The State Attorney General has filed an appeal before the Supreme Court in which he challenges the more than ten-hour search carried out by the Civil Guard in his office. A letter, published this Thursday by El País, in which the public prosecutor of Álvaro García Ortiz denounces that the trial against him suffers from “total decontextualization” and that the massive seizure of emails and messages from his electronic devices contains “information that may compromise the security of the State.”
Magistrate Ángel Hurtado took charge of the proceedings against the Attorney General, following a complaint filed by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner for leaking information about the agreement in which her lawyer sought to avoid prison in exchange for the recognition of his tax fraud and his first approach. was to place the matter under summary secrecy. He then sent the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to the Attorney General’s Office to seize emails, messages and any type of communication from Álvaro García Ortiz’s cell phones, computers and tablets. He then reversed course and temporarily limited the search to several days in March this year, but with the material already seized and in the hands of investigators.
The Attorney General, through the Attorney General’s Office, appealed the order authorizing the search. An appeal that questions the proportionality of the measure in relation to other less invasive possibilities, which denounces the fact that media like El Mundo had already published the content of Alberto González’s emails before the prosecutor received them in his email, and finally that the indiscriminate and cloned use of his devices extracted information from his phone and email “likely to compromise state security.”
This is one of the complaints that prosecutorial sources have denounced in recent weeks. The information seized by the Civil Guard could compromise, says the Attorney General, “the activity of other institutions, national interests, commitments with third parties and, ultimately, the structure of the Prosecutor’s Office as a whole”. This public interest, he denounces, was not taken into account by Judge Hurtado. There is, according to the Attorney General, neither an “exception” nor a “necessity” that would require the launch of such an invasive procedure, and journalists who had access to this information could be called to testify, asserts he.
García Ortiz also criticizes Judge Hurtado, in his appeal, that the archives of his office were also disclosed to public opinion and, however, he did not open any investigation on this matter. It was published “before or simultaneously with the start of the register” without indicating, according to the complaint, “the adoption of any measure to investigate the said leak”.
The “decontextualization” of the file
Hurtado’s entry and search order, he adds, suffers from “total decontextualization” by omitting, he explains, that before obtaining these emails from prosecutor Julián Salto, a media had already published its contents verbatim: the newspaper Le Monde. “Many other people,” he adds, had already had access to it, including “people around” Alberto González Amador. All these possibilities, he explains, make the intervention of his phone, his computer and all his messages from the last semester a disproportionate measure.
Initially, the criminal investigation revolved around the statement that the Madrid Public Prosecutor’s Office published on March 14 to deny false or biased information about the conversations that the lawyer of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner had with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. But once passed the filter of the Supreme Court, the object changed and focused not on the statement, which is not considered criminal, but on the possible prior leak of these emails to the press.
By the time the Attorney General had access to it, he claims, the case “had already reached the media” and the dissemination of false information about the legal proceedings against Alberto González Amador posed a “serious risk” to the actions. of the parquet. He concluded that the “institutional response” of collecting the information and issuing the statement was “fully justified.”
