The committee’s report on the “Benalla Affair” said “major dysfunction” was apparent in the president’s office and said they believed there was evidence that Macron’s security had been compromised.
The report came following an investigation into the violent conduct of Benalla, a former security aide of the president and part of his inner circle, during a Paris street protest.
It suggested Benalla’s alleged links to a Russian oligarch posed a serious conflict of interest and a potential threat to presidential security and national interests.
The damning 120-page report was published on Wednesday following a six-month inquiry, during which the committee quizzed Benalla, 27, after he was filmed attacking two protesters at a May Day demonstration, at which he was observing a police operation, last year.
The senate committee concluded Benalla was “inexperienced” and had been granted excessive powers. It said Macron and his team had been wrong not to immediately report him to the authorities after the incident, instead allowing him to remain in his job until a video of the demonstration became public. The report said facts had initially been kept from the legal authorities.
The committee also expressed doubt over whether Benalla had been properly disciplined and questioned why he had been reportedly allowed to keep at least two diplomatic passports.
Benalla and a second man, Vincent Crase, a former Republican Guard and gendarme employed by Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party, both under investigation over the May Day demonstration, were arrested and placed in police custody after reportedly breaching their parole conditions. They are in prison after the investigative website Mediapart published transcripts of conversations between them after they were ordered by a magistrate not to communicate with each other.
When the Benalla scandal broke last summer, Macron described it as a “storm in a tea cup”; seven months on the president and his closest aides continue to suffer the fallout from increasingly damaging revelations.
One of the president’s special advisors reportedly implicated in the scandal, Ismaël Emelien, resigned last week though the Elysée insisted his departure was not connected to the investigation.
On Wednesday morning, Philippe Bas, the president of the cross-party Sénat commission, presented the report. He said the investigation encompassed several issues, including “an affair over the irregular carrying of weapons, an affair of Russian contracts, an affair of diplomatic passports, an affair of the muddling of a head of mission in the proper functioning of presidential security”.
It criticised a “lack of precaution and diligence” by Macron in the “prevention of a conflict of interest between certain aides”.
In a statement, senators said they were not seeking to interfere with ongoing investigations, but that Benalla had clearly played an “essential role” in Macron’s security.
“He had at his disposal important, top-level, means – unprecedented at the Elysée – including permission to carry a weapon obtained under questionable conditions,” it found.
“Efforts of the highest officials of the presidency of the Republic to present his missions as limited to organisational tasks remain, however, barely credible.”
The report also expressed concern about Benalla’s reported connections with a Russian oligarch. “Those business relations could have made Messers Benalla and Crase the weak links in the head of state’s security, by placing them under the control of a foreign interest,” it said.
“In addition, the law commission has stressed the need to recall that those who work with political authorities should not interfere with the correct functioning of administrations, what are not under their authority but that of the government and and the directors of the central administration.”
It concluded: “Finally, it is not in the spirit of the Constitution that those working for the Prime Minister are simultaneously working for the President of the Republic.”
It added that some of Macron’s closest aides, including his office director, had given misleading information about Benalla’s role at the Elysée that had been “contradicted by factual elements collected during the work of the committee”.
It is now up to the senate’s president to decide whether to follow through on the recommendations of the committee and file a complaint with the prosecutor’s office.
News Source: Goal.com, RT.com, theguardian.com, Dailymail.co.uk
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