President HACKED – Loses Millions Of Docs!

Hands typing on a laptop with cybersecurity login overlay — Photo: JARIRIYAWAT / Shutterstock

Spain’s own prime minister had his phone quietly drained of data by spyware, and four years later, nobody has been charged for it.

Story Snapshot

Spain’s government confirmed Pegasus spyware infected Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s phone in May 2021, and Defense Minister Margarita Robles’s phone the following month.
Officials say the intrusion was “unlawful and conducted externally” but have never named who was behind it.
Spain’s National Cryptological Centre confirmed the phones were infected and that data was extracted, reportedly including gigabytes of messages, emails, photos and audio.
Spain’s High Court has shut down the criminal investigation twice, most recently in January, blaming Israel for refusing to cooperate.

A Sitting Prime Minister Becomes The Target

Félix Bolaños, Spain’s minister for the presidency, called an emergency press conference on a public holiday in May 2022 to deliver stunning news. Pegasus spyware, sold by Israeli firm NSO Group, had broken into Sánchez’s phone not once but twice in May 2021, and into Robles’s phone in June 2021. Bolaños described the breach bluntly, saying the intrusions were unlawful and carried out from outside Spain’s own government.

Technical reports from Spain’s National Cryptological Centre later confirmed the infections were real and that attackers pulled real data off the devices, not just probed them. One recent account puts a number on the theft, citing an estimate of roughly 2.7 gigabytes of information lifted from Sánchez’s phone, a haul that could hold years of private messages, emails, photos and audio. For the head of a NATO government, that is not a minor privacy slip.

Bolaños was careful with his words. He said the attackers were “external” and linked to “unofficial organizations without state permission,” but he stopped short of naming a country or a group. That distinction matters. Spain was, at the very moment of this announcement, also facing accusations that its own intelligence service had spied on Catalan separatists using the same software, a scandal that cost the spy chief her job days later.

Four Years, Two Dead-End Investigations

Spain’s National Court opened a criminal probe to find out who hacked its own prime minister. It has now closed that investigation twice. The most recent closure came in January, when the presiding judge said Israel simply would not answer the court’s formal requests for cooperation, known as letters rogatory, leaving investigators with no way to trace the attack back to any person or organization.

The Guardian reported that material Spain later received from French judicial authorities, who are investigating similar Pegasus targeting of French officials, did not contain anything new that would let the judge identify who used Pegasus against Spanish politicians. Without that cooperation, the case cannot legally move forward, even though the technical evidence of the hack itself was never in dispute.

A separate Spanish-language report from Moncloa.com noted that some investigations point toward Morocco as a possible source of the attacks, given long-running tensions between the two countries over Western Sahara and immigration policy. That theory has circulated for years, but it remains a pointer, not a court finding, and Spanish authorities have not made that accusation officially.

Why An Ally’s Silence On Attribution Should Bother Americans Too

This case exposes an uncomfortable truth about modern spyware. A tool powerful enough to vacuum up a head of government’s private life can be deployed with almost total deniability, because the company that built it and the government that may have used it can simply refuse to answer questions from a fellow democracy’s courts. That is not a technical failure. It is a diplomatic one.

Spain is a NATO ally, and its prime minister was hacked while running the country. If Israel, a close American partner, will not cooperate with a lawful judicial request from another Western democracy, that raises real questions about accountability for commercial spyware sold under government license. American conservatives who value national sovereignty and rule of law should see this as a warning, not a foreign curiosity.

Sánchez himself addressed the breach directly, telling the public his government identified the intrusion itself and reported it rather than covering it up, framing the response as transparency under pressure. That posture is admirable on its face. But transparency about the fact of a hack means little if the people responsible for it never face consequences, and right now, four years on, nobody has.