“One will sit in the dock on November 3 and the other is just a witness.” This is how PP leader Alma Ezcurra tried to ignore the confession before the Supreme Court of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's Chief of Staff. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, a public employee, assumed quite naturally that he leaked an email from the lawyer of the Madrid president's partner, Alberto González Amador, to construct the lie that the Prosecutor's Office had offered him a pact. Something irrelevant for the PP, since the person who is going to be judged, they say in Genoa, is the State Attorney General.
The video of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez's statement was released last Friday. Ezcurra was the first PP leader who had to respond in this regard, since the question did not fall to her leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in a morning interview in which she took another step towards the right on abortion in the middle of the electoral struggle with Vox.
Ezcurra did have to respond in the usual press conference after the PP executive meeting. The deputy secretary of Sectoral Coordination first accused “Moncloa and its entourage” of leaking the videos of the statements of the attorney general and Ayuso's chief of staff. He then went on to defend Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, the strategy that the PP has followed since the case that affects Ayuso's partner broke out and the intervention of the Chief of Staff to help someone who was defined by the president as “a private citizen” became evident.
“The Supreme Court knows the entire judicial procedure and as far as I know,” said Ezcurra, “one will sit in the dock on November 3 and the other is just a witness, so everyone can draw their own conclusions.” Ezcurra made no public assessment of the fact that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez admitted that he lied, and that he told a newspaper about his lie.
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez's lies do not seem to have made a dent in the PP leadership. “Lying is not illegal,” sources from Genoa said when asked by elDiario.es. A far cry from when Feijóo himself said in 2023: “If I lie, kick me out of the party.” “I will never deceive the Spanish,” he added. “Whether the truth is hard, I will tell it. Whether the situation is unpleasant, I will describe it. I do not come here to deceive anyone,” he concluded at the closing of the 23J campaign.
Feijóo himself already defended Ayuso's chief of staff, when he called the threats made by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez against the journalists of elDiario.es and the media itself “private conversations.” And if on the upper floors of 13 Calle de Génova in Madrid, there is none on the first floor, where the PP of Madrid is housed.
One more day for Ayuso's PP
At Ayuso's game this Monday was another day at the office. Like when Miguel Ángel Rodríguez insulted and threatened to “shred” journalists from elDiario.es and to “close” this medium. Or like when she falsely accused journalists from 'El País' of harassing minors at the door of the two apartments that the president of Madrid shares with her partner.
Nobody in the party or in Ayuso's Government dares to contradict his all-powerful chief of staff. The president remains silent on the matter: like so many other Fridays, the day the Supreme Court videos were made public, Ayuso had no public event scheduled. And he did not have an agenda this Monday either, although sources from his team assured this editorial team that he was working “normally.”
In the meantime, the president did attend the events of October 12, where she attacked the President of the Government and his associates during a meeting with a Telemadrid reporter who did not ask her any questions about the videos of Rodríguez and Alberto González Amador testifying before the Supreme Court.
In the afternoon he went to a bullfight in Las Ventas where Morante de la Puebla gave him a bull, just as he did with Santiago Abascal. And that is the entire public agenda that the Madrid president has had since last Tuesday.
In his absence, it was the PP spokesperson in the Assembly, Carlos Díaz Pache, who after learning of Más Madrid's request for Rodríguez to appear in the Assembly, once again repeated the litany that his party has already used to block the more than 30 appearance requests from the opposition: that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez is a senior official in the Government, but that since he does not have a management area, he does not have to give explanations in the regional parliament.
It does not matter that he appears as a senior official on the Community Transparency portal with a salary of 96,210 euros per year; or that he is one of the leaders with the most weight in the Government, where he often acts as number two when setting up the agenda of the Ayuso government. The Chamber Board, dominated by the PP, alleges that its work is merely advisory and that exempts it from submitting to parliamentary control.
In Ayuso's PP or in his own Government, no one dares to disavow Rodríguez. 'De facto', the plenipotentiary advisor has more power than any other public position surrounding the president in the Community or in the PP. It is that authority that he exercises by delegation from his boss that means that, whatever he does, Rodríguez (and this includes lying to the Supreme Court, deceiving half a dozen newspapers and threatening those he does not control) never receives the slightest reproach in the PP or in the regional government.
His figure is armored. But not only in Madrid. Nobody from the national leadership dares to question it.
MAR's lie about elDiario.es
Miguel Ángel Rodríguez appeared as a witness at the headquarters of the Supreme Court, that is, with the obligation to tell the truth. The State Attorney's Office asked him about the conduct of this medium when it revealed, exclusively, the tax crimes of Alberto González Amador.
“Did any journalist from elDiario.es, signatories of the news or others, contact you to verify the facts?” asked the State lawyer. The literal response from Ayuso's Chief of Staff was as follows: “No, not on the 11th (March 2024) when they are supposed to have the file, nor on the 12th.”
“Didn't anyone contact you?” the State Attorney's Office asked again. Rodríguez answered for the second time: “No, I don't remember and anyway, we are not very supportive of each other.”
In that passage of the interrogation, Rodríguez does not tell the truth.
The day after that interrogation, elDiario.es journalist José Precedo also appeared as a witness, who, when asked by the State Attorney's Office, recalled that on March 11, 2024, he called the Communication Directorate of the Community of Madrid to verify the information. And after not getting a response, he wrote to Miguel Ángel Rodríguez himself through the WhatsApp application.
The conversation lasted between 9:54 p.m. and 10:45 p.m. on March 12. And in it, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez limited himself to answering that nothing asked about tax fraud and the home or homes in which Isabel Díaz Ayuso resided was related to the Community of Madrid.
In several of the responses, Rodríguez warned: “You will see.”
During the journalist's statement, the State Attorney's Office demanded the dumping of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez's mobile phone, given that he had denied the existence of that conversation the day before. But the case's investigator denied the request and explained that he would decide later if it was pertinent.
The content of that conversation that Rodríguez denied before the Supreme Court was compared after the court hearing by a Supreme Court official who reviewed the entire conversation on the cell phone of the elDiario.es journalist with Díaz Ayuso's chief of staff and incorporated it into the case.
