The trial against the state attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, enters its final phase. This Thursday, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court hosts the sixth and last scheduled day of the oral hearing, in which all parties will be able to present their conclusions after five previous hearings (held during the current and last week) which were concluded without any direct evidence being presented indicating the head of the Public Prosecutor as the author of the leak of an email from the lawyer of Alberto González Amador, boyfriend of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, who recognized the commission of two tax crimes. Therefore, in the absence of the smoking gun, the accusations attempt to build their incriminating thesis with circumstantial and peripheral evidence which the defense and prosecutors describe as mere “inferences” without foundation.
From the beginning of the trial, García Ortiz has defended his innocence. And this Wednesday afternoon, in the fifth hearing of the trial, the highest authority of the Prosecutor’s Office reiterated it: “The truth is not filtered, it is defended”, he summarized at the end of his statement as the accused (in an image previously unpublished in the current Spanish democratic phase). For more than an hour, the Attorney General tried to dispel the shadows of suspicion cast over him and the theories put on the table (both by the accusations and by the Guardia Civil) to link him to the leak.
In fact, as he had already done in the preliminary phase, García Ortiz availed himself of the right to respond exclusively to his defense (exercised by the State Prosecutor’s Office) and to the Prosecutor’s Office (which requests acquittal); as well as offering to answer questions from the court, which did not ask him any questions. With this decision, which he justified with the lack of “procedural loyalty in the search for the truth” demonstrated by González Amador, the accusations were prevented from looking for loopholes to try to introduce doubts on the veracity of his testimony.
It remains to be seen whether González Amador’s lawyer will respond to García Ortiz’s words this Thursday. As specified by the president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, all parties will have the opportunity to present their final conclusions on the trial starting from 10.00 am. The investigating judge has already announced that, to try to convince the seven judges to issue a sentence favorable to their interests, each prosecution and the Prosecutor’s Office will have speaking time of 30 to 45 minutes; and defense, for as long as necessary. Taking this provision into account, González Amador’s lawyer already asked this Wednesday if he could have a few more minutes, to which Arrieta replied that he will be understanding based on the content of his report.
With the material presented during the trial, the court will have to decide whether the State Attorney General is guilty of the crime of revealing secrets for having allegedly leaked to the press an email from the lawyer of Ayuso’s boyfriend, in which he offered a deal to the Prosecutor’s Office and confessed to the tax crimes attributed to him in a case opened against him in a court in the capital. The private prosecution, brought by González Amador, seeks four years in prison for García Ortiz, while the Prosecutor’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office ask for acquittal.
UCO deductive leaps
García Ortiz, who will be able to exercise his right to have the final say this Thursday after the parties present their final reports, already said Wednesday that he had not leaked that email. And that during the night of March 13, 2024, when that message was released, he and his team were just trying to gather data to publish a press release that would refute the distorted information he had published. The world at 9.29pm, where it was stated that the Prosecutor’s Office had offered a deal to Ayuso’s boyfriend, although in reality it was the opposite. Hours earlier, the president’s chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, had also spread the hoax that this supposed deal had been withdrawn due to “orders from above.”
The statement from the Prosecutor’s Office was published on the morning of March 14, and according to García Ortiz, the information contained in the leaked email was included because it had already been published by the media. According to the highest representative of the public prosecutor, the content of that text was already known and therefore no secret was revealed. “We made the decision to defend the work of the prosecutors, who are absolutely impeccable,” he put into context, before denying that he had any interest in harming González Amador. “(It was) the rigor of the data compared to other news,” he added.
In the previous days, more than half a dozen journalists from four different media (EL PAÍS, La Sexta, Cadena SER and elDiario) assured that they had handled the contents of the leaked email before it reached García Ortiz. One even specified that he had received a physical copy a week earlier; and another, the first to publish verbatim quotes from the document, who had seen, read and copied it six hours earlier.
Despite all this, members of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Guardia Civil who prepared the reports on the case – in which they conclude that García Ortiz had a “prominent” role in the leak – insisted this Wednesday on targeting him. According to the agents, thanks to his position, the attorney general had “total control” of the work of the State Attorney General’s Office on the night the crime spread. e-mail; and, since they suspect that the leak comes from that institution and exclude other possible sources (even if they have not investigated these alternatives, as they have acknowledged), they add that nothing could happen in the prosecutor’s office without him knowing. “Whatever the State Attorney General does, it will not do so without the knowledge or control, as a hierarchical body, of the Attorney General,” the UCO members summarized to underline this.
For all parties, the declaration of these agents was a key moment. The prosecution sees the Guardia Civil’s findings as a huge advantage in their favor. But the defense minimizes them as simply unfounded assumptions and, therefore, tries to question them.
In the absence of direct evidence, the accusations try to build their thesis on supposedly peripheral and circumstantial evidence, and within this theoretical framework they connect the deductive leaps introduced by the UCO. But for the State Attorney’s Office and the Prosecutor’s Office, the UCO’s conclusions are mere “deductions” and “inferences”, without documentary support and the result of an incriminating vision which, from the beginning, had the aim of inferring that the suspect was the culprit. According to the defense, from the beginning, not only was the entire procedure aimed at targeting García Ortiz, but any other possible leak was ruled out by not investigating another possible source of the news. Consuelo Castro, the state’s attorney, told agents Wednesday: “Everything that was leaked was in the possession of the state Attorney General and 600 other people.” “We don’t do future investigations,” a UCO official apologized to avoid the question of why they didn’t investigate more people. Then some laughter could be heard in the room.
