Aufgrund des großen internationalen Interesses an demr«Causa Fuellmich» veröffentlichen wir dieses Interview mit seiner Anwältin Katja Wörmer hiermit auch auf Englisch.

Due to the great international interest in the «Fuellmich case», we are publishing our German interview with his lawyer Katka Wörmer also in English.

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Lawyer and Corona-Ausschuss (Corona Committee) founder Reiner Fuellmich has been in pretrial detention since October 2023. Among other things, he is accused of embezzling 700,000 euros, which he received in the form of two loans – with amounts of 500,000 and 200,000 euros originating from the Corona Committee.

In an interview with Transition News published on January 30, Fuellmich said: "The accusation is a mirage and would collapse if Viviane Fischer were heard." The whole thing was a "show trial", said the 66-year-old. Behind it he identifies the three lawyers Justus Hoffmann, Marcel Templin and Antonia Fischer, who according to him were "infiltrated by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution" and then "became undercover informants themselves".

However, Viviane Fischer was no longer heard extensively, and the court not only did not investigate Fuellmich’s accusations against the lawyers Hoffmann, Templin and Antonia Fischer, it even dismissed them as "ridiculous", as Fuellmich’s lawyer Katja Wörmer criticized in this interview with Transition News. In it, she also fundamentally criticizes the verdict handed down against Fuellmich last Thursday, according to which he is to serve a prison sentence of three years and nine months. An appeal will be lodged in any case. In addition, a second trial before the district court is imminent, she says.

Transition News: Last Thursday evening, the Göttingen Regional Court sentenced lawyer and Corona Committee founder Reiner Fuellmich to three years and nine months in prison for embezzling around 700,000 euros. What impact does this sentence have on him and on you?

Katja Wörmer: In the summer, the public prosecutor’s office had demanded exactly three years and nine months while maintaining the arrest warrant, in a ten-minute plea in which the hearing of evidence was not mentioned or acknowledged at all. And it was precisely this demand, that the court complied with in its judgment. This is very, very unusual, because courts usually fall well short of the prosecution’s demand.

And how do you see it personally?

The verdict is sobering, but was also somewhat expected. The chamber had repeatedly made it clear throughout the trial that it considered Reiner guilty and emphasized in the numerous decisions to continue his imprisonment, which were issued in response to the petitions for a review of his detention that we had filed, that the defendant could expect a severe prison sentence and that, according to the chamber’s – at that time preliminary – assessment, there were two counts of embezzlement. In the oral reasons for the judgment, the chamber now spoke of "two serious cases of breach of trust".

The court also decided not to count five months of the time served on remand towards the prison sentence imposed. How do you classify this – especially as Section 51 (1) of the German Criminal Code stipulates that the time spent in pre-trial detention counts towards the prison sentence to be served?

By not crediting five months of pre-trial detention, the chamber is ultimately punishing our defense work. In the oral reasons for the verdict, the presiding judge emphasized that it should have been clear to the defence and the accused since 24 January 2024 how the chamber would legally assess the criminal charge. However, the main hearing was only opened on February 2, 2024. Therefore, if one follows these words of the presiding judge, the entire main hearing, including the taking of evidence, would have been superfluous and Reiner Fuellmich could have been sentenced directly in purely written proceedings.

Yet you have made every effort to demonstrate Fuellmich’s innocence, for example by submitting extensive motions for evidence.

The Chamber is of the opinion that the taking of evidence was concluded at the latest on May 2, 2024 with the issuance of the legal notice at that time and was therefore also terminated ex officio. All motions for evidence filed by the defense after that date were therefore also rejected – initially with reasons.

The chamber only allowed additional questioning of a few witnesses who had been summoned by the defense on behalf of the defendant in the so-called self-loading procedure. However, this questioning was only allowed to be carried out to a very limited extent and on very restricted issues after special authorization by the chamber.

And why did this not work?

Overall, the Chamber judged the defense work that had taken place after 2 May 2024 by the defense lawyers and the accused himself not to be relevant, but to be an abuse of rights. In the oral reasons for the judgment, the presiding judge stated that the case should have been referred to the next instance at that time, i.e. the appeal to the Federal Court of Justice. And she should have given up the defense work in the proceedings before the Göttingen Regional Court.

