Private chats reveal the extent to which Deltan Dallagnol, coordinator of Brazil’s Car Wash anti-corruption task force, sought to personally profit from the fame generated by his high-profile work as a prosecutor, raising ethical questions and provoking disagreements with colleagues.

In March 2018, Dallagnol received more than $10,000 to give a speech to Neoway Tecnologia Integrada Assessoria e Negócios S.A., a big-data firm that was under investigation by Car Wash for potentially corrupt contracts with a state-controlled oil company.

Three months later, Dallagnol was the featured speaker at a secret, off-the-record event with the most influential banks and investors in Brazil, organized by investment firm XP Investimentos. It’s not clear if he was paid for the event, but his speaking agent, who works on commission, negotiated the agreement with XP. Invitees to the talk included at least three banks that had been investigated by Car Wash: Itaú, Santander, and Deutsche Bank. The investment firm engaged Dallagnol for two other speaking events — both were public and well paid.

In an apparent bid to convince Dallagnol to take on the off-the-record speaking gig, the XP representative told the prosecutor in the chats that Supreme Court Minister Luiz Fux had already participated in a similar off-the-record event “and nothing came out in the press,” adding that two other Supreme Court ministers had also been invited to give private talks. Fux did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment and the other two ministers, Alexandre de Moraes and Luís Roberto Barroso, denied participation in such events.

The topic of the series of XP talks that Dallagnol and Fux participated in was the Car Wash investigation and the national elections that were scheduled to take place later that year. Invited guests included representatives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, Citibank, UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Natixis, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, State Street, Macquarie Capital, TD Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Itaú, Bradesco, Santander, Verde Asset Management, and Nomura Holdings.

Dallagnol also brought with him Guilherme Donega, a Brazil-based consultant for the anti-corruption advocacy organization Transparency International. The group has close ties with the Car Wash task force and partnered with Dallagnol and colleagues on their New Measures Against Corruption initiative, a proposal for anti-corruption reforms.

In a statement, Transparency International said that Donega spoke about the New Measures initiative and was not paid for his participation. Responding to a question about the ethics of paid speaking engagements by prosecutors, the organization said that “activities of any kind — even private ones — that may compromise the integrity, fairness and impartiality necessary for the function they perform should be avoided.” The group added that, in uncertain situations, the relevant authorities should be consulted in advance.

Earlier this month, The Intercept revealed plans by Dallagnol and a colleague to open an agency to organize speaking events and courses. “Let’s organize congresses and events and make a profit, okay? It’s a good way to take advantage of our networking and visibility,” Dallagnol wrote in a chat to his wife last December.

To get around rules that restrict prosecutors from managing businesses, the prosecutors decided to bring in their wives to administer the agency. There is no evidence that the project ever got off the ground, but that did not stop the prosecutor from taking in a considerable profit: In a private chat, Dallagnol told his wife that he expected to make around $106,000 that year in after-tax revenue from speaking fees and book royalties.

Dallagnol has previously said that most of the profits would be donated to a fund to help “civil servants working on anti-corruption operations such as Operation Car Wash,” but did not provide any details about how the fund would be administered. He would not confirm to The Intercept if that arrangement is still in effect.

The information about the Car Wash prosecutors’ speeches comes from an archive of documents and Telegram chat logs provided exclusively to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source. The Intercept released an editorial statement about the archive. Previous reporting from the archive has revealed a laundry list of unethical and likely illegal actions by the Car Wash prosecutors and Justice Minister Sergio Moro, who was previously the presiding judge in the case.

Dallagnol was investigated by the Public Ministry’s inspector general in 2017 for his paid speaking engagements, but was cleared of any wrongdoing. Private chats show that the National Association of Federal Prosecutors — which asked him to edit its public statement in his defense — spoke to the inspector general on Dallagnol’s behalf. The inspector general, in turn, guaranteed that he’d close the case. The inspector general’s office has opened a new investigation into Dallagnol’s activities in response to The Intercept’s reporting.

In Brazil, prosecutors are prohibited from operating a business, but the inspector general’s office found that the paid speeches constituted educational activities, which are permitted, mirroring a similar decision in 2016 that applied to judges.

The U.S. Justice Department and International Criminal Court, among other such entities, expressly prohibit payment from third parties for outside speaking or writing gigs related to one’s work in order to avoid conflicts of interest or the perception thereof.

The U.S. Justice Department also stipulates that “an official is prohibited from participating in any matter in which he has a financial interest.” In his first lecture for XP on the subject of “Ethics and Car Wash,” Dallagnol openly jokes about having stock in Petrobras and BTG Pactual, two companies at the center of the corruption probe he coordinates.

The prosecutors’ association and the Public Ministry office did not respond to requests for comment.

XP responded that it is “customary for financial institutions to hold exclusive meetings with authorities and institutional investors to promote debates and discussions pertinent to the domestic scenario. Payment of an honorarium, or the lack thereof, is agreed upon between the parties by contract.”

The speaking agency that represented Dallagnol said in a statement that it could not comment on arrangements surrounding the talks because they are private matters.

