The message that Judge Peinado launches
BarcelonaIt is difficult to talk about lawfare in the cases that harass the PSOE due to the multitude of evidence and proof that accumulate daily, but if there is one that could serve to illustrate a textbook case of lawfare it would be the one affecting the wife of the Spanish president, Begoña Gómez. Judge Juan Carlos Peinado has led a surreal investigation, guided by evident bad faith and hostility towards Pedro Sánchez and his circle. For this reason, everyone took for granted that last Monday, when Begoña Gómez was summoned for a hearing, the judge would proceed to inform her of her indictment and the opening of oral proceedings. Surprisingly, however, five days later, the judge has not yet communicated his decision, nor has he ruled on the popular prosecution's request to withdraw her passport preventively, which unjustifiably prolongs the procedure.
But furthermore, early this Friday morning, he announced that he was opening a separate proceeding on the case in an order so confusing that he later had to supplement it to clarify that Begoña Gómez remains on the sidelines and that only an award to businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés, which according to the European Public Prosecutor's Office could be fraudulent, will be investigated. In this way, Peinado ensures that he will keep one foot in the case even if he sends Gómez to trial.
We recall that this judge has had to be corrected on multiple occasions by higher courts, he appeared at Moncloa to take sworn testimony from Sánchez himself (an unprecedented episode in democracy) and even wrote that the couple's attitude was typical of an absolutist king hated by everyone like Ferdinand VII. Not even the UCO, the unit of the Civil Guard that has carried out controversial investigations such as that of Sánchez's brother (another case that smells of lawfare), has supported the main crime that initiated the investigation, which is influence peddling in the SEPI's bailout of Air Europa. The Public Prosecutor's Office, for example, is requesting acquittal.
It seems that Peinado's dream would be to imprison Sánchez himself, an idea that José María Aznar already hinted at in the opening of the PP congress a year ago. For the moment, however, he will have to settle for bringing his wife to a trial where she faces, pay attention, 24 years in prison. An ignominy.
Peinado follows the wake of other judges who have felt compelled to form a kind of "patriotic magistracy" like the late Juan Antonio Ramírez Sunyer, who initiated the Procés case and who, as the then president of the CGPJ and the Supreme Court, Carlos Lesmes, wrote, had "changed the course of Spain's history." Or Judge Joaquín Aguirre, whom we heard in some audios boasting that thanks to his investigation of the alleged Russian plot of the Procés, which came to nothing, he had "overturned the amnesty law." The message sent by these procedures full of arbitrariness, however, is very powerful: a warning to navigators so that everyone thinks twice before confronting certain powers of the State.
