Panorama hypothesize, interpret, attack. The Quirinale responds with violence and speaks of a "murky destabilizing maneuver". This morning the weekly published by Mondadori (in turn controlled by Fininvest, Silvio Berlusconi's holding company) published an "exclusive reconstruction" which sent Colle into a rage. The periodical headlines "Blackmail the President” and claims that the Head of State, on the phone with the former Interior Minister Nicola Mancino (now under investigation), let himself go to “cutting comments on Berlusconi, Di Pietro and part of the investigating judiciary in Palermo“. According to Panorama, this would be the content of the conversations intercepted by the prosecutor's office of the Sicilian capital during the investigation into the alleged State-Mafia negotiation.
The President's reply was not long in coming and in the early afternoon a fiery communiqué arrived from the Quirinale. Here is the full text:
“The campaign of insinuations and suspicions against the President of the Republic has reached a new peak with the sensational attempt by some periodicals and newspapers to pass off as truthful some alleged reconstructions of the intercepted conversations between the Head of State and Senator Mancino. Thus, authentic fakes are added to the many manipulations. The President, who has nothing to hide but values of freedom and guarantee rules to enforce, has asked the Constitutional Court to pronounce itself in terms of principle on the subject of possible direct or indirect wiretapping of his telephone conversations, and is serenely awaiting the pronounce.
What is happening, moreover, confirms the absolute objectivity and correctness of the choice made by the President of the Republic to appeal to the Constitutional Court for the protection not of his person but of the institution's own prerogatives. Risible therefore is the claim, from wherever it comes, to be able to blackmail the Head of State. The determination of President Napolitano to keep faith with his constitutional duties remains firm. Anyone who cares about the defense of the proper conduct of democratic life is up to it reject any murky destabilizing maneuver".
Soon one arrived solidarity note to the Head of State by the Superior Council of the Judiciary: "While acknowledging to its chairman the absolute correctness of his behavior in the whole matter, still recently the subject of alleged journalistic revelations - reads the text -, the Chairmanship Committee recalls in particular that intercepted conversations are not available of the head of state both because they are still subject to investigative secrecy which certainly could not be instigated to violate, and because they are the subject of the conflict of attributions raised before the Constitutional Court, which must freely decide their fate, and because their confidentiality pertains directly to the institutional and non-personal prerogatives of the President of the Republic. Therefore, any appeal to disclose or to allow the disclosure of the wiretaps would be inadmissible at present”.
