Posted Oct 3, 2022 10:43 AMUpdated Oct 3, 2022, 10:44 a.m.
This is a first for a Minister of Justice in office. The Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) ordered a trial against Eric Dupond-Moretti on Monday. The former tenor of the bar, appointed head of the Chancellery in the summer of 2020 and reappointed to this post after the re-election in May of Emmanuel Macron, was summoned at 9:00 a.m. with his lawyers before the CJR investigation committee .
“As unfortunately we expected it, it is a judgment of dismissal which was rendered by the commission of the instruction” (of the CJR, editor’s note), announced Me Christophe Ingrain and Rémi Lorrain at the exit of the CJR, in Paris, in the absence of the person concerned. “We immediately lodged an appeal in cassation against this judgment. This stop no longer exists, ”they further specified.
“It is now up to the plenary assembly of the Court of Cassation to take up this file and to rule in particular on the numerous irregularities which have marred this file for two years, in the forefront of which is the atypical positioning since unfair and biased of the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation”, François Molins, further estimated Me Rémi Lorrain.
The Elysée has so far maintained its confidence
Despite the appeal in cassation, the dismissal of Eric Dupond-Moretti will not fail to pose once again the question of the maintenance of the government of the former criminal lawyer. The ex-lawyer will now have to convince Emmanuel Macron that his legal troubles, unprecedented for a Keeper of the Seals, will not hinder his mission to “repair” an institution in chronic crisis. “I have always said that I held my legitimacy from the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister and from them alone,” he said recently, anticipating his dismissal on trial.
The executive has so far maintained its confidence in him and seems to care about this divisive and eruptive minister who does not hesitate to attack right and left, the National Rally like La France insoumise, or to denounce the climate of “denouncement that certain feminists would reign.
An opening of judicial information in January 2021
Eric Dupond-Moretti is accused of having taken advantage of his position, once at the head of the Ministry of Justice, to settle scores with magistrates with whom he had had trouble when he was a lawyer, which he dispute. Complaints from magistrates’ unions and the anti-corruption association Anticor, denouncing two situations of conflict of interest since his arrival at the Chancellery, had given rise to the opening of a judicial investigation in January 2021.
The first case concerns the administrative investigation he ordered in September 2020 against three magistrates of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF). They had had his detailed telephone bills (“fadettes”) go through when Eric Dupond-Moretti was still a star at the bar in order to flush out a possible mole who would have informed Nicolas Sarkozy that he was being tapped in the so-called corruption case. Paul Bismuth.
A PNF deputy prosecutor, Patrice Amar, and his ex-boss, Eliane Houlette, appeared in September before the Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM), which is due to render its decision on October 19. No sanction was required against them. The third magistrate implicated, Ulrika Delaunay-Weiss, was cleared before any hearing before the CSM.
In the second case, the Keeper of the Seals is accused of having initiated administrative proceedings against a former investigating judge seconded to Monaco, Edouard Levrault, who had indicted one of his ex-clients. Eric Dupond-Moretti had criticized his “cowboy” methods. The CSM decided on September 15 not to sanction Edouard Levrault, considering that “no disciplinary breach could be blamed on him”. A decision that sounded like a disavowal of the minister. Throughout the investigation, Eric Dupond-Moretti repeated that he had only “followed the recommendations of his administration”.
