s phone and computer. General, Álvaro García Ortiz. This first report, in addition to recording the internal tension of the Prosecutor’s Office on the night of March 13, demonstrates what the attorney general has already acknowledged in public: that they collected those emails between Alberto González’s lawyer and the prosecutor in the case to deny several false information published in those hours.
The Central Operational Unit deduces that it is most likely that the leak, both that of the initial complaint revealed by elDiario.es and that of the email, came from the Prosecutor’s Office. It does so without any message or email containing anything about it and omitting two key pieces of information: that the complaint had been placed in the hands of the court a week before the first information about the case was received and that on the night of March 13, the first to submit textual excerpts from Alberto González’s emails in circulation were not any means of communication. It was Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s right-hand man in the Community of Madrid, who sent it to several journalists.
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