The Car Wash task force members were clearly aware of ethical concerns related to accepting money from financial firms and others, but were also tempted by the easy money, as Dallagnol’s conversation with fellow Car Wash prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon suggests:

The perceived impropriety of large speaking fees was central to Car Wash’s own successful argument to obtain a judicial warrant for ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s financial records. In his ruling granting the warrant, Moro wrote, “The illegality of these transfers cannot be concluded, but it must be acknowledged that these are large amounts for donations and lectures, which, in the context of Petrobras’s criminal scheme, raises doubts about the generosity of the companies mentioned and at least authorizes the deepening of investigations.”

In the case of Neoway, the big-data firm, Dallagnol and his colleagues had apparently forgotten that the firm had been cited in a deposition two years earlier, judging from chats examined by The Intercept. Dallagnol accepted payment for his speech, spoke about the importance of big-data tools in a promotion video for the company, and helped set up a meeting for colleagues to solicit the company to donate its technology to an initiative they were putting together. But the corruption case was still ongoing and, months later, the prosecutors’ work on the case, which had stagnated, resumed and Neoway’s name resurfaced.

“This is a problem for me,” Dallagnol wrote in a chat group with colleagues. “I want to talk to you guys on Monday to see what to do, I think it’s a case for me to recuse myself and I don’t know how much this affects everyone’s work,” Dallagnol wrote on July 21, 2018. Official documents provided by Dallagnol show that he did, in fact, recuse himself from the case and notify the Public Ministry’s inspector general, but only in June 2019, ten and a half months later (and just days before The Intercept began publishing private chats in which he participated).

When deciding which prosecutors would officially participate in the Neoway prosecution, one colleague suggested, “It’s better to leave out whoever had contact with neoway.” In the end only seven of the office’s 13 Car Wash prosecutors’ names appear on the relevant official documents; Dallagnol was not among them. In a statement to The Intercept, Neoway denied any impropriety in its contracts and said it was unaware that it had been cited in the investigation.

In an interview with The Intercept’s reporting partner, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, Dallagnol said:

“I do not recognize the authenticity and integrity of these messages, but what I can say, and it is a fact, is that I participated in hundreds of message groups, just as I am included in more than 1,000 Car Wash cases. This fact does not make me know the content of each of these processes. If, by chance, I participated [in the group in which Neoway appeared], I certainly was not aware. If I had known I would not have done it, and, knowing it, I removed myself.”

Dallagnol refused to be interviewed by The Intercept.

The chat logs also revealed Dallagnol’s brainstorming about his budding career as a paid speaker. In a Microsoft Word document created in December 2015, apparently written as notes to himself, Dallagnol maps out his “next steps.” Under “topics for speeches,” he wrote, “I think where I can contribute today is compliance training and eventually business ethics, but I would need to study more ethics… complicated.”

Grave concerns that a major corruption scandal involving Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s son, federal Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, might be shielded from serious investigative scrutiny by Bolsonaro’s powerful Justice Minister Sergio Moro were expressed in secret chats involving Moro’s longtime ally, Deltan Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor of the anti-corruption Car Wash investigation. Moro himself is currently battling his own corruption scandal as a result of The Intercept’s series of ongoing exposés beginning on June 9, based on a massive archive of secret chats, documents, and other materials involving the then-judge and the Car Wash prosecutors.

The specific scandal involving Bolsonaro’s son erupted almost as soon as his father was elected president, a victory driven in large part by an anti-corruption platform. As The Intercept has extensively reported, a government agency responsible for detecting unusual movements of money on the part of politicians found more than $1.5 million reals in transfers and deposits by Flávio Bolsonaro’s longtime driver, Fabricio Queiroz, most of which ended up in Flávio’s account and at least one of which ended up in the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle. The scandal became even more serious when Queiroz’s substantial connections to the country’s most violent and dangerous paramilitary gangs were revealed, and even worse, when it was revealed that Flávio himself employed in his cabinet while he was a state representative both the mother and wife of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most wanted paramilitary leaders.

That meant that the cloud of scandal around Jair Bolsonaro’s son, a newly elected senator, was not just about allegations of “mere” stealing of public funds. They suggested something much darker: deep links between the Bolsonaro family and the organized crime rings that rule and terrorize much of Brazil (and which Sergio Moro was purportedly appointed to combat).

In the new secret chats reported by The Intercept, federal prosecutors, while talking to one another after Bolsonaro’s victory, were emphatic that these unexplained deposits by Flávio’s driver perfectly match other corruption schemes they prosecuted in which political officials hire “phantom employees” who do no work, but collect their salary and then pay back the vast bulk of that money to the political official for his own personal enrichment.

Despite how clear-cut these prosecutors believe Flávio’s corruption to be, they expressed in these newly published chats deep worry that, while the investigation of the money movements is in the hands of local investigators, the broader and more serious allegations against Flávio might not be investigated because Moro is concerned about angering Jair Bolsonaro. This is considered likely not only because the corruption case has the president’s son as its prime target, but also because it already involves his own wife and could — given his longtime close friendship with Queiroz — end up implicating the president himself.

Even more stunning in these chats is that Moro’s most loyal defender and ally over the last five years, Dallagnol, himself expressed concerns that Moro would refuse to pursue an investigation of Flávio out of fear that it would jeopardize Moro’s own chance to be named to the Supreme Court. In May, Bolsonaro surprised the nation when he admitted that he had promised Moro — who, as a judge, was responsible for removing Bolsonaro’s primary adversary, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by finding him guilty on corruption charges — not only the justice minister position, but also the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, a lifetime appointment.