In particular, in the opinion of the chamber, the accused did not use the subsequent hearing of evidence to positively convince them of his innocence, but rather allegedly used the court proceedings and pre-trial detention as a political stage to present himself and spread political messages to his supporters and the public.

What do you say to that?

From the point of view of the defense, this assessment by the chamber makes the political nature of the trial more than clear. The accusation is also misguided in light of the fact that Reiner Fuellmich would have had a much better chance of "spreading his message" or continuing his educational work in freedom. Especially before his arrest, he had a "broad stage" in the context of the Corona Committee, but also through his successor format "ICIC.law" and also before the Corona period as a consumer protection lawyer in the prosecution of so-called "junk real estate cases" etc. and was known to the public through his corresponding commitment. Reiner Fuellmich did not need a criminal trial or pre-trial detention for this.

But why does the court now not want to offset the five months of pre-trial detention served against the prison sentence imposed?

The legal requirements for not crediting periods of pre-trial detention are very high. It will be interesting to see in the written reasons for the judgment, how the court intends to justify this in such a way that it is appeal-proof.

In a statement published by Bittel TV on February 2, 2024, which has since been deleted on YouTube but can still be found on Telegram, Reiner was still very confident, saying: "The hearing of evidence continues or is just beginning now. And I am absolutely certain that the witnesses who will be heard here will confirm our version of the story." At the end of 2024, Reiner emphasized in an interview with Transition News that he was wrongly detained. According to him, the accusation is a "mirage" and the whole thing a "show trial". So how could Reiner’s conviction come about?

As already mentioned, not all of the defense witnesses were summoned and heard at the trial. And the taking of evidence was abruptly interrupted on May 2, 2024, with the Chamber’s legal notice. The witnesses subsequently summoned by the defense in the self-loading procedure were only allowed to be heard on very limited issues by admission of the Chamber. If all defense witnesses had been heard in court without restrictions, we believe that the outcome of the trial would have been different, although of course we can only express our expectations from an objective point of view.

As the defense and the defendant had already considered the chamber to be biased and subjectively prejudiced against the defendant at a very early stage, numerous motions for recusal were filed against the chamber and the presiding judge during the course of the trial, which were unfortunately unsuccessful.

The last motion for recusal was filed by the defense when the court had already invited the press to the sentencing. This gives the impression that the verdict was already certain, whereas a motion of bias against the entire criminal chamber should have been decided.

Due to the course of the trial, the conduct of the chamber or the termination or the blatant restriction of the evidence program since the beginning of May last year, Reiner also expected a corresponding verdict from this chamber.

In the aforementioned interview with Transition News, Reiner also said that "the accusation would collapse if Viviane Fischer were to be heard". In a statement he wrote in jail, which Transition News published on January 30, he reiterated that. Was that the or a sticking point?

Viviane Fischer was heard in court, but Reiner Fuellmich had filed numerous motions for evidence to hear her again and in particular to question her about the Chamber’s new legal opinion, which she had expressed in the legal notice on May 3, 2024. She argued that it was now assumed that the loan agreements had only been concluded between Viviane Fischer and the defendant as a sham and that the real intention had been to agree a liquidity reserve and conclude trust agreements. Viviane Fischer was not questioned again about this new legal assessment by the court during the proceedings. The Chamber had probably inferred this new legal assessment from the statement in the main hearing, but on the other hand repeatedly mentioned in its evidentiary rulings that the credibility and testimony of Viviane Fischer was not at all important for the legal assessment.

Viviane Fischer insisted in the interview with me «that the money should be kept as a quick liquid resource in the event of unauthorized seizure of the account ... should be held in reserve. That was what Reiner Fuellmich himself had suggested. This goal cannot be achieved with a personal loan that can only be accessed after a year or that is dependent on a house sale. So, by the very nature of things, what we had agreed could only be a ‹liquidity reserve.›» Is that so?

