President Javier Milei has said that the Senate session in which Edgardo Kueider was expelled over corruption allegations was void because his vice, Victoria Villarruel, led the session while acting as president of the nation.

Milei traveled to Italy on Thursday, leaving Villarruel as acting president, but she has responded publicly that she was not formally transferred the presidential power until after the session had ended. The episode underscores the increasingly public rift between the president and his second-in-command.

“The session is invalid,” Milei said on Friday during an interview with Luis Majul on radio station El Observador.

On Thursday, the Upper House voted to expel Senator Edgardo Kueider from Congress after he was arrested in Paraguay with over US$200,000 of undeclared cash while crossing the border from Brazil. Kueider was a Peronist lawmaker, but voted for Milei’s flagship bill, the Ley Bases. Like Milei, his lawyer said the session was null and filed a writ for Kueider to be reinstated.

In Argentina, the Vice President is also head of the senate. However, Milei argued that Villarruel should not have presided over the session because he was in Rome and she should have been the acting president, not the head of the Senate. Milei said that, according to current legislation, the vice president “automatically” acts as president if the president travels overseas. That role is then occupied by the provisional spokesperson of the Senate, who is currently Bartolomé Abdala.

“If she presides over the session of the Congress, she is working in the Legislative Branch, but at the same time, she is the acting president of the nation […,] she is occupying two positions, and that violates the separation of powers,” he said.

Villarruel responded that the temporary transfer of power did not take effect until it had been formally signed off. “Until the power of attorney [to be President] is transferred to me, I am vice president. And that is done through the presidency’s notary. I signed the minutes giving my consent at 7:00 p.m.,” Villarruel wrote, answering a comment on her Instagram account.

Screenshots of what appears to be a chat with Villarruel’s secretary were published by various news websites. They show a conversation timestamped 8:36 a.m. on Tuesday, stating the president’s time of departure and arrival. The secretary responds “OK” to the messages. The chats also show a letter notifying Villarruel of Milei’s trip through the Electronic Document Management System (GDE, by its Spanish acronym), which stores all proceedings and files within the public administration. Milei mentioned the letter in his interview.

A spokesperson for Villarruel told the Herald that Villarruel was not aware of the trip, that the Legislative Branch does not use the GDE, and that the vice president does not have a username for the system in the Senate building.

Milei’s trip to Italy, although not his departure time, had been reported by media including the Herald over a week before he departed.

The relationship between Milei and Villarruel has been strained for months, with the president calling her part of the “caste” and leaving her off the guestlist for government events. She was not present for Milei’s first anniversary speech celebrating one year in power. 

“I would have loved to be there,” Villarruel wrote in a comment on her Instagram account.

Villarruel lamented that Kueider was expelled from the Congress, implying that she does not consider him a member of the Peronist bloc. Since Kueider entered Congress on a Peronist ticket, his seat will now be granted to Stefania Cora, who is associated with Maximo Kirchner’s organization La Cámpora. “We are going to work until our last breath so that the [Kirchners] no longer manage the designs of our country,” Villarruel wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Kueider is currently being investigated in Paraguay for attempted smuggling. Peronist senator Oscar Parrilli, social democrat deputy Margarita Stolbizer, and left-wing former deputy Myriam Bregman have suggested that Kueider was smuggling money from a government bribe to vote for the Ley Bases. Investigators have not reached any formal conclusions about the origin of the funds. 

Bregman’s party, the Party of the Socialist Workers (PTS) demanded that the Ley Bases be declared void. The vote on the controversial bill was tied in Argentina’s senate, with Villarruel casting the deciding vote in favor of the government.