After almost 30 hours of interrogations, it is the State Attorney General's turn. Álvaro García Ortiz will become this Wednesday the first active senior representative of the Public Ministry to testify as a defendant in a trial. The accusations consider that he leaked to the press the email in which Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner confessed to being the author of two tax crimes and are asking for sentences of up to six years in prison. He will deny it again before the seven judges of the high court who have to decide whether or not he is guilty.
The statement by the attorney general – the last to speak before the parties' reports – comes after the court has heard 28 witnesses including prosecutors, journalists and politicians. These are interrogations from which not a single direct piece of evidence has emerged that the attorney general leaked the email with the businessman's confession.
What's more, informants from several media outlets, including elDiario.es, have declared that they knew the secret whose revelation is the subject of the trial before the attorney general could have it. Some of them have even provided evidence that they knew that a pact proposal existed before the attorney general. A revelation that calls into question the main evidence against the attorney general: the temporal coincidence between him receiving that confidential information and it appearing in the press.
The origin of the case that has brought García Ortiz to the bench is the information published by the newspaper El Mundo on March 13, 2024, in which it was said that the Prosecutor's Office had offered an agreement to Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of the Community of Madrid. To counter the lie, spread by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and reported by various media outlets – some added that the pact had been stopped by “orders from above” – the attorney general decided to prepare a press release. To do this, he requested all the documentation and the exchange of emails from the prosecutors involved. The Statute of the Prosecutor's Office includes a mechanism called “accounting” by which a superior can request documentation of a case from other prosecutors.
By the time that statement was issued at ten in the morning on March 14, several media outlets—including elDiario.es—had already published the content of the email with the confession. Several journalists have told the court that information about a possible pact had already been circulating in the newsrooms for days. These are statements that reinforce the Prosecutor's Office and the defense of the highest representative of the Public Ministry, since their thesis is that not only is there no evidence that García Ortiz leaked the document, but that by then the confession was not classified material because various media had already published its content.
There are many unknowns in García Ortiz's statement that will not be clarified until the interrogation begins this Wednesday afternoon. For example, if he will answer all the parties or if, as happened in the investigation phase, he will only answer the questions of the State Attorneys who direct his defense. “No. Absolutely not,” he then said on up to half a dozen occasions to deny any involvement in the leak to the press of the email containing the health commissioner's confession.
His statement as a defendant before Judge Ángel Hurtado last January was a tense day. The attorney general announced that he would not answer the magistrate's questions or the accusations. And he charged directly against the instructor: he accused Hurtado of acting with “predetermination” and of investigating the case guided by “a certainty” that, he said then, does not lead to “discovering the truth.” He accused Hurtado, therefore, of doing nothing that would not lead to the conclusion that he had leaked the email.
The attorney general then explained that he did not want to answer either the judge or the accusations because all the evidence against him came from the records of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard in his office and that of the provincial prosecutor. Records that, at that time, had not been endorsed by the Appeals Chamber. He also charged against the complainant: “He omits fundamental information, he has not been loyal.” The confusion reached its peak when the lieutenant prosecutor herself announced that she was not going to question the attorney general because the searches in his office were not legal.
The attorney general, the only accused
Almost ten months later the situation has changed. The Supreme Court endorsed these records – strongly criticized by the State Attorney's Office in the first trial session – and García Ortiz no longer has Judge Hurtado before him but a court of seven magistrates, led by Andrés Martínez Arrieta, who has barely asked questions to most of the witnesses. And now he is the only accused, when at that time he was accompanied on the bench by prosecutors Pilar Rodríguez and Diego Villafañe, his right-hand man on Fortuny Street, where the headquarters of the State Attorney General's Office is located.
García Ortiz was clear to Hurtado when he denied having participated in the leak or having given someone the order to leak the document to the press. “No. Absolutely not.” He also denied having acted to harm González Amador, whom he described as “a citizen with full rights.” And he harshly attacked the “untrue information” spread by Ayuso's entourage and some media, in addition to pointing out the Madrid Prosecutor's Office of Almudena Lastra for not having publicly reported the case: “A mistake was made.”
García Ortiz is not expected to abandon that script and he will deny, also this Wednesday, having had anything to do with that leak. The accusations are expected to focus on the main evidence supporting the case: the aforementioned temporal coincidence between García Ortiz receiving the confession email and it appearing in the press and the deletion of his messages and emails a week after the Supreme Court opened the case against him.
This temporal coincidence was already addressed in his defense brief, which gives clues to the argument that García Ortiz can follow before the court. His lawyers argued in that brief that the events of the afternoon of March 13, 2024 — in which he demanded information about the case from his subordinates — show that “there is no necessary logical connection” between the publication of the February 2 email on Cadena Ser and the sending of that same email to the attorney general.
Their thesis is that both events are “close in time” because they had the same triggering cause: “The launch by the Community of Madrid of a series of coordinated communication actions that sought, at the same time, to neutralize and divert the focus of the information published by elDiario.es, and to accuse the Prosecutor's Office of persecuting the partner of the President of the Community of Madrid for political reasons.”
The indication of temporal coincidence also clashes with the testimony of several of the journalists who have appeared before the court and who have confirmed that this confession was already circulating in some of the main newsrooms in the country before it reached the hands of the attorney general. This same Tuesday, José Manuel Romero, then deputy director of El País and today deputy director of elDiario.es, ratified the content of the notarial acts that prove he and other editors of the Prisa newspaper knew about the negotiations between González Amador and the Prosecutor's Office through the Madrid Prosecutor's Office long before that information reached García Ortiz on the night of March 13. These minutes collect the messages that these editors exchanged.
García Ortiz will also face this Wednesday an issue that the prosecution has made a fundamental part of the case: the deletion of his mobile phone. On October 23, 2024, a week after the Supreme Court opened the case against him, García Ortiz changed his phone number and in that change his WhatsApp messages were deleted, as confirmed by the Civil Guard. A week after the opening of the case and a week before Hurtado sent the Central Operational Unit (UCO) to his office to intervene in his messages and emails. Also shortly after October 12, 2024, he was already certain that he was going to be charged.
The attorney general has been defending for months that this deletion was not intended to destroy evidence of his involvement in the leak, but rather that it was a periodic deletion that he made on his phone to protect all the sensitive information he handles due to his position. “He deleted, as he regularly did in the performance of his duties and in a secure manner, personal data from his mobile device,” he stated in his defense brief.
The statement of García Ortiz, the first attorney general to appear as a defendant before a court in the exercise of his office, is not scheduled until the afternoon session this Wednesday. Beforehand, 12 agents from the UCO of the Civil Guard will testify before the Supreme Court, those who carried out the searches and those who signed the key reports of the case.
Among them will be Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Balas, who faced Hurtado in a tense interrogation when the State Attorney's Office reproached him, among other things, for having omitted Miguel Ángel Rodríguez's hoax from his most important report. The most relevant reproaches of the defense that will give way to the interrogation of the State Attorney General before the final stretch of the trial: the last arguments and the hearing for sentencing.