Only loan agreements were concluded between Viviane Fischer and Reiner Fuellmich, other contractual bases simply do not exist. The court now saw two emails from Reiner, which he had written to Viviane Fischer and the witness Weißenborn at the beginning of November 2020, as a so-called collateral agreement to the loan agreements. Based on these emails and a few chat messages from the summer of 2022 – i.e. a year and a half later – the court now concludes that no loan agreements were concluded in the present case or that they were only concluded as a sham and were therefore void and that there were fiduciary agreements instead. This is not tenable from the point of view of the defense.

In what way?

On the one hand, Reiner had only stated in the e-mails that the money was initially to be transferred to a private account. However, he also mentioned the loan agreements, abbreviated as "DV" [for "Darlehensverträge"], which were only concluded after the e-mail was sent. Nor can a formal contractual collateral agreement be inferred from the wording “from there the money can be returned to where it is supposed to go at any time” before the loan agreements are concluded. Chat messages or emails in printed form can only ever be so-called eyewitness objects in criminal proceedings. They do not constitute contractual documents and therefore cannot be reinterpreted as the content of the contract or as an alias for the contract that was only concluded later. Therefore, there were always only loan agreements. A trust agreement on a liquidity reserve was not concluded at any time.

But is this legal opinion generally valid?

This is the legal opinion of the defense, which is reflected in the facts, because the defendant even made an affidavit on the conclusion of loan agreements alone, which is before the court. He has always vehemently denied concluding trust agreements. However, if two fully qualified lawyers and attorneys choose a certain form of contract with a certain content, it can be assumed that only that which became part of the contract at the time it was concluded and was stipulated in the contract itself should be legally binding. However, private emails or chat messages, which were not even marked as part of the contract, can never become part of the contract without the knowledge and intention of the author and cannot be reinterpreted as such in retrospect – in this case almost two years later.

Reiner also said in this interview that the three lawyers Justus Hoffmann, Marcel Templin and Antonia Fischer were ultimately behind everything, that they were "infiltrated by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution" and then became "undercover informants" themselves. The aim was allegedly to take him out of circulation. How did it fail to make this clear to the court?

The chamber dismissed the statements and assumptions made regarding the use of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in the background as ridiculous and complained, that there was allegedly no evidence of this. The chamber had not only rejected and vehemently denied any influence by the judges’ services in the oral reasons for the verdict and in a decision by the presiding judge the day before, but had even considered it a slanderous insinuation.

However, in his statement to Transition News, Reiner considered the involvement of the services or the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to be already proven, firstly because of numerous terms used in the file itself. For example, a "Corona reference" was repeatedly mentioned, although it was supposed to be a purely economic crime. The reference "relevant to state security" was repeatedly found in evaluation reports, and Reiner Fuellmich was described as belonging to the "lateral thinking" (Querdenker) scene. His political activities as temporary chairman of the party dieBasis were also mentioned. These are all mentions that would be irrelevant and out of place in a purely economic crime.

In addition, the attorney Christof Miseré had presented an excerpt from a so-called dossier of one of the services during the trial, which had been leaked to him by a whistleblower. Of course, he could not name a source for this, but could only provide anonymous information in order to protect the identity of the whistleblower. In such cases, hard evidence cannot be presented in court – as is inherent in the case. The court therefore dismissed the dossier as non-existent and ridiculous, as its existence had allegedly not been proven and could not be proven. The court did not take note of the clear political references made by the terms mentioned in the file and simply ignored them.

As for Templin, even Viviane Fischer said in an interview with Transition News, she suspects “that Reiner Fuellmich ... may have a claim under the law of enrichment because Marcel Templin took something that he could take but was not allowed to keep”. So why is Templin still sitting on the more than 1 million euros?

