Interior Minister Spoke Untruthfully To Parliament

What Interior Minister Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir told parliament earlier this summer about police investigations of her Ministry, and what the reality was, are two different things.

As Vísir points out, Hanna Birna addressed parliament on the investigations of her Ministry on numerous occasions. On June 18, while police investigations were still ongoing, she told her colleagues that she had no knowledge of what police were uncovering and how they were conducting their investigations.

“I do not know these investigations,” she told parliament. “I do not know about them, and it would be unnatural if I knew about any part of this investigation.”

This directly contradicts what Parliamentary Ombudsman Tryggvi Gunnarsson’s third letter states about her activities in the Ministry at that time.

As was brought to light in the letter, Hanna Birna had, on many occasions before and after June 18, “questioned the scope of the investigations [of her ministry], how far we were going, that we were taking the computer of her assistant, getting information about phone records, and many other things,” former Commissioner of the Capital Area Police Stefán Eiríksson told him, adding that Hanna Birna told him directly, “We will of course let you have everything. You will have access to all of it, but aren’t you going too far in all this?”

Stefán also expressed surprise at just how much Hanna Birna knew about investigations of her Ministry, saying that she had “specific comments about specific elements of the investigation” that compelled Stefán to “gather information just to answer her questions.”

Hanna Birna has told reporters that “I have nothing to hide about my communications with the Police Commissioner, and I regret that the Ombudsman would, with this framing, try to set up an unnatural picture of our natural communications and cooperation.”