Support from the public prosecutor’s office for Judge Joaquín Aguirre’s maneuver to investigate the Russian plot despite the Barcelona court’s veto. The anti-corruption prosecutor approved the opening of a new, separate room based on the same evidence that the higher instance had overturned, finding that the instructor’s decision is “procedurally possible.”
Judge Aguirre agreed in June to open a new, separate room on the Russian plot, ignoring the Barcelona court’s order to dismiss the case or send it to trial. The instructor did neither: he continued to investigate the case, refused to grant amnesty and referred Carles Puigdemont and the rest of those investigated to the Supreme Court, which led the former president to file a complaint against him (and the Catalan court). TSJ must decide whether to admit or not treat).
For the moment, the prosecutor has not commented on one of the judge’s most controversial maneuvers denounced by the defense. To validate the evidence he had in the separate room that the Barcelona court had ordered to complete the investigation, the magistrate signed a “validation order” of various evidence (including the cloning of the cell phones of several people investigated). . In his resolution, the magistrate recognized that the first submission of “all the documentation” of the file to the police had been invalidated, but he took the same decision with the aim of “reactivating the investigation”.
In his letter, the prosecutor asks the Barcelona court to reject the defenses’ appeals against the opening of the new separate room. Prosecutor Ricardo Sanz-Gadea affirms that the maneuver of the investigating judge “would not result in a fraud on the law” since some of the new accused (among them, Puigdemont, Artur Mas or two journalists) were not part of the previous investigation, despite agreeing with the same facts: alleged Russian influence in the process.
The prosecutor supports the “gradual crystallization” that Judge Aguirre accumulated after studying the thousands of documents and reports on Russian interference. The judge, says the prosecutor, “evaluated all the evidence to initiate a new piece, expanding the facts and people under investigation.”
The Barcelona court vetoed the judge from continuing his investigation into the Russian plot. A decision which, the judge himself recognized on June 21, “led to a dismissal” of the case. The instructor then found an alternative – which the defense considers illegal – consisting of opening a new, separate room, based on another room different from the one that had been demolished, to investigate the same facts that his superiors had prevented him from doing. ‘investigate. The Barcelona court must now decide whether to overturn this maneuver.
The instructor put his plan into practice, and in July he again ordered the police to follow the same procedures he had carried out throughout the beginning of the year, when he declared the file secret and changed the judicial police for the third time. The instructor had found the first documents on Russian influence in 2018 in a register of the UDEF of the National Police, then had analyzed the documents obtained in collaboration with the Civil Guard until he went to the General Commission of National Police Information, which he had already investigated the Russian plot before the National Court in a case which was archived.