Templin obtained the amount of 1.15 million euros from the sale of Reiner’s property in the fall of 2022. The loan of 700,000 euros was to be repaid to the committee from the sale price. Templin had previously taken over the organizational management of the mandates for the class action. Mind you, this had nothing to do with the Corona Committee. And at the time, Reiner had not settled any legal fees from the advance payments made by the class action plaintiffs, but had initially only taken out a loan of 600,000 euros. In the summer of 2022, almost all of the class action plaintiffs then switched directly to the law firm Fuellmich because they were apparently no longer satisfied with the – purely organizational – support provided by Templin. There was also a data protection incident there in spring 2022. As the loan had not been issued by Templin personally, but by the plaintiffs’ association or their advance payments, Templin no longer had any claim to the registration of the land charge in November 2022 after the sale of the property.

He had claimed to have a substantive legal claim of 1.15 million euros against the notary and the buyers of the property. However, even the criminal court assumed in its evidentiary rulings that no such claim existed. Templin, on the other hand, threatened to foreclose on the buyers of the property – and thus caused the amount to be paid out to him.

Why did Reiner not take action against this?

Reiner was in the USA at the time and was unable to take decisive action. We had already filed a criminal complaint against Templin in November 2023, and we had also officially declared the assignment of the repayment claim against Templin to his law firm colleagues Antonia Fischer and Justus Hoffmann, who represented Vor-gUG (Pre-company of a non-profit entrepreneurial company) in court, here in the criminal proceedings for use to repay the loan. However, this declaration of assignment was never accepted by the plaintiffs in the adhesion proceedings at the time, Antonia Fischer and Justus Hoffmann - and therefore, in Reiner Fuellmich’s opinion, in breach of trust.

But couldn’t Templin have transferred 700,000 euros?

Templin could indeed have simply transferred the 700,000 euros obtained from the house sale to Antonia Fischer and Justus Hoffmann, i.e. to his two law firm colleagues, as early as fall 2022. As I said, even the criminal court assumed that he had obtained the money from the house sale without legal grounds. And if Templin had done this, all the damage would have been repaid and there would have been no reason at all to arrest Reiner Fuellmich and take legal action against him.

Has Templin ever commented on this to you? He has not responded to my inquiries.

No, he did not even respond to written reminders. Incidentally, he never appeared in court either. We repeatedly asked the court to summon him as a witness. But the court did not do so. We applied for him to be summoned in a self-summons procedure, but that didn’t work either. We had a very strong feeling that the court and the public prosecutor’s office did not want him to be heard and questioned as a witness.

What happens now, i.e. will you appeal? And will you apply for bail – and if so, what are the chances of success?

We will lodge an appeal on points of law. Since the first instance has already taken place before the Regional Court, the admissible legal remedy is an appeal to the Federal Supreme Court. Bail applications or applications for the use of an electronic ankle tag submitted by us before the start of the main trial were all rejected, as were the numerous applications for a review of the arrest warrant during the trial and the appeal against arrest before the Higher Regional Court. According to the current status, there will be a second trial before the Regional Court regarding the monthly payments to the Fuellmich law firm during the time of the Corona Committee for the completion of communication work with donors, supporters, etc.

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PS: On Friday, the day after Fuellmich’s conviction, Bild.de was not too shy to declare the 66-year-old the "loser of the day" https://www.bild.de/politik/2019/po.... Of course, a media outlet doesn’t have to share Fuellmich’s opinion, but it should stick to the facts.And publicly labeling someone a "loser" on a platform with a very wide reach, against whom, as Bild.de itself writes, a verdict has been issued that "is not yet legally binding", is simply defamatory and has nothing to do with factual reporting. And then Bild.de goes one better in an unjournalistic manner and writes maliciously at the end: “Bild says: Late punishment!”

Source: Bild.de

And that’s not all. As the "winner of the day", Bild.de named Argentina’s ambassador Fernando Brun. Reason: The 54-year-old had paid tribute to Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, as someone "who had a heart for the poor, who stood for ’a church that listens.’" And because Brun will be returning to Buenos Aires in May after a good two years as chief diplomat in Berlin to become Secretary of State in the Foreign Ministry, he was sent “¡Felicitaciones!”.

Transition News says: More glorifying adulation is hardly possible. As Janine Beicht pointed out in an article, which we have adopted with the kind permission of Haintz.Media, Francis preached modesty, but in reality he ruled with an iron hand like a "pope-dictator".