Marine Le Pen. SERGIO AQUINDO FOR LE MONDE
The presiding judge of the Paris Court of Appeals left her lunch in high spirits. While Judge Michèle Agi had sharply questioned MEP Nicolas Bay on Monday, January 19, ripped apart his parliamentary assistant, Timothée Houssin, and, earlier that morning, crisply grilled Julien Odoul, a former assistant and current French MP, on Tuesday afternoon, she listened politely to Marine Le Pen. The leader of the Rassemblement National laid out a well-prepared argument on the fourth day of the appeal trial over her party's fake jobs at the European Parliament. A lower court convicted her last year of embezzling public funds and banned her from running in elections for five years.
The day started with Odoul, who was sentenced in the first trial to an eight-month suspended prison sentence and a one-year ban on holding elected office, and whose position remained uncomfortable. Odoul joined the far-right party, then called Front National (FN), in September 2014 after stints with the left-wing Socialists and a collection of centrist and center-right parties. There, he met Le Pen (who says she has no recollection of the encounter) and aspired to work in her staff. Yet, in October of that year, he was only offered a position as a parliamentary assistant to Mylène Troszczynski, then a newly elected MEP, even though he had an office at the party's Paris headquarters, where he made himself useful. Troszczynski gave him little to do. "She was not very productive," Odoul said, "she wasn't very experienced." He took the opportunity to make his way into Le Pen's staff and, in February 2015, became a "special advisor to Marine Le Pen."
