Prosecutor wants Supreme Court to interview Lithuanian President in spokeswoman’s case

Prosecutor Gintas Ivanauskas said at the hearing he disagreed with the earlier court ruling to reject the request for an interview of the president, saying she could have been familiar with the document of the State Security Department.

“Other persons were interviewed in connection to the circumstances. I had requested an interview with the president of the Republic of Lithuania. Video recordings suggest the president was looking at the copies,” Ivanauskas told the court.

He asked the seven-judge panel of the Supreme Court to return the case for revision to a Vilnius Court, which last year ruled that the information of the State Security Department published in the media had been found a state secret without a valid reason.

The state prosecutor also wants the court to publish the telephone recordings, adding that Ulbinaitė should be subjected to a polygraph test.

Meanwhile, Ulbinaitė and her lawyer want the prosecutor’s request to be rejected as unfounded. In her words, courts of two instances have already ruled that the content of the security report provided to the President’s Office could not be a reason for listing it as a state secret.

“The requests (to interrogate the president) have already been discussed in (courts of) two instances and were examined in full, the courts ruled they had no connection to the case whatsoever,” Ulbinatė’s lawyer Giedrius Danelius told BNS.

In the lawyer’s words, the prosecutor “is mystifying the significance of evidence” in an effort to achieve examination of telephone conversations of journalists, wiretapping of which have been found as unlawful.

A finding in the case is expected on March 10.

Ulbinaitė was charged with revealing a state secret to an editor of the BNS news agency. The probe was opened after BNS Lithuania published a story in October of 2013 on the department’s warnings to state leaders about information attacks plotted by Russia against Lithuania.

Last May, a Vilnius court ruled that “although related with assessment of risk factors and threats of a foreign country, the analytical information drafted by the State Security Department was listed as a state secret without reasonable grounds, as disclosing the content will not have a negative effect upon national security and interests of the state and the society”.

Courts have also found that BNS staff were unlawfully wiretapped during the pre-trial investigation in this case, and some journalists later received compensation.