The Supreme Court judge calls Miguel Ángel Rodríguez as a witness in the case against the attorney general

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez will declare in the Supreme Court that he is obliged to tell the truth. Judge Ángel Hurtado has decided to call Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff to testify as a witness on January 8, in addition to eight journalists who reported on her partner’s tax fraud case. Rodríguez was the first to leak fragments of the emails to various media outlets in which Alberto González Amador, the regional president’s partner, negotiated an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, although he conveyed false information about how the events were developing, causing the denial. of the Public Ministry.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff will appear in court for the first time since the proceedings began regarding the revelation of secrets regarding the emails in which Alberto González Amador’s lawyer offered an agreement to the Prosecutor’s Office to recognize his double tax fraud of 350,000 euros but avoid jail. It was Miguel Ángel Rodríguez who, on the night of March 13, spread a message to several journalists with verbatim extracts from one of those emails but including a hoax: implying that the pact offer had come from the Prosecutor’s Office – it had happened to the setback – and that that offer had been withdrawn by “orders from above” to harm González Amador and subject him to a longer judicial process.

Several media outlets published this false information about the events. Shortly before these publications, the newspaper El Mundo had stated that the offer had come from the Prosecutor’s Office, although omitting that the pact had been frustrated by “orders from above.” This information was what caused the Public Ministry to collect those emails and issue a statement denying the falsehoods, which after a complaint from González Amador led to the opening of proceedings that, months later, keep the attorney general charged.

Among other measures, the judge has asked the newspaper El Mundo to send “a copy of the news originally published at 9:29 p.m.” that night, which gave rise to the Prosecutor’s Office’s movements. Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, stated this Tuesday that “of course” he will go to testify at the Supreme Court. “I can’t tell you much more,” Rodríguez said, alleging that he has not yet received the summons.

Far from the usual tone of his messages about the judicial progress of this case, where he has gone so far as to announce in advance the indictment of the attorney general with the expression “it’s going ahead”, Rodríguez has refused to explain if it was he who first leaked it to the media details of the emails that the Ayuso couple’s lawyer exchanged with the Prosecutor’s Office to seek an agreement. “When I know what they are going to ask me, I will be able to answer, but now everything seems rushed to me. I will answer whatever the judge asks me,” he said to questions from the media.

The Prosecutor’s Office and García Ortiz himself have already alleged on several occasions that the first to disseminate information from those emails was Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself, right-hand man of the president of the Community of Madrid. Now the Supreme Court judge, Ángel Hurtado, has accepted that he come to testify as a witness, therefore obliged to tell the truth. He also launches another procedure that the attorney general considers key to defending that he did not leak those emails that night of March 13: calling to testify, also as witnesses, eight journalists from different media who published the emails or made reference to his content.

This interrogation by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez will serve, therefore, to clarify whether a part of Alberto González Amador’s emails were already circulating among the media before the attorney general obtained them when he requested them to deny the false information that was being published. .

Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff, with a long career in political communication since his services to José María Aznar in the 1990s, personally took on the defense of Alberto González Amador after elDiario.es revealed that he had been reported by the Prosecutor’s Office for defrauding more than 350,000 euros using a network of false invoices. Among other things, Rodríguez threatened a journalist from elDiario.es with the closure of the newspaper and falsely reported that two editors from this medium had gone, hooded and disguised, to Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s house to try to sneak in.

The investigation into the attorney general

The case opened in the Supreme Court tries to find out if Álvaro García Ortiz, attorney general of the State, ordered the leaking or personally leaked the emails of Alberto González Amador on the night of March 13, after requesting them from the prosecutor in the case to deny the falsehoods that They were published about the agreement that the businessman had offered to the Public Ministry. He is accused of revealing secrets along with Pilar Rodríguez, provincial prosecutor of Madrid.

For the moment, the only diligence that the instructor has launched has been to seize the cell phones and computers of the two defendants to analyze seven months of messages and emails looking for evidence of the alleged leak. A first report from the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard on the material seized from Pilar Rodríguez has helped the agents to conclude that the leak came from the Prosecutor’s Office although the emails analyzed say nothing about it.

The judge also echoes this Tuesday a series of requests from the popular prosecution exercised by the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF), which among other things asked to investigate whether on October 30, during the searches, the attorney general He manipulated a mobile phone with the lieutenant prosecutor in the central patio of the building.

After asking the Prosecutor’s Office to preserve the images from non-existent security cameras and ignoring the minutes that reflect that, by that time, the UCO had already finished analyzing the terminal and had returned its phone to the attorney general, Judge Hurtado confirms “the unfeasibility of the procedure for viewing the recorded images concerned” and calls Salvador Viada, president of the association and who supposedly witnessed the scene, to testify next week as a witness. It also requests, at the request of this accusation, that the Prosecutor’s Office report on whether it has opened any type of internal investigation into the leak.

In parallel, the judge has opened a new avenue of investigation into Juan Lobato, former general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid, after he went to a notary office at the beginning of November to record messages from last March 14 in which Pilar Sánchez Acera, Then she advised in Moncloa and today working with Minister Óscar López, she sent him those same emails before they were published by the media.