Fillon case: Attorney General denies pressure

Scratched off the shelves. A practice in ancient Egypt was to hammer the cartouches of the unworthy pharaohs in order to make their name disappear from posterity. Thursday, in two hours of hearing by the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the independence of justice, Catherine Champrenault, the attorney general of Paris, particularly on edge, has hardly pronounced the name of her former financial national prosecutor , Éliane Houlette.

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This shows the relationships they had during the Fillon affair. At the outset, the high magistrate hammered: "I solemnly tell you, in the Fillon case, as in all the other files under my hierarchical control, I received no instructions from the directorate of criminal affairs and pardons , no instructions from the executive power and I have never relayed a request from the Keeper of the Seals or the executive power to influence a procedure. ”

Who is lying under oath?

The Attorney General was heard once again by the Parliamentary Commission of the National Assembly on the independence of the justice system, after having been accused of incessant pressure in the Fillon case, by Éliane Houlette, during her hearing on June 10 . “There were only four requests for feedback, two from the justice system, two at my request. Nine others were spontaneous, " said Catherine Champrenault, who previously discussed at length the legality of the feedback.

"Their intensity followed that of the investigative acts carried out with beating beat" , she recalls, revealing that the financial parquet had established a "chrono" of the investigations as of January 25, in order to manage the acts from day to day for him -even. Chrono that he transmitted "spontaneously and without difficulty" . What contradict the words of Éliane Houlette who, she, declined a very long list of requests for transmission. "Who is lying under oath?" , questions the deputy Olivier Marleix, deputy LR.

A legal "innovation"

Incidentally, Catherine Champrenault also returned to the qualification of the facts, conceding a legal “innovation” in the Fillon case. Contrary to the past, the jobs of fictitious parliamentary attachés were qualified for the first time "of embezzlement of public funds" and not "breach of trust" , a complaint which, she clarified, does not come under the jurisdiction of the jurisdiction of the national financial prosecutor's office but that of Paris.

Faced with this difficulty, Catherine Champrenault claims to have provoked, on February 15, 2017, "a technical and legal meeting" to raise this point which unleashed at the time the press and the lawyers. Faced with "this serious legal uncertainty" , the public prosecutor's office strongly suggests opening judicial information in the name of "legal certainty" of the proceedings. "I know that they would like to make me say that we opened an information to have Mr. Fillon resign but his defense asked for an opening of judicial information as of February 9."

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Éliane Houlette will “brutally” slam the door of the meeting. Which says a lot about the feverishness of the magistrates in a case where serenity was essential. Catherine Champrenault thus insisted on "the confusion which was made (by Éliane Houlette, Editor's note) between the psychological pressure due to the affair and illegitimate pressures." The Attorney General seems to have been less diligent in the case of lawyers' fadettes, of which she was informed by a request for joinder of files in 2016, two and a half years after the opening of the preliminary investigation. At the time, she had not seen fit to ask for feedback.