To this day, consistent with Dallagnol’s predictions, there is no evidence that Moro — who at the time of these private chats had already left his position as judge and accepted Bolsonaro’s offer to take over the Ministry of Justice — has taken any measures to investigate the scheme of “phantom employees” that Flávio is accused of maintaining, nor, more importantly, Flávio’s connections with powerful militias in Rio de Janeiro.

The corruption scandal involving Flávio, which had been dominating the headlines, had virtually disappeared from media coverage in recent months due to apparent inaction. The investigation regarding the “unusual movement” of funds is now in the hands of the local Rio de Janeiro prosecutor, and appears to have entered a much slower-than-expected pace for a case of this seriousness. Moro, meanwhile, has given no indication of investigating the federal ramifications of the case, such as Queiroz’s alleged loan to first lady Michelle Bolsonaro or his ties to militias.

On the few occasions Moro answered questions from the media about the senator-son of the president, he has repeated that “there is nothing conclusive about the Queiroz case” and that the government does not intend to interfere with the work of the prosecutors. The case returned to the news only this week when, on Monday, July 15, Supreme Court President Dias Toffoli responded to Flávio Bolsonaro’s request to suspend investigations into his personal finances and those of his associates; the judge accepted the request by ruling as improper investigations initiated without judicial approval involving the use of financial information from the agency that monitors politicians’ financial transactions: the agency whose reporting of suspicious deposits from Queiroz triggered the Flávio scandal in the first place.

On December 8, 2018 — just five weeks after Bolsonaro’s victory but three weeks before he was inaugurated — Dallagnol initiated the discussion of these concerns regarding Moro with a message posted in a Telegram chat group composed of other Car Wash prosecutors. Dallagnol noted an article from the news outlet UOL that described an unexplained deposit by Flávio’s driver, Queiroz, of $24,000 reals ($6,500) into an account in the name of Michelle Bolsonaro.

As the article described, the “transaction was identified as ‘atypical’ by” the agency charged with monitoring money movements. Queiroz, Flávio’s longtime driver and a close Bolsonaro family friend, “moved R $1.2 million (US $380,000) between January, 2016 and January, 2017.” The UOL article noted that “the agency’s report does not itself prove improprieties but indicates amounts of money being moved that are incompatible with the income and economic activities of the ex-aide.”

This news caused Dallagnol to ask what his colleagues on the Car Wash anti-corruption task force thought about the case and Moro’s reaction to it as Bolsonaro’s new justice minster. One prosecutor, Jerusa Viecili, already a critic in prior chat groups of Moro’s closeness with the Bolsonaro government, responded: “I’m saying nothing . . . just watching ”.

The Intercept’s reporting revealed in June that many Car Wash prosecutors, in their secret chats, were indignant that Moro, after insisting for five years to critics that the Car Wash investigations and convictions were completely apolitical and free of ideology, had joined Bolsonaro’s far-right government as a political official, with many complaining that his doing so would forever put into doubt the legitimacy, credibility, and apolitical legacy of their anti-corruption work.

For years, critics of the Car Wash investigation accused prosecutors and Moro of being right-wing operatives abusing the power of law and the cover of an anti-corruption crusade to advance a nakedly political agenda, one designed to overwhelmingly target the left, especially the Workers’ Party that had dominated Brazilian politics for two decades, while neglecting or even ignoring serious corruption by the right.

The investigators’ insistence that they were devoid of political motives was seriously undermined, argued the prosecutors, by the appearance of Moro joining a right-wing government that was elected only once the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro rendered Bolsonaro’s primary center-left adversary ineligible to run. Their credibility has been damaged further by The Intercept’s exposés showing that prosecutors explicitly discussed having as one of their motives preventing a return of the Workers’ Party to power: exactly that which they and Moro spent years denying.

Dallagnol expressed serious concerns about how the justice minister was conducting the investigation into Flávio’s corruption allegations, suggesting that the ex-judge could end up being lenient with Flávio due to limits imposed on him by Jair Bolsonaro or by the self-interested desire of Moro to avoid putting at risk his nomination to the Supreme Court by angering Bolsonaro with a robust investigation into his son. Invoking a Brazilian poem used to expressed uncertainty about whether any consequences would follow from certain actions, Dallagnol wrote about Flávio’s actions: “It’s obvious what happened…. And now what, Jose?”

In the December 8 chat, Dallagnol continued: “In any case, the president will not split from his son. And what if all this happens before the vacancy on the Supreme Court appears?” About Jair Bolsonaro’s possible retaliation against Moro’s crown jewel — his anti-corruption bill — Dallagnol concluded, “Now, how much will he support the Moro Anti-Corruption agenda if his son ends up feeling Moro’s investigation on his skin?”

Requests for comment from the Car Wash prosecutorial task force and the prosecutors cited in this article were not answered as of the time of publication. The article will be updated to include any responses.

Moro’s predicament — how to investigate a corruption case involving the son of the president who named him to his position or, even more delicate, how to investigate corruption that could involve the president himself and his wife — caused Dallagnol himself to consider avoiding all interviews about corruption debates.

