Alberto González Amador’s request to a judge of the Supreme Court for the telephone companies to preserve the communications of four journalists from elDiario.es, in the event of their possible intervention, represents the latest episode of accusations and threats that the environment of the Madrid president began to speak since the publication of the exclusive about her partner’s tax fraud.
elDiario.es had just published its second information about Alberto González Amador when the deputy director Esther Palomera, who did not sign the news, began to receive insults and threats on her phone from Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff. “We are going to crush you,” Rodríguez warned on the night of March 12 in those messages for which no one in either the regional government or the PP has apologized.
This Monday, December 23, the letter from Alberto González Amador’s lawyer was published in which he asks Judge Ángel Hurtado that a specialized unit of the Civil Guard address the telephone companies so that they extend their obligation to save call data. , messages and locations of six informants, four of them from this newspaper, beyond the twelve months required by Law. The lawyer publishes in his writing the telephone numbers of the six journalists.
Nine months earlier, on the night of March 12, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez wrote to the elDiario.es journalist: “We are going to crush you. You’re going to have to close. Fuck you. Idiots.” Esther Palomera asked if it was “a threat.” “It’s an announcement,” replied the Madrid president’s chief of staff.
These messages coincided with the publication of the second elDiario.es exclusive about González Amador. The businessman had obtained two million euros as a commission agent in a mask purchase and sale operation in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Then he wanted to hide the large profit from the Treasury with a scheme of false invoices.
Just a week later the threat materialized in the form of a hoax. On March 19, Rodríguez himself spread false information among the media and some of them rushed to spread it without contrasting anything with this medium or its journalists. “Hooded eldiario employees tried to access the president’s house. This intimidation has never been seen in democracy,” said the message that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez disseminated among the media. For the alleged harassment at the president’s home, her entourage also blamed two journalists from El País, of whom she released photographs and identities.
In later moments, Rodríguez gave different forms to his hoax. He even said that it had been two journalists from elDiario.es who had tried to raid the house and that they had posed as “heating technicians” to access the building. The hood, he specified the day after the first falsehood, was that of the coat worn by the alleged assailants.
Ayuso’s entourage also tried to use routine police action to criminalize the informant’s work. When the journalist was doing his work in the vicinity of the home – whose address this media has never provided – national police officers who provide escort and counter-surveillance services for the president approached the journalist, identified him and let him continue doing his job.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior denied that the police had caught the journalist doing anything irregular or illegal and spoke of a routine identification. “It was a situation of absolute normality, [el periodista] “He was doing his job,” said that spokesperson after consulting the police report.
Two days after Rodríguez spread the hoax about the assault on the president’s house, Alberto González Amador filed a complaint against the chief prosecutor of Madrid and the Economic Crimes prosecutor who is investigating him. He accused them of a crime of revealing secrets in relation to a press release issued by the Prosecutor’s Office to deny another hoax spread by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, this time consisting of ensuring that it had been the Public Ministry who had offered a pact that would avoid prison. to González Amador when it had been just the opposite.
Gabriel Rodríguez Ramos, González Amador’s lawyer, alluded on several occasions to the work of elDiario.es journalists to build his accusation. The lawyer used the routine identification of the journalist and said that the national police had been forced to practice the same “given the attitude” of the informant, an expression he reiterates in the brief presented this Monday in the Supreme Court.
To refer to the call that this medium made to the businessman before publishing, in which González Amador was offered to include his version, the lawyer falsely said that the journalist offered his client “details” of the complaint and that he “commanded” him to make statements. In reality, the journalist only conveyed to González Amador the crimes that the Prosecutor’s Office attributed to him and tried to obtain his version to include it in the text that was going to be published.
Communications Intervention
In the document presented this Monday by the same lawyer, representing González Amador, he requests that the telephone companies be obliged to save the data of the telephone numbers to which the journalists have called in almost ten months, and of those they received calls. Also when they occurred and how long the communications lasted.
González Amador’s request also affects the messages they wrote or who they received them from and at what time. The journalists’ interlocutors are identified in the data that the businessman wants the companies to keep beyond the legal obligation of twelve months. In the event that Judge Hurtado agrees to the businessman’s request, in addition to the data on calls and messages, the telephone companies should also retain all the digital connections of the journalists and all their locations during the last ten months. The Constitution protects the professional secrecy of journalists and their right not to reveal sources. The Federation of Press Associations (FAPE) has issued a statement in which it opposes the Ayuso couple’s claim to access communications from journalists in the exercise of their professional activity.
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