MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

CFK insists Judiciary Party all out against her

The VP insisted the Prosecution had no arguments against her rebuttal in the corruption case and that Judge Capuchetti overlooked many leads in her assassination attempt

Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (CFK) Monday insisted Prosecutor Diego Luciani and “The judiciary party” were “at full strength” against her. Earlier in the day, she recused Judge María Eugenia Capuchetti from the assassination attempt case.

“You who listened and saw the hearings of the road trial, where the documentary, testimonial and expert evidence that we exhibited demolished the lies of the prosecutors... Look at what Luciani says now, when it is his turn to reply,” CFK wrote while posting a brief video of Luciani in which he says that “he has nothing to reply. We are not going to answer.”

Then she listed 31 videos on YouTube containing “historical and documented evidence of the legal and factual refutation of each and every one of the lies exposed by prosecutors Luciani and Mola.”

“From meetings that never existed, to telephone records where only Macrista businessmen appear talking about bids and price redeterminations. The Judiciary Party at full speed,” CFK went on.

Regarding the recusal of Judge Capuchetti, CFK said that “her irregularities and arbitrariness are detailed, from the first day, when [the arrested would-be shooter Fernando] Sabag Montiel's cell phone was erased.”

In his new appearance before the court Monday, Luciani claimed that the defense lawyers made “politically tinged assessments, unfounded and not very serious arguments” while calling for a speedy sentence in the next few days. “What we intend to do is to give the maximum speed so that the court may issue the verdict it deems appropriate”, he explained.

Regarding Capuchetti, CFK's lawyers argued that there was an “accumulation of irregularities that have caused our client to lose confidence in the intervening magistrate” while underlining that “almost two and a half months after the attack, a series of clearly arbitrary resolutions and the total investigative paralysis have convinced us of a manifest bias against this party,” since most of the evidence requested has been “rejected, or carried out late, when its effectiveness depended on speed.”

They added that the magistrate did not delegate the investigation, but neither did she “promote a single line of investigation, did not ask questions to the witnesses and blocked any hypothesis that goes beyond Brenda Uliarte, Fernando André Sabag Montiel and Gabriel Nicolás Carrizo ... even though there is ample evidence that points to other paths.”

Hence, “an endless number of attitudes of the magistrate ... leave us no other alternative but to recuse her.”