The accusations of the CNI against the president of the Generalitat
The CNI accused Aragonès of being the leader of the underground CDRs and requested authorization to access his mobile phone with the Pegasus software, as revealed by ElNacional.cat. The judicial documentation that the Spanish government has declassified includes the arguments that the CNI presented to justify the spying on the head of the Catalan Government with the Pegasus software. “Aragonès has coordinated the actions of the CDR” or “Aragonès, without respecting his institutional role and in a hidden way, has continued to carry out the tasks of head of the CDR”, are some of the textual statements that appear in the documentation, as reported ElNacional.cat.
With these accusations, the CNI asked to be able to use Pegasus to access the communications of the current president of the Generalitat and indicated that it did not want to spy on him as vice-president, but as head of the Defense Committees of the Republic. “It is requested [to be able to spy on him] not because of his capacity as vice-president of the Generalitat, but because of the function of directing and coordinating the activities of the CDRs,” the CNI asserts in its request. It is not known if in its request the CNI provided evidence to Supreme Court magistrate Pablo Lucas to allow the intervention of Aragonès’ phone from July 2019 to April 2020. The president defends that it was 2018 and, therefore without legal cover.
The censored and deleted documentation
The defense received this Thursday the documentation, full of censored parts, which prevent us from understanding the meaning of many of the fragments, with pages completely erased. According to sources close to the president, the explanations given by the CNI to access telephone communications “are out of line with reality, are fictions and are totally implausible”.
The Spanish government has sent the declassified documentation to the judge in the Pegasus case at the Barcelona court this Thursday, 24 hours before Paz Esteban appears as a suspect. In this way, he rectified a communication from this same week in which the judge informed the declassification of the communications, but without handing him the three Supreme resolutions that authorized the CNI to access Aragonès’ phone, when he was vice-president of the Government .
The reaction of the Minister of Defense and Moncloa
For her part, the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, has acknowledged this Thursday during an intervention in Congress, that her government has sent the judge the documentation “absolutely essential” and “without any frivolity” because the former director of the CNI can testify and be questioned this Friday about the espionage in Aragonès. According to Robles, in this documentation “it is clear” that “everything was done with judicial authorization” and, therefore, “with absolute respect for the law”.
After the CNI’s reasons for accessing Pere Aragonès’ mobile phone were made public, Spanish government sources wanted to point out that “now there is transparency, guarantees and the rule of law” while with the PP “there was a dirty war and parallel polices”.
The Spanish government says that the CNI operations shown in the declassified documentation were carried out before they arrived in Moncloa and “always had judicial authorization”. “Neither the CNI nor the Supreme Court must inform, logically, the government”, say the same sources. They frame the declassification in the government’s will to collaborate with justice “always with the limit of national security”. For the Spanish government, the news about espionage in Aragonès published this Thursday show that “the rule of law now works and acts with transparency, nothing to do with the parallel police and the dirty war of the stage of PP”.
