The Supreme Court proposes to try the Attorney General for revealing secrets

MadridJudicial and political earthquake in the State: the Supreme Court proposes to try the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, for alleged disclosure of secrets. The investigating judge, Ángel Hurtado, sees evidence that either he or the chief provincial prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez, leaked to the media a "confidential" email from Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner, Alberto González Amador, in which he proposed to the Public Prosecutor's Office that he acknowledge the crimes of tax fraud and reach an agreement. The order, which gives the parties ten days to take a position on whether it is necessary to open a trial or close the case, can be appealed. García Ortiz rules out resignation and maintains his innocence.

The Spanish government also closes ranks with the Attorney General of the State and maintains its "full confidence," in the words of the Minister of Justice, Félix Bolaños. "Between the prosecutors and the confessed criminals, we stand with the prosecutors who pursue crimes. He is an exemplary public servant," he stated. The minister has insisted that, even if the indictment is ultimately final, he will not be forced to back down. Sources from the Public Prosecutor's Office emphasize that the statute of the Public Prosecutor's Office establishes that work must be suspended and that you are a prosecutor when an oral trial is opened, but this is not the case with García Ortiz because he is under special services status. However, it would affect the also-defendant Pilar Rodríguez.

Bolaños and García Ortiz met at the awards ceremony of the Observatory against Domestic and Gender Violence of the General Council of the Judiciary. Hurtado's ruling was made public just as they were entering. Once it was over, they approached each other to exchange views: the Minister of Justice addressed the media, but the Attorney General left without making any statements. The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, wished to make his point, going further and implicitly accusing the judiciary of being "the real opposition" to the Spanish government.

Instructions from the Spanish government?

The PP was quick to demand García Ortiz's immediate resignation. "It's time for the Attorney General of the State and the person who gave him the instructions to leave," tweeted PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo. Who gave him the instructions? The conservative president refers to a section of Hurtado's ruling in which he claims that the Prosecutor's Office leaked Ayuso's partner's email following "instructions received from the presidency of the Spanish government," something that Bolaños has denied "flatly and categorically." "I regret that the Supreme Court makes these statements without any evidentiary basis," said the Minister of Justice.

Throughout the investigation, Hurtado has not obtained definitive proof that García Ortiz or Rodríguez personally sent the aforementioned email to a media outlet, although he has enough evidence to leave them on the verge of trial. One of the obstacles was that the Attorney General changed his mobile phone and not being able to recover yours WhatsApp. "The suspect, unlike the suspect, has made any information that might be there disappear from his mobile devices, which, thanks to this securing of evidence that was taken into account from the beginning, could have allowed access to presumably relevant information, as indicated by the same circumstance of having been the one that was intended to be preserved for eventual analysis," the judge emphasizes.

What has been proven thanks to the WhatsApp Rodríguez's request is that García Ortiz requests that he forward the emails that prosecutor Julián Salto exchanged with González Amador's lawyer, Carlos Neira. The controversial email is dated February 2, 2024, and is headed: "Proposal for criminal compliance in relation to a crime against the Public Treasury." The request comes "following instructions received from the presidency of the Spanish government and taking advantage of the information published in The World at 9:29 p.m. on March 13 [...] in order to gain the story from that information by the Prosecutor's Office" about who had initiated the initiative to reach an agreement in that agreement. According to the aforementioned media, it came from the public prosecutor's office, but the reality is that the proposal was from González Amador's lawyer. emails to Julián Salto [...] was to immediately forward them to García Ortiz not to the official email, but to the private one, as he himself requested, to end up providing them to a media outlet such as Cadena SER for publicity, which happened with an advance at 11:25 p.m. on the program 25th hour of this station and the publication at 23:51 on the web." Then, Hurtado notes, "the work was started to prepare the statement" that was would be sent the next morning, March 14, to the rest of the media.

García Ortiz's arguments

The investigating judge rejected the exculpatory arguments that García Ortiz had put forward, according to which he had not revealed any secrets because The World had already published that a settlement was being negotiated. "The maintenance of secrecy depends exclusively on the affected party's wishes, and their privacy will be violated if a third party illegally and against their will steals them and disseminates them," Hurtado emphasizes. González Amador did not consent to the publication of his lawyer's email. In fact, as he stated a few days ago, I didn't even know its contents beforehand, although his lawyer later contradicted him and claimed that Ayuso's partner knew that making a deal with the Prosecutor's Office meant admitting to the crimes.