Gabriel Rodríguez-Ramos, the incisive lawyer of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend – or Don Alberto -, attempted a certain gesture of perplexity, almost as if something unknown was being revealed to him, when, at last Tuesday’s hearing of the trial of the State Attorney General, his communications director, Mar Hedo, let him say:
—In Spain there are many leaks.
In the courts, of course, there have been hundreds. They have almost never been investigated. There have even been in this same open process to pursue a leak. What was disclosed were not exactly minor details nor those that do not affect people’s privacy, as is alleged in the case that has captured much of the national news in the last year. As the State Attorney’s Office highlighted, in its opening statement of the trial, during the investigation, information such as the defendant’s home and email address came into the hands of others. One more among the extraordinary events surrounding this process: the investigation into who sent to the press the document in which Mr. Alberto González Amador’s lawyer confessed to fraud against the Treasury has placed García Ortiz, head of the public ministry and sixth authority of the State, on the bench of the Supreme Court.
Since what is being investigated is a leak and how it has come to trial without the investigating magistrate, Ángel Hurtado, being able to find anything resembling evidence for the prosecution, journalists have become key witnesses. Yesterday they declared six and next week another six will do so. Two of them reiterated what they had already told Hurtado and he decided to ignore it, claiming that he did not grant them credibility: that both knew that González Amador’s lawyer had sent a letter to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office acknowledging his. The defense uses it as decisive information to demonstrate that the secret of which García Ortiz is accused of leaking was not such a secret. One of the witnesses, José Precedo, the first to publish the news about the fraud of Ayuso’s boyfriend, went a step further: he said that he could not reveal his source, but that he was in no way the accused.
In the courtroom of the Supreme Court where the trial is taking place, a distant echo of the show starring Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (MÁR) and his lessons on journalism still persisted. Ayuso’s chief of staff dedicated himself to discrediting the informants who uncovered Don Alberto’s fraud. And to justify his hoax that the Prosecutor’s Office had frustrated an agreement with González Amador in March 2024 “by orders from above”, in an “ugly and dirty” maneuver – which provoked the reaction of the public ministry that has brought García Ortiz to the bench -, Rodríguez defended a bizarre concept of journalism: a kind of license to lie. “It was a message without support from any source. I am a journalist and I work in politics. I am not a notary who needs any certification,” he alleged smugly.
With this background, Precedo did more than explain his relationship with the case: he defended the professionalism of his work and the dignity of good journalism. “We check everything we publish, even though something else was said here yesterday. When journalists are attacked here, they are called liars, their reputation is being played with,” he cried. “Sometimes that leads you to publish things later, but it makes you sleep much more peacefully.”
As he had already stated in the investigation, the elDiario.es journalist reiterated that since March 6, 2024, he had a screenshot of the email in which González Amador’s lawyer admitted his client’s crimes. That is, a week before it was sent to the attorney general. The private prosecution’s strategy was to erode the credibility of the witness. And he punctuated it with the question, formulated in a thousand ways, why he didn’t publish it until a week later. Precedo explained that the source that gave him all the documentation of the case did not allow him to make public use of that email. And that he did not give it his authorization until it began to appear in other media.
The journalist admitted that he has had a professional relationship with García Ortiz for 20 years, since the time when they both worked in Galicia. One of the popular accusations tried to discredit him on that side. He was met with a forceful statement: “I have never had a piece of paper pass me by.” And then, at the end of almost an hour and a half of interrogation, the journalist, with a slight tone of emotion, declared something else:
—I have a moral dilemma, because I know who the source is.
The president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, reacted with a strange verb:
-Don’t threaten us…
—I don’t threaten anything. I say that I know who the source is, but I cannot reveal it, and that causes me a moral dilemma because here a person who is innocent is being asked to go to prison.
The defense once again received good news with the testimony of Alfonso Pérez Medina, judicial correspondent for La Sexta. During the investigation, this journalist had already provided a screenshot of an internal chat in his editorial office in which it was recorded that at 9:54 p.m. on March 13, he had already communicated to his colleagues the information that Ayuso’s boyfriend had proposed an agreement to the Madrid Economic Crimes Prosecutor’s Office by which he acknowledged the crimes. That is, five minutes before the corroborating email was sent to the State Attorney General’s Office, on alert to gather data to deny the hoax that MÁR was spreading at that same time. Pérez Medina declared that he did not have the email, but that he had confirmed its contents from three different sources. This was published a few minutes later on the La Sexta website.
The journalist from La Sexta made these inquiries after half an hour earlier, El Mundo had disseminated other information, in this case erroneous: that it was the Prosecutor’s Office that offered the agreement to González Amador and not the other way around. The author of that news, Esteban Urreiztieta, also gave a statement. Although it did not conform to reality, Urreiztieta defended his approach by pointing out that he was only able to obtain another email in which the Prosecutor’s Office showed itself willing to negotiate the agreement. That communication had been provided that same morning by González Amador to Ayuso’s chief of staff, as both admitted. But when asked by the defense, the El Mundo journalist pointed out something else: that for some time before, he already knew from several sources that the Madrid president’s partner had the “will” to reach an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office that implied the “admission of the crimes” and penalties that did not imply his entry into jail.
Urreiztieta wanted to make it clear that he never gave rise to an alleged political intervention to avoid the agreement with González Amador. Other media, however, did buy it that same night of March 13. Journalists from two of them, Vozpópuli and Libertad Digital, also appeared at the trial. Both published an almost identical headline: “The Prosecutor’s Office offered Ayuso’s boyfriend an agreement that he later withdrew due to orders from above.” They were precisely the same words that Rodríguez was using in his campaign for agitprop on social networks and chats with journalists. The hoax was presented as a true fact without attributing the statements to the right hand of the Madrid president. Those appearing at the trial limited themselves to appealing to the right to protect their sources. The day closed after having offered a sample of the best and the worst of journalism.