On the same day that his group discussed Moro’s posture in the Queiroz and Flávio case, Dallagnol used a private chat to discuss the same topic with another Car Wash prosecutor, Roberson Pozzobon. In that conversation, Dallagnol expressed deep concerns about granting media interviews about corruption issues given the possibility that questions about Flávio Bolsonaro might be raised.

In stark contrast to his usual eagerness to speak publicly about other cases of corruption — Dellagnol had famously used the media far more aggressively than is typical for prosecutors — he suggested that he was now reluctant to issue a more severe condemnation of Flávio for fear of the political consequences of displeasing the new president — motives similar to the ones he had, just hours earlier on that day, suggested could cause Moro not to investigate Flávio.

After considering various options for how to talk about the Flávio case if he were asked in interviews, Dallagnol concluded, “This can only be read as wishy-washy and protective of the government.” Pozzobon agreed that Dallagnol should try to avoid speaking about the Flávio scandal, ending the discussion with this proclamation: “I believe silence in this case is more eloquent.”

One and a half months later, on January 21, in the same chat group of prosecutors, Dallagnol announced that he had been invited to be interviewed on Brazil’s “60-Minutes”-like, highly watched Sunday night news program on Globo, “Fantastico,” to speak about ongoing corruption debates. The prosecutor was excited to be interviewed to the extent the questions focused on the case the program’s producers had specified: namely, corruption allegations against federal Congressman Paulo Pimenta, a member of the center-left Workers’ Party, the same party as Lula’s.

Dallagnol was particularly happy to speak critically about the Workers’ Party congressman’s invocation of a special legal “privilege” that has effectively shielded many lawmakers from investigation because it stipulates that federal lawmakers can be tried on criminal charges only by the Supreme Court. The law in question was enacted upon Brazil’s re-democratization as a protection against dictatorship-era abuses in which military regime leaders would simply concoct corruption charges against dissident Congress members and remove them from office; however, the sheer number of corruption cases pending against Congress members has produced a huge backlog in the Supreme Court, thus meaning that lawmakers who invoke this right have a high likelihood that their cases will never be brought to justice, or at least not for many years. In the past, Car Wash prosecutors were never shy about forcefully denouncing the invocation of this congressional privilege when it came to other politicians charged with corruption.

But in the case of this “Fantastico” interview, Dallagnol, who has been severely critical of lawmakers who invoke this right, was suddenly reluctant to accept the invitation to speak on such an important national media stage due to his fear that he would have to talk not only about the Workers’ Party, but also about Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, who had invoked the same privilege in an attempt — ultimately unsuccessful — to shield himself from investigation. Indeed, Flávio’s invocation of this privilege — preserved for federal lawmakers — was far more dubious than the Congress members whom the Car Wash prosecutors had previously criticized, because the corrupt acts of which Flávio is accused occurred prior to his being elected a federal senator. If any case of a politician abusing this privilege merited condemnation by the anti-corruption crusaders, it would be Flávio’s.

But in this private chat about the TV offer, Dallagnol expressed his reluctance to speak about the case involving Flávio, calculating that the risks of having to discuss the case were greater than the eventual benefits of the investigation: “I don’t see that we have anything to gain because this question [of the privilege] is already settled.” His Car Wash colleagues agreed that while an interview about the Workers’ Party case would present no problem, the best option was to reject “Fantastico’s” invitation in order to avoid what they described, invoking soccer imagery, as a “divided ball” around Flávio Bolsonaro (the Globo news program declined to comment on this story).

“Xiiiiiiiii”

All of these chats are drawn from the archive of messages that The Intercept began to reveal on June 9, in a series titled the “Secret Brazil Archive” (in Brazil, the scandal has become widely known by the Twitter hashtag The Intercept Brasil coined on the day of the first series of articles: #VazaJato, a play on the word “leak” in Portuguese (“vazamento”) and the name of the Car Wash investigation, Lava Jato). The statement from the editors of The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil published with the first series of reports explained the criteria used to report on this vast trove of materials; the ongoing reporting now includes partnerships with some of Brazil’s largest media outlets, including its largest center-right weekly magazine Veja (which has supported Moro and the Car Wash probe in the past), to ensure that the archive materials in the public interest are reported as quickly and responsibly as possible.

The idea that Moro was eager to protect Jair Bolsonaro’s son, or at least eager to avoid his investigation, was expressed again in the prosecutors’ chat groups in mid-January. This chat was prompted by Dallagnol’s finally making a public statement about the corruption allegations against Flávio Bolsonaro. He did so in response to pressure and questions from Intercept Brasil reporter, and now editor, Rafael Moro Martins, who pressed the task force on why it had said nothing about Flávio’s case even though it had often publicly expressed views on similar corruption cases by other politicians.

After Dallagnol posted a public statement about the Flávio case in response to The Intercept’s pressure, his press aide, in a private chat, praised him for doing so, writing to him: “This reinforces our non-partisanship.” After praising Dallagnol’s denunciation of Flávio, the press adviser then criticized Moro’s far less assertive statements whenever the justice minister was asked about Flávio’s scandal involving Queiroz: “They say his comments on Queiroz were very ‘neutral,’ that they had no firmness, you know? To many people, it seems Moro wanted to escape to the margins.” Moro, said Dallagnol’s press aide in their private chat, “stayed on top of the wall”— a common phrase in Portuguese for those who refuse to take a position or get involved in a dispute.

