The trial against the attorney general for the leak of an email from Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner begins this Monday in the Supreme Court. The magistrates will hear dozens of testimonies, including those from journalists ignored by Judge Ángel Hurtado who agree on something: they all knew that Alberto González Amador was negotiating with the Prosecutor's Office hours or even days before that information reached the hands of Álvaro García Ortiz. An aspect considered key by the Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office to allege that not only is there no evidence that he leaked the document, but that by then the businessman's confession was not a secret. González Amador himself had spread other emails about the case through Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso's chief of staff.
The investigation, at first, revolved around the statement that the Madrid Prosecutor's Office issued on the morning of March 14, 2024 to deny hoaxes about the tax fraud case of Ayuso's partner. But the Supreme Court focused on an earlier moment: when the media began to reveal the content of the email and whether that was before or after that documentation reached the hands of the attorney general. A first report from the Civil Guard analyzed the news sequence in a biased manner and concluded that the media did not publish any of the email until after García Ortiz had it in his possession. The testimonies of several journalists before Hurtado pointed in another direction.
The case has two key moments on the night of March 13, 2024, when the Attorney General's Office requested all the emails while Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and several media outlets spread hoaxes about the case. One is at 9:59 p.m., when García Ortiz received in his email the February 2 email with the confession proposal from González Amador's lawyer. The other is at 11:44 p.m., when he receives the missing email that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and several media outlets had already published.
A fundamental part of the trial will be to analyze whether there is sufficient evidence to accuse García Ortiz of personally leaking the email to the press, but another will be to determine if, by the time he had it in his possession and was able to leak it, it was already known to the media. And the statements of half a dozen journalists suggest that the existence of these negotiations between González Amador and the Prosecutor's Office was already known by several media hours or even days before, which according to the Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office limits the ability to consider that email as a secret that can be violated.
The first news published on the night of March 13, 2024 was signed by Esteban Urreiztieta in El Mundo: “The Prosecutor's Office offers Ayuso's partner an agreement to admit two tax crimes while prosecuting the case.” By the time it was published at 9:29 p.m., various leaders of the Prosecutor's Office had already been alerted that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, Ayuso's chief of staff, was spreading a manipulated version of the events among the press and this news was what ended up triggering internal movements in the Public Ministry to deny information that they considered false: the pact proposal was from González Amador, not from the Prosecutor's Office, which contradicted the speech of Ayuso herself and the PP at that time.
Urreiztieta testified in the Supreme Court and defended the “veracity” of his information and then explained that his news at 9:29 p.m. was not based only on that decontextualized email, but included information about the businessman's intention to reach an agreement, first before the Tax Agency and then accepting prison before the Prosecutor's Office. The State Attorney asked the question: “At the time this news was published, were you unaware of the rest of the emails that were exchanged between Mr. Carlos Neira and the Prosecutor's Office?” The journalist's response indicated that he was also aware of these negotiations: “What we knew is that there had been, as reflected in the information, conversations in recent weeks to address a conformity agreement and, as we also reflected in the information, that would imply a penalty of non-compliance for Mr. González Amador as is usual in these cases.”
“It was a secret that we knew long in advance”
Several other informants explained to Hurtado that they also knew about those negotiations, or even the content of the email, before the attorney general. Alfonso Pérez Medina, a court journalist for La Sexta, was the first to publish at 10:10 p.m. that the pact had, in fact, been the initiative of González Amador. “We were able to basically examine those two emails, not the others, and we saw that, with the temporal sequence, the offer had indeed come from González Amador,” he explained to the judge. Later, the journalist provided new documentation: internal messages from the television newsroom that show that he already had this information at 9:54 p.m., five minutes before the attorney general had it.
José Manuel Romero, currently deputy director of elDiario.es, was deputy director of El País when he appeared, with part of his team, before Judge Hurtado as a witness. He explained that they had reconstructed what had happened the day this media revealed the case and revealed that at 2:18 p.m. on March 12, a day and a half before the attorney general had the email, a source from the Madrid Prosecutor's Office had already put him on the trail of the pact, which led journalists from the Prisa newspaper to make several arrangements in this regard. “AND“This secret was a secret that we knew well in advance of everything that happened much later,” he said.
José Precedo, one of the journalists who wrote the first exclusive with which elDiario.es revealed the González Amador tax fraud case, explained that he had access to that email even several days before, when he obtained the documentation of the case. “On Wednesday, March 6, I receive triple documentation. This triple documentation consists of a report from the Tax Agency that gives rise to a complaint, the complaint itself that is presented in a court in Madrid by the Prosecutor's Office, and an email that the lawyer Carlos Neira sends to a generic mailbox of the Prosecutor's Office on February 2.”
Miguel Ángel Campos told Cadena Ser at 11:20 p.m. that night of March 13 that González Amador's defense had even acknowledged that he had “certainly” committed two tax crimes. But he explained that he was able to examine that email, through a source, a few minutes after three-thirty in the afternoon that day, six hours before the attorney general. “M.e shows the email and lets me take notes. He didn't leave me a copy, he didn't print it for me, he let me take notes and I wrote everything down. “All that email,” explained this court journalist. He published it, he added, when his source gave him authorization to do so.
The email was no longer secret
Judge Ángel Hurtado agreed to these testimonies but chose not to give them credibility or sufficient weight to prevent the prosecution of the attorney general, although these testimonies will be heard again in the trial and analyzed by seven different magistrates. Both the Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office, which defends García Ortiz in this process, consider that it is a key piece of information along with the lack of evidence and the fact that Ayuso's entourage was the first to disseminate confidential emails about the case.
“The obtaining of the email by some journalists and the knowledge of it by the attorney general must necessarily be close in time,” García Ortiz alleges in his defense brief. He found out about the existence of the negotiations, not just the emails, when El Mundo published its first news item at 9:29 p.m. that night. He could not, therefore, be the source of the media that obtained or learned about it before 9:59 p.m., when his collaborators sent it to his personal email account.
Hurtado did not give sufficient importance to these testimonies and neither did the Appeals Chamber when it confirmed the prosecution of the attorney general last July. The argument is that all of these informants, according to the judges and contrary to what some of them stated, did not exactly mention the email with the confession. “The information was already known to other people before the Attorney General acquired knowledge of it and before the Prosecutor's Office information note was disseminated,” says the lieutenant prosecutor of the Supreme Court in her letter in which she requests the acquittal of García Ortiz.
The defense of the attorney general and the Prosecutor's Office also point to more people who could have access to the email since it was sent by lawyer Carlos Neira on February 2 to prosecutor Julián Salto and a State Attorney: officials with access to the generic email of the Prosecutor's Office to which it was sent, various officials of the Public Ministry, in addition to González Amador himself and his entourage.