Warrantless wiretapping case against President Macri dropped.
Federal Judge Sebastián Casanello today dismissed phone tapping charges against Argentine President Mauricio Macri for which he was prosecuted five years ago, accused of ordering the illegal espionage of an AMIA victim family member, Sergio Burstein, and Macri’s own brother-in-law Néstor Leonardo.
According to judicial sources, Casanello considered investigators failed to collect enough evidence to prove that the now President was aware of the illegal tapping of phone records on Macri’s former brother-in-law Néstor Leonardo and Sergio Burstein, who lost his wife in the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center bomb attack.
Macri was prosecuted in 2009 by then Federal Judge Norberto Oyarbide along with other 11 defendants who, unlike Macri, will face trial, among them ex-spy Ciro James and ex-head of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police Jorge “Fino” Palacios (both Macri appointees).
Judge Casanello considered a request by prosecutor Jorge Di Lello to clear Macri from the phone-tapping charges of being responsible of setting an alleged espionage structure carried out by the Buenos Aires City administration he was in charge of as mayor.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/205768/phonetapping-case-against-president-macri-dropped
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The acquittal itself was a fait accompli: Di Lello and Casanello are members of the "judicial branch" of Macri's right-wing party, the PRO.
What Macri's motivation might have been for wiretapping his eccentric brother-in-law, we may never know. The Sergio Burstein case is far more serious, however, because Burstein is the head of 18-J, the most prominent of the three victims' rights groups representing survivors and loved ones of those killed or maimed in the 1994 AMIA (Jewish Mutual Association) Center bombing.
Burstein's 18-J, like the other two AMIA survivors groups, has publicly expressed doubts as to the official story that Hezbollah set a car bomb at the site with Iran's connivance (there was no crater at all, and the bomb pattern matched that of an inside bomb - as corroborated by the only forensic studies ever done on the bombing). All three survivors groups had been calling for the removal of the special prosectutor, the late Alberto Nisman, for sabotaging the very case he was appointed to investigate.
That fact that charges still stand against señores James and Palacios could still make this interesting though: James worked for years as Macri's personal private eye, and is believed to know where all the Macri family's bodies are buried (so to speak); and Palacios, a right-wing extremist and former policeman, has already been indicted for his role in sabotaging the AMIA investigation during the Menem era. Stay tuned.