The Spanish Prosecutor’s Office is contesting a ruling by Judge Ángel Hurtado that has brought the State’s Attorney General to the brink of a trial. The Public Ministry, which maintains there’s insufficient evidence to link the leak of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner’s email to Álvaro García Ortiz, is criticizing the Supreme Court magistrate for involving the Prime Minister’s Office in the case. The Ministry claims the Attorney General followed “instructions” from the Prime Minister’s Office.
The judge’s decision follows eight months of investigation, which resulted in preliminary charges against Álvaro García Ortiz and the Madrid provincial prosecutor, Pilar Rodríguez. They are accused of leaking an email detailing Alberto González Amador’s confession on March 13, 2024. The initial paragraph of the ruling presents a new element: that the Attorney General acted under “instructions” from the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court highlights in this appeal that this possibility is being raised for the first time. The possibility of the Attorney General’s objective not being to gather information to refute false news, but to follow orders from the department that Óscar López was directing at that time, never arose during interrogations, reports from the Civil Guard, or any investigation carried out during these eight months.
“The facts under imputation vary from one day to the next in the instructor’s resolutions,” the Prosecutor’s Office reproaches, after reaffirming “the resounding non-existence of evidence regarding the sending of the email from the State Attorney General’s Office.” At one point, it states, Judge Hurtado claims that everything was in response to the Prosecutor’s Office’s intention to counter something unimportant, but the Deputy Prosecutor replies that it was “a matter of undeniable relevance, in the face of information proven to be false that attributed an anomalous action to the institution for political reasons.”
The information that the Prosecutor’s Office intended to deny during those days of March, some of it spread by the head of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s cabinet, claimed that the Public Ministry had explored the possibility of reaching a silent agreement with González Amador in his tax fraud case, but that an order from the leadership had frustrated that agreement, condemning the businessman to a judicial ordeal lasting several years.
The Prosecutor’s Office reiterates in this appeal that there is no evidence to bring the Attorney General and the Madrid provincial prosecutor to trial and points to the key piece of evidence in Hurtado’s indictment: the Civil Guard report on the messages intercepted from Pilar Rodríguez, which illustrate the frenzy of messages and calls that night for prosecutor Julián Salto to send them the confession that the businessman’s lawyer had sent him a month earlier.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the two experts who appeared before the judge “acknowledged that they had not obtained any evidence that the leak had been carried out by the Honorable Mr. State Attorney General.” It denounces that “there is also no evidence of the agreement” between the two defendants to carry out the leak, and highlights that several people have testified in this case who “have declared having been in possession of the email, having examined it or knowing its content before the Attorney General obtained it.”
Journalists’ Testimonies
In this document, the Prosecutor’s Office refers to the testimony of several journalists from Cadena SER, elDiario.es, El País, and La Sexta who have stated that they had access to the email of Ayuso’s partner’s confession before that information reached the Attorney General’s email shortly before ten o’clock that night. One of the last has been Alfonso Pérez Medina, who has recently made public internal messages from the Atresmedia chain that demonstrate that, minutes before García Ortiz obtained the information, the journalist was already discussing it in detail with other La Sexta workers.
The Prosecutor’s Office has requested that these statements be incorporated into the case. For the moment, Judge Hurtado and the Court have not given credibility or importance to the testimonies of journalists who have testified in this regard.
The Attorney General addressed the case on Friday, stating that he has no intention of resigning despite the indictment and is convinced that he can defend his innocence in a future trial before the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court. “The Prosecutor’s Office must be strong and must appear strong. It cannot be that lies defeat an Attorney General. If he did not remain, the next Attorney General would be a very weak figure,” he explained from the Summer School of the Public Prosecutor’s Office that is held at the Pazo de Mariñán.