Support from the Prosecutor’s Office for Judge Joaquín Aguirre’s maneuver to investigate the Russian plot despite the veto of the Barcelona Court. The anti-corruption prosecutor has endorsed the opening of a new separate piece based on the same evidence that the higher instance had annulled by considering that the instructor’s decision is “procedurally possible.”
Judge Aguirre agreed in June to open a new separate piece on the Russian plot, ignoring the order of the Barcelona Court to close the case or send it to trial. The instructor did neither one thing nor the other: he continued investigating the case, refused to grant amnesty and sent Carles Puigdemont and the rest of those investigated to the Supreme Court, which caused the former president to file a complaint against him (and the Catalan TSJ must decide whether admits or does not process).
For now, the prosecutor has not commented on one of the judge’s most controversial maneuvers that the defenses denounced. To validate the evidence he had in the separate piece that the Barcelona Court had ordered to finish investigating, the magistrate signed a “validation order” of various evidence (among them, the cloning of cell phones of several investigated). In his resolution, the magistrate acknowledged that the first delivery of “all the documentation” of the case to the Police was invalidated, but he made the same decision with the objective of “reactivating the investigation.”
In his letter, the prosecutor asks the Barcelona Court to reject the appeals of the defenses against the opening of the new separate piece. Prosecutor Ricardo Sanz-Gadea argues that the maneuver of the investigating judge “would not incur in fraud of law” since some of the new defendants (among them, Puigdemont, Artur Mas or two journalists) were not part of the previous investigation, despite deal with the same facts: the alleged Russian influence in the process.
The prosecutor supports the “progressive crystallization” that Judge Aguirre accumulated after studying the thousands of documents and reports on Russian interference. The judge, indicates the prosecutor, “assessed all the evidentiary material to initiate a new piece, expanding the facts and people under investigation.”
The Barcelona Court had vetoed the judge from continuing to investigate the Russian plot. A decision that, the judge himself acknowledged on June 21, “led to a dismissal” of the case. The instructor then found an alternative – which the defense sees as illegal – consisting of opening a new separate room, based on another room different from the one that had been knocked down, to investigate the same facts that his superiors had prevented him from investigating. The Barcelona Court must now decide whether to annul this maneuver.
The instructor put his plan into practice and in July he again commissioned the same procedures from the Police that he had carried out throughout the beginning of the year, when he declared the case secret and changed the Judicial Police in the case for the third time. The instructor had found the first documents on Russian influence in 2018 in a registry with the UDEF of the National Police, and then analyzed the papers obtained together with the Civil Guard until he changed to the General Information Commissariat of the National Police, which He had already investigated the Russian plot in the National Court in a case that was archived.
Source: www.eldiario.es
