Editorial | What is the Attorney General waiting for to leave?

The institutional position of the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, becomes even more untenable after the order to open oral proceedings against him was announced yesterday. The investigating judge in his case, Judge Ángel Luis Hurtado, had no doubt about the sufficiency of the charges brought against García Ortiz to force him into the dock. In fact, Hurtado's order goes beyond the mere order to open oral proceedings, because his ruling is a forceful exposition of the facts incriminating García Ortiz and a vindication of his work as investigator, for which he continually relies on the order of the Appeals Chamber that upheld the indictment of the current State Attorney General and dismissed the case against his subordinate, Pilar Rodríguez. The decision to open oral proceedings thus reflects the progress and results of the investigation. García Ortiz may be acquitted or convicted, as such an outcome is not determined by his indictment, but he will arrive at the oral trial with a trail of malpractice and arbitrariness that are incompatible with his continued position as head of the Prosecutor's Office. The accusation of revealing secrets about Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner is not an isolated incident in García Ortiz's career, as he was also disavowed by the Third Chamber of the Supreme Court for having made appointments with abuse of power, which is the non-criminal form of a kind of administrative prevarication. García Ortiz's proclivity for illegality—alleged or declared—is a stigma for the rule of law and, especially, for the Public Prosecutor's Office, but it fits in with the modus operandi of Pedro Sánchez's government, which, in a further provocation to judges and prosecutors, continues to confirm the accused as head of the prosecutors' office. Sánchez is not doing this out of affection for the Attorney General, but rather out of pure personal utilitarianism, given that García Ortiz is merely an instrument of defiance against a justice system that has his relatives indicted or accused.

Spanish society will have the humiliating privilege of seeing a serving Attorney General sitting in the dock, exercising his hierarchical functions over the prosecutors, including the one who will represent the Prosecutor's Office in the oral trial. Judge Hurtado has refused to provisionally suspend García Ortiz from those duties, because the law does not provide for this measure. This is logical: no one could have foreseen the absurdity of an Attorney General refusing to resign or not being dismissed by the government after being accused of a crime committed in the course of his duties. It is urgent to reform the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecutor's Office to prevent a repeat of this regrettable episode, although García Ortiz still has the moment of dignity that would be granted by his immediate resignation.

It's clear that the government isn't going to stand still. Given the tenacity with which it seeks to defuse or hinder the legal cases that directly affect Pedro Sánchez—and this one involving the Attorney General is one of them—we cannot rule out maneuvers against the judges of the Second Chamber who will form García Ortiz's court. Sánchez's strategists recklessly filed a complaint against the judge investigating Begoña Gómez and concocted a fraudulent application for special jurisdiction in the case against Sánchez's brother. Judge Hurtado has finished his work. A new phase begins, in which the government has already prepared the delegitimizing message of "lawfare" against a possible conviction. And, in any case, he will always have Conde-Pumpido in the Constitutional Court and the pardon in the Official State Gazette.