Those comments from Dallagnol’s aide were posted in mid-January, just a little more than a month after Dallagnol himself, in December, debated the case with his colleagues and expressed a similar concern that Moro would not pursue the allegations against Flávio with the investigative rigor they merit.

This conversation with Dallagnol’s aide occurred two months after several federal prosecutors had privately complained, as The Intercept previously reported, about the ethical conduct of Moro during the years he was a judge overseeing the Car Wash investigation. What emerges from an examination of these chats is a clear pattern of Moro’s closest allies on the Car Wash prosecutors’ task force — who praised and defended him in public — privately voicing many of the same critiques and concerns about his methods and motives as many of his harshest critics.

In the Brazilian press, Moro has now been questioned several times about his apparent apathy about the investigation into corruption allegations against Bolsonaro’s son, as well as about a major scandal involving Bolsonaro’s political party during the 2018 election. In response, Moro generally claims that he has no control over the Federal Police, even though it reports to him, because, he says, they maintain investigative autonomy. Thus, he implies, any failure on the part of the Federal Police to adequately investigate the Bolsonaros’ corruption scandals has nothing to do with him.

But Moro’s claim that he does not control the Federal Police — a claim made in response to criticisms that as justice minister he has sought to protect Bolsonaro, his family, and his party — should be viewed with substantial skepticism. After all, Moro, for years, also publicly insisted that he had no role in the management and direction of the Car Wash prosecutions that he was required to judge as a neutral arbiter: a claim that The Intercept’s reporting, with the aid of this archive, has proven to be false.

Additional reporting: Amanda Audi and João Felipe Linhares

Brazilian prosecutors plotted to leak confidential information from the Car Wash corruption probe to Venezuelan opposition figures at the suggestion of Justice Minister Sergio Moro, then the presiding judge for the investigation. The private conversations revealing the plotting, which took place over the Telegram chat app beginning in August 2017, indicate that the prosecutors’ motivation was expressly political, not judicial: They discussed the release of compromising information about the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro, which had just taken steps to reduce the power of opposition politicians and removed the country’s prosecutor general, a Maduro critic and ally of the Car Wash prosecutors.

“It may be the case to make the Odebrecht deposition about bribes in Venezuela public. Is it here or with the PGR [Public Prosecutor]?” Moro wrote to Deltan Dallagnol, the coordinator of the Car Wash investigation, on the afternoon of August 5. Odebrecht is a Brazil-based construction company whose multinational, multibillion-dollar corruption scheme had been cracked open by the investigation.

Dallagnol replied hours later, outlining their options: “It can’t be made public simply because it would violate the agreement, but we can send spontaneous information [to Venezuela] and this would make it likely that somewhere along the way someone would make it public.” Dallagnol continued: “There will be criticism and a price, but it’s worth paying to expose this and contribute to the Venezuelans.”

The Car Wash prosecutors had frequently discussed leaking directly to the then-deposed Venezuelan prosecutor general, an equivalent position to an American attorney general. In the coming months, the deposed Venezuelan prosecutor general took to her blog and published secret evidence from the Car Wash case — a video of a deposition carried out by Brazilian investigators that was said to be in the hands of only the Brazilian prosecutors — on the eve of an important election.

A secret plot to leak information that would harm a foreign government is clearly outside of the mandate of the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office — or a low-level federal judge.

The revelations of the discussion, published in partnership with the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper, come from an archive of documents provided exclusively to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source (read our editorial statement here). Previous revelations from the archive have rocked Brazilian politics. The exchange between the judge and the prosecutor is one of many such conversations revealed by The Intercept suggesting that Moro overstepped his role as a judge to act as the de facto leader of the Car Wash task force, a level of coordination which is illegal under Brazilian law.

The Car Wash probe began as a money laundering investigation in 2014, but it quickly became apparent that the initial targets were working on behalf of executives with the Brazilian energy giant Petrobras. The executives were demanding kickbacks to approve overinflated contracts and giving a cut of the kickbacks to politicians. More than five years later, the case has led to 244 convictions, 184 state’s witnesses agreements, and $3.4 billion in recovered assets; it revealed alleged corruption in 36 countries, mostly in Latin America. In almost all of these countries, local prosecutors signed agreements with the Brazilian Public Prosecutor to share information and pursue their own prosecutions. At least 13 current or former presidents have come under investigation, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was twice convicted on corruption-related charges.

Yet Moro and the Car Wash task force’s methods and impartiality have been called into question from nearly the beginning. Recent revelations from The Intercept put the operation’s domestic reputation in serious doubt. A Brazilian Supreme Court minister said in an interview that the reporting could be grounds to vacate convictions. Some of the Car Wash prosecutors’ foreign partners have privately raised concerns that abuses by Moro and Brazilian prosecutors could taint their own cases.

