There is a scene that has been repeated for weeks in the corridors of La Libertad Avanza and that occurred again last night with unusual intensity: the telephone Javier Milei sounds, on the other side there is a libertarian reference that asks, with more or less delicacy, let go of Manuel Adorni’s handand the President then deploys the same vocabulary with which he usually dispatches his adversaries in X. The insults flow naturally. The position, immovable.
The President retweeted his filmmaker Santiago Oría yesterday: “Ready, Adorni explained everything perfectly and completely. It was very clear that HE DIDN’T STEAL and that JOURNALISM LIED TREEFULLY. Justice is going to put an end to the matter and it will be clear that Manuel is innocent. THE END.” In the same text, Oria pointed out against journalism: “They are disgusting operators dedicated to dirtying people. They act without scruples and do not care about the truth: they only do harm. The cost we pay for getting into this political shit is to see if we can change something in this blessed/damned country.” The problem is that the facts, this time, do not come from the press. They come from the mouth of Adorni himself.
The embarrassment of LN+ and the mea culpa
Thirty-five days after Milei himself announced that his Chief of Staff would present his sworn statement “imminently,” Adorni finally sat down last night in front of José del Río on LN+ to do what he had been putting off for months. What followed was not the reparation that the ruling party needed. It was a delayed confession, clumsily administered.
Adorni admitted that he and his wife, Bettina Angeletti, kept unreported savings for years and that the omitted assets amounted to approximately half a million dollars. When asked by Del Río about why those funds had not been declared, the answer he chose was unhappy: “We did not declare it because the way to escape the old policy was to have savings in black. It would never have occurred to me to save in white in those years.”
Adorni also acknowledged that he personally prepared his sworn declaration of asset initiation in the chaos of the first days of government, transferred to that document the information that he had been recording in his previous records and “dragged the error” of not incorporating the savings accumulated with his wife. In short: “I make mea culpa, of course I made a mistake,” he said. And he added that he thought about resigning. That “I thought” has all the weight of what it does not say: he did not resign. And Milei didn’t ask him.
March disdain and justice
The contrast with what the ruling party itself maintained for months is devastating. In March, Adorni had said that he had everything declared. When the deputies summoned him to Congress to give explanations, the official appeared and ruled out any inconsistency in his financial situation. The opposition questioned, he denied. The President supported him. Karina hugged him online. It was all an operation of “caste” and “filthy garbage.”
In the ruling party, the official version is that the coordinating minister made a mistake in the preparation of his first sworn statements, but they are careful to emphasize that there were no irregularities. The distinction between “error” and “irregularity” is the tightrope on which the government has been dancing since last night.
The problem for Adorni and the libertarians is that Justice does not distinguish with the same generosity: the prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita would promote an accounting expertise to verify the evolution of Adorni’s assets, and the possibility that the Chief of Staff must appear in Comodoro Py generates, according to sources from the ruling party itself, a growing concern.
The vice president and the magic pendrive
It was not just the opposition that came out to strike. Victoria Villarruel defined Adorni’s actions and his explanations as “a shame”, and ironically commented on the former spokesperson’s statements with a phrase that is already circulating as an epitaph of the night: “May you have a cascade of successes and soon find a magic pendrive.” The distance between the vice president and the government, which is already public and notorious, was measured again in that phrase.
But also from the hardest wing of the libertarian space, presidential biographer Nicolás Márquez described Adorni as a “public mythomaniac” and demanded that ministers, if they have dignity, demand his resignation or present their own. He is not an external critic: he is someone from the most closed privacy of the presidential circle.
And the same thing continues to happen on the phones as before the LN+ interview, only with greater urgency. Libertarian references from the provinces, candidates who aspire to tour the interior in a campaign, list makers who look at the 2027 electoral calendar and do the math: none of them can imagine a tour in Tucumán, in La Rioja, in the deep Conubano, in any place where the adjustment is felt in the body, and answer to people when they ask them about the waterfall in the pool. There are no arguments that are enough. There is no story that covers that image.
The government knows it. Milei too. That’s why he insults.
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