In a trial, nothing is wasted. It is possible that a not very attractive piece of the piece will turn out to be very appetizing when each party draws its final conclusions. That doesn't happen often in the kitchen, but in law it's different. Of course, it can provoke more laughter than interest. The lawyer of the association of prosecutors who is asking for the conviction of Álvaro García Ortiz decided to ask a slightly eccentric question to Miguel Ángel Campos, journalist from Cadena SER. “When you call him (the attorney general), has Atlético de Madrid already scored?” The events I was asking about coincided with a Champions League match. Fortunately, it had not been necessary to call Simeone to testify at the trial.
In reality, everything was arguing about nothing. Campos had telephoned the attorney general in one of the calls he made after the (false) news that El Mundo had reported minutes before appeared. The call lasted four seconds, because, when García Ortiz did not answer, it went to the mobile mailbox. At that moment, the reporter already knew that it was Alberto González Amador's lawyer who had proposed reaching an agreement with the Prosecutor's Office, not the other way around. “I'm calling the attorney general to try to verify that the information is not true. The attorney general is not my source.” The latter is the same thing that José Precedo, journalist for elDiario.es, declared last week.
That testimony caused a problem for the president of the court. Andrés Martínez Arrieta reacted in a rude manner and warned Precedo that he could not “threaten” the court. This time Magistrate Arrieta took it more calmly and did not get upset. He even let Campos explain in detail why professional secrecy is essential: “It guarantees the right of society to access certain information.” In short, news that no one could know without the commitment to keep the identity of the source secret.
That's something all journalists know. In recent days, the invocation of professional secrecy has caused some Twitter judges and right-wing press columnists to react, upset that these testimonies could have benefited García Ortiz. Not even that is evident, because it is the accusations that have to prove that the attorney general committed a crime of revealing secrets, not the other way around.
In his attempt to discredit the journalists' testimony, González Amador's lawyer, who is prosecuting the private prosecution, put on the table Campos' tweets in which he referred to Isabel Díaz Ayuso's boyfriend as a “confessed fraudster.” Campos did not remember it, but he had no problem stating that it could be true. His argument was that lawyer Carlos Neira had acknowledged two tax crimes in the communication with the prosecutor. Perhaps the intention of the question was to verify the damage suffered by Amador's credibility due to the leak of the documents of his case.
José Manuel Romero, a journalist for elDiario.es and formerly of El País at the time of the events, heard the same question from the lawyer regarding the words “confessed fraudster.” He responded by mentioning the file prepared by the Tax Agency that contains the evidence obtained in the tax inspection of Amador, including the issuance of false invoices. That file was sent to the Prosecutor's Office when it exceeded the minimum amount established by law by 350,000 euros for the case to go to criminal proceedings.
Amador tried to respond to these accusations with several lawsuits invoking the right to honor and threatening to demand large amounts of money from politicians and journalists. The one that went the furthest was the one directed against Vice President María Jesús Montero for being seized. The Supreme Court rejected it. Other lawsuits are in the initial stages in various courts, without any of them having much future after the Supreme Court's decision.
Both Campos and Romero did not identify the names of their sources and also denied that García Ortiz was the one who provided them with the information. However, they offered a revealing piece of information. Campos confirmed to the prosecutor's questions that he had gone to speak with his source and that he had been quick, since it was “what it costs me to go up to the third floor,” which is where the headquarters of the Superior Prosecutor's Office of Madrid, headed by Almudena Lastra, is located.
Romero specified that what he knew came “always from sources of the Prosecutor's Office of the Community of Madrid”, the same organization. “I want this to be clear from the beginning,” he insisted.
Prosecutor Lastra was the witness who most harshly criticized the steps taken by the State Attorney General's Office (FGE). She declared that that night of March 12 she was convinced that the FGE was going to leak the documents from Amador's case, although she did not provide any concrete evidence that the court could value, beyond her opinion.
Romero admitted that he did not have in his possession the February 2 email that initiated communications between prosecutor Salto and Amador's lawyer. What he did have was information from his source that confirmed that what Díaz Ayuso and his chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, were saying was not true. “Not only is it not a hunt (of which Ayuso accused the Government), but Amador's lawyer has presented an offer of compliance by which he recognizes the crimes, is prepared to pay a fine and with that reduces the jail sentence and avoids going to prison,” the source told him.
The testimony of Campos and Romero coincided with that of Precedo last Thursday. All of them, who then worked for three different media outlets – to which we must add Alfonso Pérez Medina, from La Sexta – knew the content of the communications between the prosecutor and the lawyer hours or days before they reached the hands of the attorney general. The case documents were no longer a secret either for those journalists or for their sources in the Madrid Superior Prosecutor's Office. A revealing phrase from Romero was heard: “If we had published them immediately without doing our job, we would not be here now.”
If the journalists had quickly released everything they knew without doing any verification, without making calls to confirm what they knew, without moving cautiously so as not to reveal the identity of their sources, all in a here-I-catch-you-here-I-kill-you plan, this trial would not have taken place. To begin with, the FGE would not have released a statement that is not the subject of this trial, because the investigating judge did not consider that there was any crime there. It makes you think about the limits of journalism and the justice system itself.