Moro declined to comment on the chat transcripts showing plotting to leak to Venezuelan opposition figures. He cast doubt on the authenticity of the messages obtained by The Intercept, but does not outright deny the chats — a reaffirmation of the position he has adopted in recent weeks. “Even if the alleged messages quoted in the report were authentic, they would not reveal any illegality or unethical conduct, only repeated violation of the privacy of law enforcement officials with the aim of overturning criminal convictions and preventing further investigations,” he wrote in a statement.

The Car Wash task force, based in Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná, provided a similar response and would not comment on the specifics of the article. “The material presented in the article does not allow verification of the context and veracity of the messages,” they said in a statement.

“Our Actions Could Lead to More Social Upheaval and More Deaths”

The idea to leak information that could damage Maduro’s government came at an extremely tense moment for international relations with Venezuela. By July 2017, the U.S. had threatened Maduro with new sanctions if Venezuela proceeded with plans to found a Constituent Assembly — a new legislative body created to strengthen the government and undermine the opposition-controlled Congress. Maduro did establish the body, and a week later, President Donald Trump threatened military action — a first for a sitting U.S. president since Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999, inaugurating 20 years of leftist rule in the country that frequently antagonized (and has been antagonized by) the U.S.

Meanwhile, the 2016 impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, the center-left president who followed Lula in office, marked a deterioration of relations between Brazil and Venezuela. Following the impeachment, Brazil’s new center-right government led the charge to have Venezuela suspended from Mercosur, a South American trade bloc. In December 2017, Venezuela expelled the Brazilian ambassador in Caracas and, days later, then-President Michel Temer reciprocated. The relationship hit rock bottom this January, when far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guiadó as president and increasingly aligned his country with the U.S.

The unauthorized disclosure of confidential information by prosecutors could be a violation of Article 325 of Brazil’s criminal code, which allows for up to two years in prison for a public agent who “reveals a fact that they are aware of due to their position and that should remain secret, or facilitate its revelation.” And there were other risks, too: Odebrecht lawyers repeatedly complained to Brazilian prosecutors about leaks, saying that they could put lives at risk and compromise their ability to strike a deal with Venezuelan authorities — possibilities that the prosecutors acknowledged in internal chats as well.

The Car Wash prosecutors’ discussion about leaking information to damage Maduro’s government came in the wake of the shake-up to Venezuela’s system of governance. Just hours before Moro’s message suggesting a leak, the newly appointed Constituent Assembly, formed as a way to subvert the opposition-controlled Congress, gathered for its first full day of deliberations. In one of the body’s first moves, it voted to remove Luisa Ortega Díaz as prosecutor general, a post which she had held for nearly 10 years under Chávez and Maduro. Ortega had become an ally of the Car Wash investigation and, weeks earlier, she filed the first charges in a related case, indicting two Maduro allies for allegedly receiving bribes from Odebrecht. Her decision infuriated Maduro.

The Car Wash team had hoped that Ortega would reveal this information through the Venezuelan justice system but with her removal from office, that no longer seemed possible — at least not through the courts.

Under threat from the Maduro government, Ortega went into self-imposed exile and, after a stop in Colombia, flew to meet Brazil’s prosecutor general in the capital, Brasília, on August 22. The messages obtained by The Intercept show what she wanted: to cooperate with Car Wash even though she no longer had the authority of her former title. “We witnessed an institutional rape of the Venezuelan Public Prosecutor’s Office,” said Brazilian Prosecutor General Rodrigo Janot, alongside Ortega at a press conference in Brasília. “Without independence, the Public Prosecutor’s office of our northern neighbor is no longer able to … conduct criminal investigations or act in court with independence.”

Out of the spotlight, the task force had been discussing the subject of a possible leak intensely, debating whether the revelations would have potentially explosive consequences. “Realize that a civil war is possible there and any action by us could lead to more social upheaval and more deaths,” said Paulo Galvão, one of the Car Wash prosecutors, on August 5. His colleague Athayde Ribeiro Costa also demonstrated caution: “Imagine if we decide to do it and the madman orders the arrest of every Brazilian in Venezuelan territory.”

Dallagnol, the head prosecutor on the Car Wash task force, tried to assuage his colleagues’ fears, addressing Galvão by his initials. “PG, regarding risk, it’s something that is up to the Venezuelan citizens to ponder. They have the right to rebel,” Dallagnol wrote. He continued to lobby for action in Venezuela the following day:

“You Guys Who Wanted to Leak the Venezuela Stuff, Here’s Your Moment.”

After talking to Moro on the afternoon of August 5, 2017, Dallagnol went on to discuss the matter with his colleagues in the group “Filhos do Januario 2,” or “Children of Januario 2,” one of the prosecutors’ many chat groups. The conversation lasted several hours, going late into the night.

A little over two hours later, Dallagnol replied to the group and pushed forward the argument for action, saying sarcastically, “Let’s do Maduro a favor,” but also pointing out possible impediments to their plan:

On the afternoon of August 28, Car Wash prosecutor Orlando Martello sent a message to the group relating a telephone conversation he’d had with Vladimir Aras. At the time the secretary of international judicial cooperation for the public prosecutor, Aras had said in early 2016 that he did not trust Ortega. “We have good contacts with one or two prosecutors in Venezuela, but the PGR” — the prosecutor general — “there does not inspire confidence in us,” he said in one of the Car Wash prosecutors’ chat groups. But based on the tone of the call with Martello, apparently Aras had changed his mind, and Ortega became the crucial point of contact for clandestine cooperation with their Venezuelan counterparts.

