Rajoy’s statement in the Kitchen case, international pressure on Iran and the controversy over a judge in Madrid mark the information day. This is how Carlos Alsina summarizes the main news of the day.
Rajoy and Cospedal in the Kitchen trial
The first thing is Mariano Rajoy’s statement in the kitchen trial. Statement that lasted less than expected. 36 minutes. Partly because the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has not asked questions. Partly because the former president of the government has responded as much as he could with monosyllables. They did not inform him about box B. The PP did not try to destroy evidence of its existence. Bárcenas did not give him anything and, therefore, he did not destroy anything in the crusher. What’s more, he believes that if the former treasurer had had any audio a long time ago he would have made it public. And so, between the noes and the absolutely false, Rajoy’s testimony passed.
Except for the only new thing that his statement contributed. For the first time, he has supported the police operation without any doubt. That is, for Rajoy it was not espionage but a completely legal investigation.
Rajoy has said that his Minister of the Interior Fernández Díaz never discussed with him the evolution of the judicial investigations into Gürtel or box B. Even less so with the Secretary of State Francisco Martínez because he said that he was the one he mainly spoke to was the ministers.
After the number one of the match it was the turn of the number two. María Dolores de Cospedal explained that she was sure that Bárcenas did not have compromising information for the match. And that he never learned that anyone had followed him despite his eight or nine meetings with Villarejo. What she said is that she asked the former commissioner why he thought it was the party that was being spied on. But she only asked him and never ordered him to investigate anything.
Like Rajoy, even more so, she also defends the honorability of Fernández Díaz. An upright and upright person, he says, who has suffered a lot. They never spoke, he says, of any follow-up to Bárcenas. He could not avoid once again making clear his bad relationship with the former manager. And he clings to her to say that once he was fired he didn’t want to know anything more about him.
Trump, Iran and the Hormuz blockade
Donald Trump is back on his feet and no longer knows how to get Iran to sit at the negotiating table. Trump says he is in no hurry, but neither with successive extensions of ceasefires nor with continued threats has he been able to make a dent in the Iranian regime. The last one, sink any ship that lays mines in Hormuz. Which clashes with his repeated claim that Iran has no Navy left. Trump claims that the Iranians contacted them offering to reopen the Strait but that he refused because he wants to cut off their oil revenues until an agreement is signed.
The American president once again excuses his failure because it is not clear who is in charge in Iran. With Khamenei II out of the game, the hard and moderate sectors are fighting, according to the US, to take control. And in all of this, Netanyahu’s government is once again pressing to be allowed to attack Iran again and destroy the country’s main energy facilities to, as Trump already threatened, return the country to the Stone Age.
Judicial controversy in Madrid
And about Judge David Maman Benchimol. Head of the Court of Violence against Women No. 8 of Madrid, of which a conference he gave on February 18 at the Madrid Bar Association on criminal procedure has now been made public, in which he said, among other things, that it is logical for women to report their partners or ex-partners because of the advantages they have.
Or criticizing that women do not accept shared custody when in their opinion it is worse for them with the intention of delaying the judge’s ruling and washing the children’s shit.
The Ministry of Equality has already asked the CGPJ to open a file and investigate these statements as it considers them incompatible with judicial impartiality. Benchimol is the judge in charge of the complaint filed by a subordinate with former DAO José Ángel González. And therefore the one who rejected the complainant’s request to prohibit him from communicating with her.
