The article below is a draft report of the hearing on 17 February. A more extensive report of the three hearings that week (17, 18 and 21 February 2025) comes in the form of this video:
What excitement could there possibly be left after one year and around 40 court hearings, during which seemingly all has been said in the criminal proceedings against one of Germany’s top lawyers and co-founder of the Corona Investigative Committee (CIC)? Yet, on 17 February, the audience in Göttingen’s court room, the (lay) judges and even the guards sat spellbound for hours, listening to Reiner Fuellmich connecting facts and dates, reconstructing the past five years of his fact-finding life, which could as well have been plotted by John Grisham. The Bundestag-candidate’s gripping plea, weaving personal and professional observations with sharp criticism and references in (case) law, made abundantly clear why heaven and earth was moved to jail this man: Germany’s prospective and perhaps most liberal Chancellor had to be silenced, professionally paralysed and cancelled.
“It was, I realise now, my email to Viviane Fischer of 26 August, 2022, that must have made the Verfassungsschutz (German intelligence service) panic. The email in which I announced that my house was about to be sold for around 1.3 million Euros, after which I would pay back my ‘safekeeping’ loans. Learning that their would-be charge of embezzlement, the one straw they were clutching at, was about to crumble, that must have been the moment they decided to confiscate most of the €1.3 million, thus making it impossible for me to repay the loan.”
Having been kept in prison for 16 months on remand, so far, in a high security section of a high security prison, six months of which in isolation and barely recovered from the flu, Fuellmich looked worn on entering the court. It came therefore as a surprise, when his main lawyer, Katja Wörmer, asked Chair Schindler, if he would allow her client to plea, in addition to him stating his final word, on the final day(s) of the proceedings.
The judges accepted the unusual request, after a brief discussion in their back room. As Fuellmich ordered the facts substantiating the first of a string of illegal measures ordered by the German government, as well as by the current chamber of judges, his energy visibly returned.
“Why is there a police file labeled “Corona” in my dossier, when my alleged crime is financial?”
Several topics formed the skeleton of his plea: his abduction by the German government from Mexico; the conclusions of three different public prosecutors regarding his case; the abuse of law by the court; the extent of a lawyer’s freedom of expression; and the role of the four lawyers who helped to build a case against him, on the behest of German intelligence services.
If his performance on the CIC and subsequent California-based ICIC.LAW platforms may have impressed viewers, Fuellmich’s qualities as a lawyer in a real court setting are of a notably greater magnitude.