According to the chats, Aras organized a reception for two Venezuelan prosecutors who secretly came to Brazil in mid-September to share notes on corruption in Venezuela. But the visit was Ortega’s idea. Two Car Wash prosecutors in Curitiba offered to host them in their homes, while Dallagnol privately asked the executive director of the anti-corruption advocacy group Transparency International to foot the bill for their trip in Brazil.

Ortega, in her self-imposed exile, came to Brazil ahead of her two colleagues. It had been two weeks since the Car Wash task force began to put their plan in motion. “You guys who wanted to leak the Venezuela stuff, here’s your moment. The woman is in Brazil,” wrote Car Wash task force member Galvão. His colleagues in the chat group reacted as if he was joking.

On October 12 and 14, less than a month after the prosecutors visited Brazil, Ortega published a pair of videos on her website. The releases appeared to be timed for maximum impact: A hotly disputed gubernatorial election in Venezuela would take place on October 15. (Ortega did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

The videos Ortega published were excerpts from the deposition of the former Odebrecht director in Venezuela, Euzenando Azevedo, in which he admits to having negotiated a secret $35 million payment to Maduro’s 2013 election campaign on behalf of the company, as well as giving millions more to state and local campaigns. In his deposition, Azevedo named several key Maduro allies. But the videos released by Ortega did not contain all the allegations Azevedo made during his deposition: He also admitted to giving $15 million to the campaign of Maduro’s 2013 rival, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles.

The leak incensed officials at Odebrecht. The company filed a complaint with the Supreme Court in which it strongly insinuated that the leak must have come from the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which oversaw the Car Wash investigation. “The video depositions of all of the company’s employees who are cooperating witnesses, especially those that deal with facts abroad, are under the custody of the PGR, and have never been officially handed over to cooperating witnesses, their lawyers, or anyone else,” the complaint reads. Last month, current Brazilian Prosecutor General Raquel Dodge revealed that there is an active investigation into the matter under seal in the Federal Court in Brasília.

When questioned for this story, the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office said that, at the time of Ortega’s publication of the videos, Brazil and Venezuela had an information sharing agreement for another Car Wash-related deposition — but it did not include information about Odebrecht.

Risk to Life

Following the leak, Mauricio Bezerra, an Odebrecht lawyer, sent a message to Carlos Bruno Ferreira, of the International Cooperation Secretariat of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The message was passed on to the “Filhos do Januario 2” chat group by prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon. In it, Bezerra complains that the leak “significantly increased the risk” for several of the involved parties:

The physical risk to Odebrecht employees and others, mentioned by the company’s attorney, had been a concern previously raised by the task force itself. In December 2016, Dallagnol opposed the disclosure of similar information, recognizing that it was potentially explosive. “I am worried with the broadcast of the international information,” he wrote in the draft of a letter in English that he shared with his colleagues through a chat. The first justification he listed was “to avoid life risks for Odebrecht employees in countries such as Angola and Venezuela, since the contracts are still going on there.”

Recent revelations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that Odebrecht paid at least $142 million in bribes for lucrative contracts in Venezuela, but had only revealed $98 million to prosecutors.

Odebrecht and a lawyer who represents former Odebrecht executive Euzenando Azevedo both declined to comment for this story.

Brazil’s Justice Minister Sergio Moro, while serving as a judge in a corruption case that upended Brazilian politics, took to private chats to mock the defense of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and direct prosecutors’ media strategy, according to newly unearthed chats from an archive obtained by The Intercept Brasil.

The new revelations, which were published in Portuguese by The Intercept Brasil on Friday, have added fuel to a weeklong political firestorm in Brazil. The country’s largest circulation newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, said the reporting suggests that officials “ignored the limits of the law,” while UOL, a news website, said jurists view the revelations as “grave.” The site quoted the head of a national criminal law association saying, “This is unthinkable in any democracy. It’s scary.”

In the newly revealed chats with a senior prosecutor — a member of the team working on the Operation Car Wash corruption case — Moro said, “Maybe, tomorrow, you should prepare a press release” to point out inconsistencies in Lula’s arguments, adding, “The defense already put on their little show.”

Moro’s advice was a major deviation from their previous communications strategy, but prosecutors did as he asked — further evidence of bias and unethical collaboration between the two parties in the case that sent Lula to prison on corruption charges, making the most popular politician in Brazil ineligible to run in the 2018 presidential election.

The newly published chats come from an archive of documents, provided to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source, which includes years of private communications from the prosecutorial task force responsible for the Car Wash case, the largest anti-corruption investigation in Brazilian history.

Last weekend, The Intercept published explosive group chats between Car Wash prosecutors and conversations between task force coordinator Deltan Dallagnol and Moro, showing that the then-judge and the prosecutors were unethically and inappropriately collaborating in secret. Despite repeatedly insisting in public that they were acting ethically and impartially, the chats revealed that the judge was passing on advice, investigative leads, and inside information to the prosecutors — who were themselves plotting to prevent Lula’s Workers’ Party from winning last year’s election.

