Alleged political contacts with the CIA, FBI and US Embassy Santiago O'Donnell, an Argentine journalist and writer who published the books
Argenleaks and
Politileaks, both of which analyse the
Wikileaks cable leak concerning Argentina's foreign and domestic policies, stated that during his investigation, he found clear and strong ties and "friendship" between Nisman, the
CIA and the
Embassy of Argentina in Washington, D.C. Some analysts claim that there was a "smear campaign" against Nisman for his involvement as prosecutor in the AMIA bombing case.
Alleged money laundering and undeclared earnings Following the emerging data in the judicial inquiry into the death of Nisman, the federal prosecutor
Juan Zoni asked the judge of the same jurisdiction
Rodolfo Canicoba Corral to summon a statement from some relatives or close friends of Nisman people. The order included the mother, Sara Garfunkel, her sister Sandra, former ITF AMIA
Diego Lagomarsino, and the businessman
Alejandro Picón. The prosecutor said the four defendants have been figureheads of Nisman and that Nisman's real estate was not justified according to the income he received while in office. According to prosecutor Zoni, among those assets that were appointed to third parties are: • The
Audi Q3 car used by Nisman, which was in the name of Palermopack, the company owned by Alejandro Picón. • The undeclared account in
Merrill Lynch bank (New York), with an amount of more than U$S 670,000 attributed to the name of Diego Lagomarsino (Nisman's employee), Sandra Nisman (his sister) and Sara Garfunkel (Nisman's mother). • A trust for two apartments with two parking garages, which are named after Sara Garfunkel; and two lots of sea farms (
chacras) in
Punta del Este which are also named after Sara Garfunkel. Judge Canicoba Corral made the request and set dates for the declarations, but before they were carried out, the Federal Chamber ordered—at the request of Sara Garfunkel—that Canicoba Corral cease to attend the case and that Judge
Claudio Bonadio intervene. The reason for the withdrawal was an alleged partiality of the Judge Canicoba Corral, who had previously criticized Nisman and had made remarks in the media assuming Nisman's
money laundering to be almost certain. Diego Lagomarsino, the man who declared that he had given Alberto Nisman the gun from which the mortal shot came out, stated that every month he gave his boss 50 percent of his salary, against his will. He explained to the Justice that he gave the money to Nisman in his hand, in the department of Le Parc of the latter, and without witnesses. Lagomarsino also confirmed that he was co-owning with Nisman a bank account at the Merrill Lynch Bank of New York and that he made money transfers to pay the expenses of a field in Uruguay. The data on Nisman's estate were provided two months after the death, in a letter signed by Lagomarsino and his lawyers and presented to the prosecutor Viviana Fein.
Human rights violations in La Tablada barracks The
1989 attack on La Tablada barracks was an assault on the military
barracks located in
La Tablada, in the
province of
Buenos Aires,
Argentina, by 40 members of
Movimiento Todos por la Patria (MTP), an Argentine
leftist urban guerrilla group commanded by former
ERP leader
Enrique Gorriarán Merlo. 39 people were killed and 60 injured by the time the
Argentine Army retook the barracks. The MTP carried out the assault under the alleged pretense of preventing a military coup supposedly planned for the end of January 1989 by the
Carapintadas, a group of
far-right military officers opposed to the investigations concerning
Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship (1976–1983), its widespread Human Rights abuses, and the use of
State terrorism against civilians. In 1989, Gerardo Larrambebere (then federal judge of Morón), appointed Nisman as the secretary in charge of the investigation on the allegations of
forced disappearance of Iván Ruiz and José Díaz, two of the guerrilla members who participated during the fight on La Tablada barracks. Nisman filed the case due to "lack of evidence". In 1997, the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled that Ruiz and Díaz had been victims of crimes against humanity and that the Argentine State and its Juditial power had failed to comply with its duty to investigate and punish the people responsible. Twenty years later the case was reactivated and the then federal judge of Morón ordered the prosecution and capture of soldiers suspected of having committed the crimes. In December 2018, during the third hearing of the trial for the human rights violations committed during the recovery of the La Tablada barracks in 1989, a surprising revelation occurred when two soldiers who had participated in the events claimed under oath that Iván Ruiz and José Díaz were captured alive, tortured
and then disappeared by the Army (known as
Desaparecidos in Argentina). But one of them went further: César Ariel Quiroga, at the time the driver of an ambulance inside the Tablada barracks, reported that he was forced to sign a statement with facts that he did not see and which cleared the name of the military in the disappearance of Ruiz and Díaz. The caller refused to cut off the communication and the house phone was blocked. The stalker threatened her and spoke obscenities of all kinds. According to the plaintiff's deposition: "Among the man's descriptions was an insistent obsession with genitality and the size and firmness of the penis". In a 2015 book by journalist and news editor
Daniel Santoro, it is explained that the charges against Nisman were dropped since it was never wrought to a proper trial for a long time: "Meanwhile, the AMIA prosecutors learned that an attractive woman lawyer had filed a charge of sexual harassment against Nisman. His judicial colleagues were skeptical until they heard the voice recorded on the accusing lawyer’s phone; it was Nisman's. Thanks to judicial bureaucracy and perhaps favors from cronies in the court system, the statute of limitations had lapsed, and the charge was filed away". In 2018, Lagomarsino stated: "I worked a long time with Nisman, but did not know him. I started to see things that broke the image I had of him, like that he harassed a minor or La Tablada [Human Rights' violations]". A 2018 article by Mariana Escalada and Agustín Ronconi showed pictures of the judicial record that present a transcript of one of the phone calls, while adding: "Many transcripts are irreproducible due to the pornographic expressions of the man who at the time was insistently calling the young woman lawyer [Nisman's expressions]". In January 2020, journalist Pablo Duggan stated on a program for the
cable news channel
C5N that Nisman's sexual harassment was indeed real—showing also the files in the Ministry of Justice as evidence—adding that the harassment of a young woman by Nisman was systematic and mostly done everyday by phone calls; the charges were never wrought to trial, but, according to Duggan, it was one of the secrets Nisman tried to hide away during his entire career, especially in his last days. Duggan also adds that when a judge and a politician were pressuring prosecutor Gabriel Cavallo to stop the investigation against Nisman, Cavallo made them listen to a minute of the recordings: they stopped listening and left the room while saying that "it was disgusting"; Duggan also concluded by saying "Nisman could not be convicted because at the time we [Argentina] had no laws concerning sexual harassment". ==Society and culture==