He Superior Court of Justice of Madrid yesterday inflicted a new setback on Pedro Sanchez and his strategy of open war on different fronts against the judges. And this time with the seriousness of involving the Public Prosecutor’s Office to defend his wife, Begoña Gómez, in the criminal proceedings against her.
Moncloa reacted by speaking of “baseless and unproven harassment to progressive politicians and their families”, which in practice amounts to attributing action on the part of the executive power to an increasingly numerous group of judges which borders on the criminal.
The Court rejected the admission to processing of the complaint presented by the President of the Government and prepared by the State Attorney in which judge Juan Carlos Peinado was accused of prevarication.
The judges have already rejected another coincidental complaint from an unrelated individual for similar facts, as part of a strategy to exclude the judge from the trial against Begoña Gómez. There is still one filed by Gómez herself against the judge.
This is a personal effort by Sánchez, eroding institutions such as the State Attorney’s Office and the credibility of the government itself.
Members of the government and the PSOE privately questioned this strategy to put the state apparatus at the service of an individual, while the official version of Moncloa justifies it by emphasizing that it was the judges who engaged in an open battle against the president of the government, in this case by investigating on his wife.
All this to be able to separate the judge from a battery of complaints which, at the very least, reduce the credibility of the instructor, present it politically as persecution and, if possible, the case is referred to another magistrate. The latter is lacking at the moment.
“Extra-procedural end”
In this case, the order includes reproaches to Sánchez, such as seeking a “extra-procedural end” and emphasizes that “the attribution of a fallacious and prevaricatory motive to the defendant (Judge Peinado) remains, once again, in the domain of speculation”.
The only distant precedent dates back to 1989, when the then President of the Government Felipe Gonzalez ordered to Leopoldo Torres, Attorney General of the State at the time, to file a complaint against six journalists from The world to get information about his brother. The judge Carlos Divar didn’t even admit him to treatment. The criminal action was now directed against a judge.
This criminal defense strategy of the president’s wife already backfired last week when another court, the Madrid Provincial Court, rejected Gómez’s defense request to archive the file.
In this case, the Court authorized the judge to continue the investigation, with the sole limit of obtaining the grant to Globaliawhich in fact had already been eliminated, and rejecting the arguments on the prospective investigation or the various reports from the Civil Guard which did not find a crime.
The setback is greater and has great institutional implications because it responds to Sánchez’s decision to involve the Presidency of the Government, with the participation of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and ministers who even launched serious accusations at the table of the Council of Ministers against the judge. which Now they are rejected by higher authorities.
“Cycling into nothing for six months,” said government spokesperson Pilar Alegría, describing Judge Peinado’s actions.
In fact, Moncloa published a note on Friday in which it openly admits that “the complaint filed already warned about the real purpose of summoning the President of the Government to testify in person: to transform this declaration into an instrument to politically harm the Executive. exploit a legal proceeding”.
To this war between Sánchez and the judges is added the confrontation on other issues, such as the blocking before the Supreme Court of the application of the amnesty law and the indictment before the same court of the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz. In both cases, members of the Government openly disqualified the High Court, speaking of political persecution.
“We hope that what happened here will contribute to the necessary social debate on the consequences of the strategy of the ultra right and the extreme right based on the poisoning of coexistence and the unfounded and unproven harassment of progressive politicians and their families,” the government note said.
