A Supreme Court judge justified the seizure of the state attorney general’s cell phone and email by the need to clarify who leaked to a media outlet a publication that served to demonstrate the nature of a hoax that had previously been released by the Government of the Community of Madrid. This lie from the Madrid president’s chief of staff attempted to confuse the crimes formally assumed by businessman Alberto González Amador, partner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The decision of Judge Ángel Hurtado is unprecedented. His mandate in the Civil Guard comes within the framework of an investigation into the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, in his capacity as a registered lawyer, a figure reserved in democracy for representatives of state institutions to protect them from the spirit false complaints filed against them in ordinary courts.
This Wednesday, the judge of the Supreme Court ordered the Civil Guard to enter the Attorney General’s office following complaints from confessed criminal Alberto González Amador, several far-right associations and the Madrid Bar Association, whose council of administration is the result of the triumph of one of the conservative candidates in the last elections.
On Wednesday, agents of the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard occupied the office of the Attorney General – also that of the Attorney General of Madrid – by cloning email accounts, tablets and cell phones. “The person’s telephone or cell phone will be seized,” the judge wrote. Even González Amador’s defense didn’t aspire to that.
In a document presented to the Superior Court of Justice in July, González Amador’s lawyer limited the diligence to requesting from Google the emails from García Ortiz’s personal account containing the text of his client’s confession, as well as emails exchanged since his account with. prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez between March 5 and 18.
Additionally, the defense asked the tech company to check for possible emails deleted between those dates. For Judge Hurtado, this delimitation to such an invasive extent was not necessary: the Civil Guard had to seize the telephone of the State Attorney General.
The result of this intervention in the communications of García Ortiz will be freely accessible to the parties in person when the judge lifts the secrecy of the summary. Far-right associations like Clean Hands will benefit from the contents of the attorney general’s phone with restrictions set by the judge, if he imposes them.
In Judge Hurtado’s decision, it was not taken into account that the email under investigation was not even the first to reach the media which constitutes the list of messages exchanged between the defense of González Amador and the floor.
On the night of March 13, the Ser network published an email showing that Alberto González Amador had proposed a deal to the prosecution to recognize his crimes and avoid a sentence that would involve prison. El Mundo and other media had broadcast a hoax consisting of publishing another e-mail, decontextualized, making people believe that the initiative for the pact came from the public prosecutor’s office, when it was the opposite.
Hours before La Cadena Ser released the email showing that the compliance agreement came from González Amador’s defense, the chief of staff of the regional president, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, had dedicated himself to sending messages from his phone personnel to different media with another of the emails exchanged by the prosecutor of the case, Julián Salto, and the defense of the commissioner.
Rodríguez first sent the message to the El Mundo journalist, then forwarded it via WhatsApp to other media outlets such as Libertad Digital, El Debate and Vozpópuli, as revealed by elDiario.es. This leak is not the subject of any investigation and the proven fact that it occurred did not influence Judge Hurtado’s decision to seize the cell phone of the representative of one of the most important institutions of the State.
Key decisions in favor of the PP
Ángel Hurtado is a conservative judge who arrived at the Supreme Court following the election of the General Council of the Judiciary, whose mandate had already expired two years ago. Due to the refusal of the Popular Party to accept the renewal, this Council, with an overwhelming conservative majority, continued to make appointments, some as important as the one revealed today with Hurtado.
Judge Hurtado was at the center of one of the most significant judicial episodes in Spanish politics. It was his turn to preside over the court and write the sentence in the first major trial of the Gürtel affair. Another conservative magistrate, Julio de Diego, and the progressive José Ricardo de Prada complete the court. During the trial, he opposed the summons of the then President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, to appear as a witness.
Hurtado tried to ensure that the sentence did not refer to the irregular financing system that existed within the PP for at least two decades, but the opposition of the other conservative and progressive magistrate caused him to be in the minority and had to give in. to the wording of the sentence. This decision, and its allusions to cheating for more than twenty years in the financing of the party in government, motivated a motion of censure that made Pedro Sánchez president of the government.
Subsequently, Ángel Hurtado faced the majority of his colleagues in the Criminal Chamber of the National Court to defend in a dissenting opinion that neither Enrique López nor Concepción Espejel were contaminated and that they could judge the PP in another Gürtel trial one who had fully entered. box B of the game. Espejel and López were expelled from the court for presenting the necessary appearance of impartiality towards the PP.
Against the progressive prosecutor
The registration in the Attorney General’s Office is the culmination, so far, of the hostility with which the conservative leadership of the fiscal and judicial career welcomed Álvaro García Ortiz as Attorney General of the State from the first moment. And not just because he was appointed by a left-wing government. Former president of the Progressive Union of Prosecutors (UPF), García Ortiz had reached the highest category of the prosecutor’s career when he was appointed by his predecessor, Dolores Delgado, to head its technical secretariat. Hardened in Galicia, García Ortiz was an unknown among Madrid’s fiscal and judicial elite.
The association to which he belonged before becoming attorney general published a press release on Wednesday afternoon in which it expressed its “deep concern about the very harmful consequences” that this could have for the institution of the prosecution and “justice in its together “. decision “not to file a complaint” against the Attorney General and Prosecutor of Madrid, Pilar Rodríguez. The UPF insists that “all actions” carried out by the two “were carried out under legal and statutory protection, were legitimate and, moreover, necessary”.
The State Attorney General is currently the subject of a judicial investigation for revealing secrets allegedly committed in the context of a trial against businessman Alberto González Amador, accused of defrauding the public treasury of more than 350,000 euros and falsification of documents. González Amador, accused for more than seven months, has not yet testified in court.
