On May 19, at the TAP Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, it went like this: The deputy of the Liberal Initiative Bernardo Blanco asked the Minister of Infrastructure, João Galamba, where the idea came from to contact SIS on the night of April 26 , when a deputy fired by the governor, Frederico Pinheiro, took home a laptop on duty that allegedly contained classified material.
“Who told you to contact SIS?asked the deputy.The Prime Minister’s OfficeGalamba replied.It was Secretary of State Mendonça Mendes [secretário de Estado adjunto do primeiro-ministro]?Bernardo Blanco insisted. And the minister answered yes, but without saying anything, just nodding his head. He had said before that it was Mendonça Mendes who told him that since there were classified documents that could be lost, the “relevant” entities to handle the case would be the PJ and the SIS.
However, this Thursday, in response to the 15 written questions put to him by the PSD, the Prime Minister assured a different story: “The initiative to contact the Security Information Service [SIS] it came from the Chief of Cabinet to the Minister of Infrastructure, not following a suggestion from the Prime Minister’s Deputy Secretary of State”.
Therefore, the government truth is this: Mendonça Mendes may have even spoken to Galamba about the SIS; but at the time, the Minister’s Chief of Staff, Eugénia Correia, had contacted the intelligence services on her own initiative. In other words, no one in the prime minister’s office, beginning with him and ending with his assistant secretary of state, had anything to do with the intelligence intervention that night (a service official went to the home of the dismissed deputy sheriff and rescued the computer , which is now with the PJ after passing CEGER, the services that manage the government’s computer network).
“Settings Breakdown”
Responding to the PSD, António Costa again said that Galamba’s chief of staff acted “correctly” in activating the SIS. Which in turn acted “adequately and proportionately within the scope of its preventive powers, given the current assessment of the threat framework on critical infrastructures and given the warning of security breaches of classified documents at the Ministry of Infrastructure, as a result of the unlawful appropriation and use of force of a computer owned by the Portuguese state”.
Speaking later to Portuguese journalists in Moldova, where he took part in the second summit of the European Political Community, the head of government added something that “surprises” him in this story: “It is the way Portugal suddenly devalues the relevant security breach related to classified documents. We all remember how very recently a former President of the United States and the President of the United States were the subject of investigation”. That is to say: “I would like to know what the opposition would say if I lost a classified document, if there was a security breach in a classified document of mine and I did not report it to the authorities, what would they say.”
Luís Montenegro, leader of the PSD, would respond to the Prime Minister’s comments as follows: “If the answers sent to parliament are those circulated in the media, there is confusion in the government of Portugal.” The Social Democrats, however, preferred to focus on another issue: Costa publicly announced the answers before handing them over to the PSD, a “disrespect for Parliament” and “misuse of the institutions”, in the words of the parliamentary leader of the Social Democrats, Miranda Sarmento. To this accusation, Costa replied that he was limiting himself to doing the same thing as the PSD (publicizing the application with the questions before formalizing them in parliament).
“Long Distance” Contacts
In between, the President of the Republic also commented – but only to confirm that “intelligence services belong to the state, not to a government, whatever it may beFor the rest, he adds nothing more because “no head of state speaks publicly about problems with intelligence services.” argument, downplaying the omission: “The subject of the intelligence services was not mentioned in the first contacts [esses contactos] were at a distance”.
[Ver AQUI, na íntegra, as perguntas do PSD e as respostas do primeiro-ministro]
Source: DN
