The interrogation of the former high official of La Moncloa and leader of the Madrid PSOE Pilar Sánchez Acera had already lasted a quarter of an hour. The public prosecution in the trial against the State Attorney General insisted on digging into the screenshot of the famous email in which the lawyer of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend admitted his tax crimes and which Sánchez Acera received on March 14, 2024 from a journalist whose name, according to her, she does not remember. La Moncloa’s alleged involvement in the email leak had long been left out of the case, after the Supreme Court’s Appeals Chamber confirmed that the investigating judge, Ángel Hurtado, simply took it for granted. So last Wednesday, during the hearing of the trial, the president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, intervened to remind the public prosecutor that it was a closed matter.
Lawyer Gabriel Rodríguez-Ramos said the questioning of Sánchez Acera was intended to provide “context.” The president allowed him to continue for another quarter of an hour. Until, seeing that there was no progress, he intervened again: “Shall we continue with the context?” The lawyer could no longer respond other than the classic “there are no more questions, Your Honor”.
The case against prosecutor Álvaro García Ortiz arrived at trial without providing anything resembling evidence for the prosecution and the first three days of the hearing did not go in that direction either. Almost everything was “context”. So, a discarded issue like the hypothetical role of La Moncloa occupied almost an entire morning of statements.
The Supreme Court at the time had also ruled out that there was a criminal nature in the press release issued by the Prosecutor’s Office which, to deny the hoaxes of the head of cabinet of the Madrid president, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, reported the desire of Ayuso’s boyfriend, Alberto González Amador, to presume his fraud against the Treasury. This claim was the reason given in the latter’s complaint against the public prosecutor, in the Madrid Superior Court’s decision to propose an investigation into him and in the first outcry from talk shows, columnists and opposition politicians. In one of the many exoticisms of this case, the Supreme Court changed its plan, saw nothing in the note, but opened up another path: it ordered an investigation into the email leak. And he targeted García Ortiz, even though dozens of prosecutors and officials might have had access to him. Since the corpus delicti has not appeared and the prosecution is forced to sew a suit with scraps here and there, the note now acquires importance again in connection with other facts. And he also monopolized several hours of the trial. More “context”.
The first week of the hearing felt like a movie script, with no main plot and endless side ramifications. The crucial question, who the email was leaked to, emerged only in a few moments. The accusations and some press headlines vibrated with the statement of the chief prosecutor of Madrid, Almudena Lastra, who in March 2024 confronted García Ortiz because he did not consider it urgent to disprove Rodríguez’s falsehoods. In the midst of an argument over the release of the memo, Lastra says he told the attorney general “hai” or “hai” (he doesn’t remember whether plural or singular) “you leaked the email.” And his interlocutor replied: “It doesn’t matter now.” The accusations went as far as that. On the contrary, two journalists stated that they already knew the supposedly revealed secret before it reached García Ortiz. One of them categorically testified that his source was not the defendant.
Still a week to go, three more sessions of the trial. We’ll see if we can get out of the “context”.
