Civil Guard Finds No New Evidence in Attorney General's Case
The Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard has concluded that no new, unpublished information of interest has surfaced from the data submitted to the Supreme Court via WhatsApp and Google concerning Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz. This determination was made public in a resolution by presiding judge Ángel Hurtado, who lifted the confidentiality of the separate pieces he had initiated to scrutinize the information gathered from the chats and emails pertaining to the head of the Public Ministry.
Despite the case instructor indicating on April 23 and 24 that he had seemingly received the information request from both tech companies, he acknowledged this past Wednesday that the UCO did not uncover any pertinent data for the ongoing investigation. García Ortiz is being probed for allegedly revealing secrets attributed to him by Alberto González Amador, a partner of Madrid's president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The official communication sent by the Civil Guard to the magistrate stated that the information provided by Irish authorities regarding Google did not yield any new emails relevant to this case. The same conclusion was reached regarding the data delivered from the United States concerning the WhatsApp chats.
Furthermore, the UCO indicated in an official letter that no unpublished information of significance for the investigation has been found. Among the documents presented is an email that the UCO already possessed. The report from the Benemérita (the name for members of the Spanish Civil Guard) was submitted to the instructor following an analysis of the electronic folders obtained from the letters rogatory answered by Ireland and the United States.
These actions were undertaken after the Civil Guard alerted the court that they found no messages on the mobile devices seized from García Ortiz during a search of his office on October 30. In light of this, the instructor sought judicial assistance from both nations to recover any potential chats and emails.
In particular, the UCO reported that it received a PDF file from Google containing a certification of authenticity of the data alongside several alphanumeric codes known as HASH. Within this file was another folder containing 46 elements related to various applications associated with the Attorney General's Gmail account, which included 159 emails. Of these, only one was relevant to the inquiry—a communication from the Prosecutor's complaint against González Amador for alleged tax crimes.
Regarding WhatsApp, the UCO clarified that they could not recover messages linked to one of the Attorney General's mobile phones that might have been influential for the inquiry. For the second mobile device, it was noted that there was no record of a WhatsApp account being associated with that particular number. In summary, the UCO revealed that the data from the United States corroborated claims made by García Ortiz himself, affirming that he had changed devices since the investigation commenced.
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