The Supreme Court has launched the investigation against the State Attorney General under summary secrecy. Judge Ángel Hurtado’s first move has been to send the Civil Guard to the Prosecutor’s Office to search Álvaro García Ortiz’s office to seize any electronic or paper device that may be related to the accusation of revealing secrets of Isabel’s partner. Diaz Ayuso. Mobile phones, computers, tablets, notebooks as well as email addresses or WhatsApp messages. Several of these proceedings had been requested by the representation of Alberto González Amador.
As El Mundo has reported and elDiario.es has confirmed, the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard appeared this Wednesday at the headquarters of the Public Ministry on Fortuny Street to proceed with the search. Shortly before, Judge Hurtado decreed summary secrecy and asked the attorney general to appoint a lawyer to defend himself in the investigation in this case in which the leak of data on the contacts that Alberto González Amador’s lawyer and the Prosecutor’s Office maintained to seek a conformity agreement in his confessed double tax fraud of 350,000 euros.
Judge Hurtado, according to the order examined by elDiario.es, has ordered the intervention “of all computer devices, objects and documents” related to the case. Among them, the attorney general’s mobile phone, authorizing the Judicial Police to carry out a technical analysis on the fly if necessary. The proceedings also include the dumping of the State Attorney General’s email as well as the dumping of his WhatsApp conversations. Not only his professional email, but “all the email accounts used” by Álvaro García Ortiz. Everything has been carried out under summary secrecy after Judge Hurtado has decreed the measure “as long as all the documentary information has not been collected” for at least a month.
The Supreme Court took up the case against the attorney general after the Madrid Superior Court referred the proceedings. Procedures that, originally, began to analyze whether a statement from the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office on the case of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner had revealed secret data. The Supreme Court concluded that this statement was not criminal because several media outlets had already published that data, but decided that it should investigate whether the attorney general himself was behind that original leak.
The emails and the pact
As elDiario.es has explained, the first media outlet that published textual information about the conversations between Alberto González’s lawyer and prosecutor Julián Salto was the newspaper El Mundo, which published a screenshot of an email and made reference to the first conversations between both parties. It was later when the Prosecutor’s Office decided to issue a statement in this regard because various media were spreading false information and implying that it had been the Public Ministry that had offered the agreement when it was the other way around.
That same night, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s right-hand man in the Community of Madrid, sent the content of one of these emails to various media outlets with a lie: that the pact had been stopped by the highest levels of the Prosecutor’s Office. Several media also published this version, which led to the statement from the Public Ministry.
The Superior Court of Madrid opened an investigation after complaints from Alberto González Amador and the Madrid Bar Association. Investigations that revealed that both the attorney general and the provincial prosecutor of Madrid contacted prosecutor Julián Salto that night to ask him for the email list that he had exchanged with Alberto González’s lawyer. The subsequent statement from the Prosecutor’s Office that Álvaro García Ortiz ordered to make, the Supreme Court concluded, did not reveal secrets because several media outlets had already published its content, but they left it in the hands of Judge Hurtado to find out if it was the attorney general who leaked it to said media.
This Wednesday Judge Hurtado made two movements: one public and one secret. On the one hand, he has asked the attorney general to appoint the lawyer who will defend him in these proceedings. On the other hand, and without making this second decision public, he has placed the case under summary secrecy and has ordered the search of his office. All within the framework of the first criminal investigation directed against a practicing State Attorney General.
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