The National Court now agrees to investigate the Cospedal and Villarejo audios about Kitchen

BarcelonaPlot twist with a few days until the Kitchen trial ends. The National High Court judge Antonio Piña, who is investigating the case, has finally agreed to investigate the audio recordings of conversations between María Dolores de Cospedal and José Manuel Villarejo about the operation to try to steal information from Luis Bárcenas that could compromise the PP. The former general secretary of the PP, who was also Minister of Defense, had until now one of the big protected names of the case, but justice has finally decided to put a magnifying glass on it due to recordings that also implicate former president Mariano Rajoy.

According to an order, reported by various media outlets and accessed by ARA, Judge Piña has tasked the Internal Affairs Unit (UAI) of the National Police with investigating whether there are "indications of criminality" in the conversations between the former popular leader and the retired commissioner, most of which were published by RAC1. Thus, he also asks the radio station to provide the recordings to the court. All this, after the PSOE, which is acting as a popular prosecutor, once again demanded for the umpteenth time the indictment of Cospedal, who had already been investigated but that was exonerated in 2021 by the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón.

What do the audios of the meetings between Cospedal and Villarejo reveal, however? Beyond pointing out that the popular leader was aware of the plot, one of the audios that caused the most controversy is the one that directly implicates Rajoy in the operation paid for with reserved funds against the former treasurer of the PP. It is about "

a conversation from September 2014: "I know that before they had found in him, and more or less they had cleaned him, everything he had", Cospedal says at one point, supposedly referring to Bárcenas. And she adds: "The president told me, nobody else told me". At another point, she explains that "Rajoy has allowed the other [referring to Bárcenas, who was then in preventive detention] to maintain communication channels". "Just in case", she argues.

The judge now asks the Spanish police to prepare a report based on these conversations and also on those that have been revealed between Villarejo and Ignacio López del Hierro, Cospedal's ex-husband, who allegedly participated in recruiting Bárcenas' driver as a confidential informant – a key piece of the plot – and who also ended up being exempted from the case. The magistrate also requests that e-mail communications and bank transfers be investigated. "Request the UAI to identify if, among the material seized from Mr. Villarejo, conversations are identified with content that could provide indications of criminality sustained by him with Mrs. Cospedal or Mr. López, e-mails or bank transfers," it states.

The PSOE, immersed in a spiral of alleged corruption cases that are hounding the party, has quickly capitalized on this symbolic victory in the courts against the PP. Socialist sources have described the Kitchen case as the "biggest institutional scandal of our democracy," have once again called for Cospedal's indictment, and have urged to "go all the way and clear up all responsibilities," even those of Rajoy if necessary. "Each new judicial step brings the investigation closer to the core of those who led the Popular Party," the same sources affirm, while the party's organization secretary, Rebeca Torró, has directly appealed to Alberto Núñez Feijóo: "He cannot continue hiding while lecturing the rest," she wrote on X.

In the Kitchen trial, which is nearing its final stage, the Prosecutor's Office has requested fifteen years in prison for the former Minister of the Interior of the PP, Jorge Fernández Díaz, whom they consider directly participated in the "criminal parapolice operation" to "boycott" the judicial investigation of the Gürtel case and snatch "compromising" documentation from Bárcenas.