Lula, who had been the far and away favorite in election polls, was rendered ineligible by his conviction, and instead the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro handily won over Lula’s replacement. Lula has maintained that he was not granted a fair trial. Moro is now Bolsonaro’s justice minister.

In an interview on Friday with the Estado de São Paulo newspaper, Moro said, “The Brazilian legal tradition does not prevent personal contact and such conversations between judges, lawyers, detectives, and prosecutors.” This type of communication is “absolutely normal,” he added. However, the chats published by The Intercept Brasil show that the communication went far beyond “personal contact” and “conversations” to include directives as to how the prosecutors should operate inside and outside of the courtroom.

The Car Wash task force refused to comment on the contents of this story. In a statement, Moro declined to speak to the substance of this article, but said, “The Minister of Justice and Public Security will not comment on alleged messages from public authorities collected through criminal invasion by hackers and that may have been tampered with and edited, especially without prior analysis by independent authorities that can certify their integrity. In the case in question, the alleged messages were not even sent previously.”

Despite repeatedly using the phrase “alleged messages,” Moro acknowledged the authenticity of at least one of the conversations this past Friday. Questioned during a press conference about having passed on an investigative lead to prosecutors on December 7, 2015, Moro said it was an “oversight on my part.”

“The Defense Already Put on Their Little Show”

“What did you think?” It was 10:04 p.m. on May 10, 2017, and then-Judge Sergio Moro was using the Telegram messaging app to talk with Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima, a senior prosecutor in the Operation Car Wash task force. Moro had just wrapped up one of the most important days of his career and was looking for feedback.

In a modest courtroom in the city of Curitiba, Moro had deposed Lula for more than five hours, as thousands of the former president’s supporters protested outside. Later that day, video recordings of the unusual proceedings — unusual because former presidents are rarely tried on corruption charges and also because judges don’t usually interrogate the accused for hours on end — were released to the public. Less than a year later, Moro would sentence Lula to more than nine years in prison for receiving a beachfront triplex apartment as a bribe for facilitating contracts with the state-run oil company Petrobras. But, for the moment, the judge was concerned about how the public was receiving the news about his interrogation of Lula.

“I thought it went really well,” Santos Lima, the prosecutor, responded. “He started antagonizing us, which gave me some peace of mind. He contradicted himself in small details and didn’t answer a lot of things, this is not well understood by the public. You starting with the Triplex left him uneasy.” The conversation continued:

Ten minutes after his last message to Moro, Santos Lima sent a request in the “clippings analysis” group chat, used by prosecutors to coordinate media strategy and monitor coverage together with two press aides:

The press aide’s surprise and confusion over the request demonstrates that Moro was suggesting a dramatic shift in the Car Wash prosecutors’ typical communications strategy. Up until that point, they had not been in the habit of commenting publicly on the trial proceedings.

Santos Lima then forwarded his exchange with the judge to Car Wash coordinator Deltan Dallagnol, who responded in a group chat with other prosecutors:

Minutes later, Dallagnol chimed in to reinforce Santos Lima’s request in the chat with the press aides , and the second press aide reiterated their objections more forcefully:

Dallagnol also messaged Moro to congratulate him on his performance in court that day and discuss the judge’s suggestion: “Congratulations on keeping control of the hearing in such a serene and respectful way. We are pondering an eventual statement. GN [Globonews] just showed a series of contradictions and evasions. We’re keeping track.”

Moro again suggested that the prosecutors consider issuing a statement to the press. He said, “OK. I also have my doubts about the pertinence of a statement, but we should think about it due to the subtleties involved.”

Under the Brazilian judicial system, the judge and the prosecution are required to operate independently to ensure a fair trial. However, in this case, Car Wash prosecutors spent hours crafting a communications strategy at the judge’s suggestion in order to, in the words of their leader, “comfort the judge.”

Prosecutors Deliver on Moro’s Suggestion

The following afternoon, the Car Wash prosecutors put out a statement attacking Lula’s arguments and using the exact word Moro had suggested: contradictions. “As for the many verified contradictions in the questioning of ex-President Lula,” read the statement. “[T]he Federal Public Prosecutor will address this in due course, during the trial, particularly during closing arguments.”

Media coverage was dominated by the prosecutors’ allegations of contradictions. The Folha de São Paulo newspaper ran an article the next day with the headline, “Lula’s testimony had ‘several contradictions’, prosecutors say.” Exame magazine ran a piece titled, “Car Wash task force sees contradictions in Lula’s testimony.” The Estado de São Paulo ran with “Prosecutors accuse Lula’s defense of lying in triplex case.”

Santos Lima, the first prosecutor to receive Moro’s suggestion to speak out about the “contradictions” in Lula’s defense, did an interview with Estado de São Paulo’s “Broadcast Político” podcast, in which he said he did “not see any consistency” in Lula’s claims and defended Moro in response to the former president’s criticisms.

Later that night, 24 hours after Moro’s initial suggestion, Dallagnol messaged the judge to inform him that they had submitted a petition “more for strategy” that was “not essential” and that the judge “should feel free, it’s unnecessary to say, to deny” the request. He then went on to summarize their media strategy for the day. Brazil’s biggest nightly news program, “Jornal Nacional,” had just read their statement live on air: