The alleged crime occurred in 2019, when Cabral, working in partnership with Intercept Brasil journalists Rafael Neves and Rafael Moro Martins, wrote a story shedding light on illegal malpractice on the part of two Peruvian anti-corruption prosecutors.

In recordings that Cabral gained access to, two lawyers from the public prosecutor’s office coached a cooperating witness named Martín Belaunde Lossio to ensure that his testimony lined up with their case. The attorneys, then amid the prosecution of an anti-corruption case against several Peruvian politicians, wanted to make sure that there were no contradictions between Belaunde’s testimony and the accusations the investigators were preparing.

In what appears to be an act of retaliation to the publication of a story detailing the illegal conduct of two of its lawyers, the Peruvian public prosecutor’s office asked a local judge to authorize an investigation of Cabral’s communications — despite guarantees in the Peruvian constitution for the secrecy of journalistic sources.

“When dealing with issues of great public interest, should we respect the role of the media, or are we going to criminalize the press?”

Peruvian lawyer Carlos Rivera Paz, of the Legal Defense Institute, who has defended OjoPúblico in several similar cases, said the investigation against Cabral is a blatant attack on freedom of expression.

“Disclosure of the identity of informants has been common in the press,” said Rivera, “especially in cases of great public interest.” He added, “When dealing with issues of great public interest, should we respect the role of the media, or are we going to criminalize the press?”

Car Wash Reporting

The reports by OjoPúblico and The Intercept were based on audio files from conversations between prosecutors David Castillo and Elmer Chirre, cooperating witness Belaunde, and Belaunde’s lawyer, Luis Fernando de la Cruz.

Part of an investigative series led by The Intercept Brasil exposing malfeasance in Operation Car Wash, one of Latin America’s most sprawling and consequential corruption probes, the audio recordings were given to The Intercept by a source who asked not to be identified and analyzed in partnership with OjoPúblico. The Intercept published the story in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, with OjoPúblico also publishing in Spanish.

In the recordings, Belaunde states that a prosecutor from the “Special Team” — the Peruvian public prosecutor’s anti-corruption task force — asked him to lie and state that he did not know of an alleged political donation of $400,000 from construction company Odebrecht to former Peruvian President Ollanta Humala. The former top representative of Odebrecht in Peru, Jorge Barata, had denied that the company made the payment.

“Whatever you tell us, it has to agree with the prosecution’s line,” says Castillo at one point in the recordings. “If it’s useful for you, we’ll say it. And if not, then it’s as if nothing happened,” Belaunde replies.

In total, there are more than 12 hours of conversation recorded before, during, and after the official interrogation of Belaunde in March 2019 at the maximum-security Piedras Gordas penitentiary, where he was being held.

After the story was published by OjoPúblico and The Intercept, an internal investigation was opened by the public prosecutor’s office against its own attorneys, Chirre and Castillo. As the internal probe continues, Chirre remains an anti-corruption prosecutor in Lima, Peru’s capital, and Castillo has been transferred to a unit specializing in crimes involving public servants.

The Peruvian public prosecutor’s office has not released information about the internal investigation meant to scrutinize its own conduct. Instead, the office has decided to pursue legal action against those who exposed their illegal conduct.

Retaliation

The investigation into Cabral was carried out by prosecutors Richard Guerrero Soto and Orlando Ramírez Pastor — the same officials who had initially requested an investigation of the Peruvian journalist’s communications despite the confidentiality guarantees.

The inquiry was opened based on a complaint put forward in November 2019 by attorney de la Cruz, one of the people who could be heard in the recordings. De la Cruz alleged to the public prosecutor that the journalistic investigation constituted “a material threat … through the revelation of my client’s name.”

The day after Cabral’s report was published on November 3, 2019, de la Cruz denounced Cabral — without mentioning The Intercept — for revealing the identity of his client. Identifying a would-be cooperating witness is a crime under Peruvian law, punishable by up to six years in prison. “Whoever unduly reveals the identity of a protected informant, witness,” the Peruvian law states, “or information that allows his/her identification, will be punished with imprisonment of not less than four or more than six years.”

De la Cruz himself had already revealed in a publicly transmitted broadcast that Belaunde had been collaborating with authorities since at least 2015. OjoPúblico listed nine other times that Belaunde was mentioned in the Peruvian press as a willing cooperating witness between 2014 and 2019. Thus Cabral did not reveal anything new about Belaunde’s status as a would-be cooperating witness.

Since de la Cruz’s 2019 complaint, the case had stalled. Now, two years after lawyers at the public prosecutor’s office were caught coordinating a statement with their cooperating witness, the office is proposing criminal proceedings — against the journalist who exposed the collusion.

As of this publication, there is no public evidence to indicate that the Peruvian judiciary has given Belaunde the status of protected cooperating witness in any of the criminal proceedings in which he is involved. Nor have there been any decisions on the request to breach Cabral’s confidential communications.

The Intercept expresses its support for Ernesto Cabral and OjoPúblico in the face of Peruvian authorities’ persecution of investigative and public interest journalism.

Translated by Elias Bresnick.

The post Peru Opens Criminal Probe Into Journalist Who Exposed Illegal Collusion With Witness appeared first on The Intercept.

“It is imperative that Congress receive full and accurate answers regarding our government’s actions — particularly when those actions may have long-lasting effects beyond our shores,” said Rep. Susan Wild, D-Penn., in a statement to The Intercept.

“It is imperative that Congress receive full and accurate answers regarding our government’s actions — particularly when those actions may have long-lasting effects beyond our shores.”

Car Wash targeted a sprawling network of political corruption centered around the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras. U.S. and Brazilian prosecutors’ aggressive tactics greatly weakened Brazil’s once-powerful civil construction and petroleum sectors and led to the imprisonment of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, clearing the way for far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.

“Whether or not our DOJ was responsible for the wrongful imprisonment of President Silva and paved the way for Bolsonaro, a COVID-denying, climate change-denying, far-right nationalist, to take the presidency must be investigated to the fullest extent and those responsible held accountable,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of the congressional letter’s signatories, told The Intercept.

Wild, the Pennsylvania Democrat, said, “I have long been concerned by Lava Jato” — Car Wash in Portuguese — “and its consequences for Brazilian democracy — particularly what appears to have been a deeply flawed and politicized effort to imprison former President Lula and to keep him off the ballot in the 2018 presidential election. If the Department of Justice played any role in the erosion of Brazilian democracy, we must take action and ensure accountability so that it never happens again.”

After Bolsonaro’s victory, he quickly appointed Sergio Moro, the judge who convicted Lula of corruption, to be his justice minister, outraging opponents who viewed the move as proof of Moro’s — and Operation Car Wash’s — partisan leanings. In 2019, The Intercept began publishing an investigative series based on damning private chat records between Moro and Car Wash prosecutors, which showed collusion, political bias, and other improprieties.

In March, citing The Intercept’s reporting, the Brazilian Supreme Court vacated the convictions against Lula, who had earlier been released, and restored his right to run for office. The court also ruled later in the month that Moro was biased, dealing a mortal blow to the hugely influential prosecution that evolved into a powerful political movement.

Moro broke with Bolsonaro in 2020 and resigned from office. He now works as a lawyer and the managing partner at a consulting firm that represents companies he previously convicted as the Car Wash judge. Lula is again the frontrunner in next year’s presidential election. Reporting from The Intercept and Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública also revealed that the FBI requested case files on the investigation into Lula before the case went public and the Brazilians quietly sent the information through nonofficial channels.

The letter to Garland — led by Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and signed by prominent progressives like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — cites a similar letter that Johnson and colleagues sent to then-Attorney General William Barr on August 20, 2019, months after The Intercept’s initial reporting on Moro and the Car Wash prosecutors. “Regrettably, we did not receive a substantive response from Attorney General Barr to the questions we raised at the time,” the new letter reads. (The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The case will be a test of Garland’s stated commitment to the principles of democracy and rule of law. The original Car Wash-Department of Justice collaboration occurred largely during the Obama administration, under Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and was promoted by the Justice Department as a model partnership. A top department official told an audience in 2017, “It is hard to imagine a better cooperative relationship in recent history than that of the United States Department of Justice and the Brazilian prosecutors.”

In their letter, the members of Congress cite reporting from The Intercept in collaboration with Brazilian news outlet Agência Pública last March, which revealed that exchanges between the Department of Justice and Brazilian prosecutors may not have followed proper protocols.

In a 2015 incident, at least 17 U.S. law enforcement officials traveled to the Car Wash task force headquarters in Curitiba, Brazil, for a series of meetings about the investigation, while undertaking efforts to hide the visit from the Brazilian government. Under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty that regulates legal collaboration between the two countries, the host government must formally approve law enforcement activity by foreign agents in their country.

In a chat on the messaging app Telegram, Car Wash task force coordinator Deltan Dallagnol ordered a press aide to keep the meetings under wraps, saying the “Americans don’t want us to divulge things.” Details of the meetings, however, eventually leaked to the press. The Brazilian Justice Ministry immediately demanded details about the visit, but Dallagnol negotiated with colleagues to limit the amount of information that would be handed over, even attempting to hide the names of the U.S. officials.

After this was revealed by The Intercept and Agência Pública, 77 members of Brazil’s Congress sent a letter to their U.S. counterparts, requesting that the Americans “adopt the appropriate legislative measures” and “hold those responsible agents and officials accountable.”

Brazilian Rep. Glauber Braga, who organized the Brazilian congressional letter, considers the U.S. role in Operation Car Wash to be an “illegal and criminal interference.” “We cannot accept foreign interference disguised as ‘cooperation’ that aims to facilitate the implementation of an economic program to dismantle the Brazilian economy and harm democratic freedoms within the country,” Braga told The Intercept.

The chat records published by The Intercept and Agência Pública also show how Dallagnol cavalierly worked to bend the rules to benefit U.S. prosecutors, without approval from his superiors, who worried that he was violating the law to do so. The Brazilian prosecutor was eager to keep the Americans happy in order to negotiate a larger share of the billions in dollars of settlement payments being negotiated by the U.S. Department of Justice, Petrobras, and associated contractors. In a 2016 chat, Brazilian prosecutors said that the Department of Justice had “total knowledge” of the Brazilian investigation into the Odebrecht construction firm, which eventually pleaded guilty to bribery charges in the U.S. and agreed to pay a record $3.5 billion penalty and later filed for bankruptcy.

Dallagnol and other prosecutors attempted to maintain control of Brazil’s share of those funds and use them to create an independent “anti-corruption” foundation, but their plan was shot down by the Brazilian Supreme Court in 2019.

Monday’s letter stated that House Democrats “are particularly concerned that the income produced from the enforcement of important U.S. legislation dedicated to fighting corruption, could have ended up going to ends not entirely consistent with democracy, rule of law, equal justice under the law, and due process — not to mention Brazilian legal and constitutional requirements.”

The post House Democrats Want Answers About U.S. Role in Disgraced Brazil Corruption Probe appeared first on The Intercept.

The moves from the court upended the key political effects of a sweeping, yearslong anti-corruption probe called Operation Car Wash. The investigation, which examined corporate and political corruption and delivered a slew of indictments, rocked Brazilian politics. Though wide-ranging in its targets, Car Wash’s most notable outcome was barring Lula’s 2018 run for president at a time when he remained the most popular politician in the country, clearing the way for the ascension of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s rise was bolstered by anger at the perception of corruption among powerful Brazilian figures, and Car Wash, at the time, commanded high levels of public trust. Moro, who presided over the case against Lula, served as Bolsonaro’s justice minister for nearly a year and a half.

With Lula setting himself up to challenge Bolsonaro in 2022, though, the exposure of right-wing political bias at the heart of the probe itself — as an Intercept investigative series in both English and Portuguese began documenting in 2019 — could see the tables turn against the Brazilian right.

Successive moves by the nation’s Supreme Court reinstated Lula’s political rights and cut down the image of incorruptibility so carefully cultivated by the then-judge who put Lula behind bars, Sergio Moro.

March was a whirlwind of activity, but questions about Operation Car Wash — and Moro’s role in adjudicating it — have been bouncing around for years. As the probe widened and widened further still, ensnaring top corporate figures and prominent politicians, the effort faced increasing scrutiny. The most intense attention fell on the headquarters of the probe, in the conservative southern city of Curitiba, where Moro presided, and where Lula was convicted.

First Lula’s case went to the appeals courts, which upheld the decisions, and then, eventually, to Brazil’s high court. (Other Car Wash matters had come before the court; even Lula had tried to argue procedural matters before the Supreme Court early on in his case but failed to sway the panel at the time.) The trial to decide whether Moro was biased when judging Lula began in 2018 but had been put on hold until March 8, when it resumed earlier than expected.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Lula’s favor, finding in a 3-2 decision that Moro had been a biased judge when he oversaw the Car Wash case against the ex-president.

Two of the panel’s judges had already voted in 2018 that Moro acted with political animus when sentencing Lula, and two had ruled that Moro was not at fault. A final judge, Supreme Court Minister Nunes Marques, had asked for more time to make a decision.

On Tuesday, however, one of the judges who had ruled in Moro’s favor in 2018, Minister Cármen Lúcia, reversed her decision and ruled that the ex-judge’s decisions had been tainted by political bias, shoring up a three-vote majority for Lula. Lúcia’s initial vote had come before The Intercept reported on a trove of materials that exposed the coordination between Moro and prosecutors, among other revelations, and she had previously indicated that she might change her decision.

In a separate, surprise ruling in early March, a Supreme Court minister had decided that the corruption charges which saw Lula imprisoned and stripped of his right to run for office would have to be retried. The ruling, which was handed down by a minister who had been seen as aligned with Car Wash, will require a new judge to oversee the retrial, which is to take place in the nation’s capital, Brasília, rather than in Curitiba.

It’s possible that Lula will be convicted a second time, which would weaken his claim of innocence of all charges brought against him by the Federal Public Ministry, Brazil’s prosecuting body. There’s also a chance that some of the charges lapse, based on complex Brazilian statutes of limitations, before the retrial.

Lula, though, is riding high on his victory — which gave the Supreme Court’s weight to his longtime claims that his prosecution had been politically motivated.

Car Wash Collapses

These two parallel developments in the Supreme Court are the latest in a series of blows that the Car Wash investigation has suffered in the last two years. The narrative around Car Wash began to unravel in June 2019 with the launch of The Intercept’s investigative series. The Intercept Brasil published more than 100 articles showing, among other things, that Moro inappropriately coordinated with prosecutors and brought in evidence from external sources that did not pass through proper legal channels.

In addition, The Intercept Brasil revealed that wiretapping on Lula’s phones was kept from the public; that there was a plot to leak information to the Venezuelan opposition with the intent of overthrowing President Nicolás Maduro; and that chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol gave paid lectures to the very same banks he would later be tasked with investigating.

Car Wash, which began as a probe of corruption at the state oil company, Petrobras, had weighty collateral effects on the country. Its allegations unveiled immense collusion between large national contractors and Petrobras across a span of decades. The probe, though, became much more. Before prosecutors’ and Moro’s political motivations, selective moralism, and procedural misconduct were exposed, the Car Wash investigations targeting figures like Lula fostered a revulsion for politicians among Brazilians. This disdain paved a path for Bolsonaro to become president of the republic.

Car Wash was instrumental in Bolsonaro’s election, both by stoking resentment of the political classes in general and, specifically, taking Lula out of the 2018 race, when his high popularity ratings suggested that he could have won.

Now, however, the tables are turning: Lula is back, and even the Supreme Court has recognized that his antagonists in the Car Wash probe held political motivations of exactly the sort they had imputed on their targets.

Moro and Lula’s Linked Fates

There was long-standing suspicion surrounding Moro’s handling of Lula’s trial. Moro had accelerated court dates to ensure that Lula was sentenced by Moro himself and, later, so that an appellate court ruling could come in just in time for the former president to be barred from running in the 2018 elections. A Brazilian law known as “Lei da Ficha Limpa,” or “Clean Sheet Act,” prevents politicians who have been sentenced by an appeals court in certain types of cases from running for office.

Lula was tried in record time not only by Moro, but also by three other judges from the appeals court in Porto Alegre, who concurred with Moro on a 12-year prison sentence. The speed foreclosed the introduction of new arguments that Lula’s defense team hoped to raise. The rulings rendered Lula ineligible for the presidency — and, in April 2018, he was arrested on Moro’s orders.

Thanks to Moro’s work, Bolsonaro, a far-right ex-military officer, was able to avoid his stiffest competition: Lula. One of Moro’s last acts in his judgeship was yet another gift to Bolsonaro: Six days before the first round of elections, Moro publicly released the plea-bargain testimony from one of Lula’s former allies, Antonio Palocci. A chief campaign fundraiser and minister in Lula’s first-term government, Palocci later tried to become a witness for the Car Wash investigation and testified against Lula. Though Palocci’s statements were not damning enough to earn witness protections — a decision that Moro, it was later revealed, agreed with — the release of the testimony nonetheless served to further erode the public’s faith in Lula’s Workers’ Party less than a week before the election. Bolsonaro sailed to victory in the second round of voting.

Thanks to Moro’s work, Bolsonaro was able to avoid his stiffest competition: Lula.

Exactly one month after releasing Palocci’s testimony, and nine months after signing Lula’s arrest warrant, Moro resigned his judgeship and accepted the invitation to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister. The role, as Moro took office, would accrue new powers, leading the press to call the ex-judge one of Bolsonaro’s superministers.

Meanwhile, things were looking dire for Lula: He was in prison, and his rivals in the justice system now sat at the highest levels of government. Even a vigorous defense seemed unlikely to succeed. That started to change, however, in the summer of 2019, as The Intercept began its investigative series on the prosecutors and judges who had coordinated to put Lula behind bars.

The reports were based on leaked conversations on a mobile messaging app that prosecutors and Moro used to communicate with each other, assuming that they were away from any public scrutiny. The message transcripts quickly caused a political earthquake in Brazil. One pattern would hold: Lula and Moro’s fortunes remained intimately linked and diametrically opposed. The leaks, though, stood as a paradigm shift. From the moment the articles began coming out, Lula was ascendant, and Moro’s decline began.

“Vaza Jato” at the High Court

Known as “Vaza Jato” — a play on the investigation’s Portuguese name, roughly meaning “Car Wash Leaks” — the messages played a key role in this month’s Supreme Court deliberations.

On March 9, at the trial to determine if Moro acted in a biased fashion, Supreme Court judges read aloud the messages published by The Intercept as a means of justifying their votes.

“Without a doubt, from the content of the conversations divulged, we can highlight manifestly illegal situations.”

“In a democratic and accusatory penal case, the role of prosecution must not be mixed with that of judgment,” said Minister Gilmar Mendes, the first judge to vote. Mendes is perhaps the most articulate, media-savvy, and influential minister of the Supreme Court. The chats published by The Intercept had documented prohibited collaboration between the prosecutors and Moro, which Mendes said revealed lawbreaking: “Without a doubt, from the content of the conversations divulged, we can highlight manifestly illegal situations.”

Though Mendes was once a supporter of the Car Wash investigations, he had over time become a fierce critic. As he explained his vote in early March, in a more than hourlong speech to the court, Mendes compared the prosecutors’ methods to those of the KGB in their covert phone taps of Lula’s lawyers, which were monitored in real time by police and prosecutors.

After Mendes came Minister Ricardo Lewandowski, a highly respected judge and the earliest critic of Car Wash on the panel. Lewandowski said the messages in which Moro and prosecutors engaged in prohibited collaborations was “astonishing” and indignantly repeated three times that Moro had committed an “abuse of power.”

On March 8, just a day before the judges publicly deliberated Moro’s bias, Supreme Court Minister Edson Fachin made a surprise decision that threw out all the Car Wash convictions against Lula. The justification was that Moro’s mandate at the court in Curitiba was to judge crimes related to Petrobras, so Lula’s case fell outside his purview.

Many critics saw the decision by Fachin, a longtime supporter of the Car Wash cases, as a last-ditch effort to spare Moro the embarrassment of having the court rule against him. With Moro’s convictions of Lula vacated, Fachin wrote in his ruling, there was no more need to investigate the former judge’s bias in the cases. Fachin’s colleagues, though, did not bite. The trial had already gotten underway in 2018, and two votes — one of which belonged to Fachin — had already been cast in the ex-judge’s favor. The remaining judges decided to continue their deliberations — and finally ruled on Tuesday.

Car Wash’s Fall and Lula’s Rise

The dual Supreme Court developments were major defeats for partisans of the Car Wash probe, which is no longer formally underway. In February, Brazil’s Attorney General Augusto Aras, a Bolsonaro ally, decided to close the Car Wash task force working in Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro. Ongoing investigations were passed along to a group that fights organized crime.

Aras’s decision was yet another move in the complex chess game that is the intertwined worlds of Brazilian jurisprudence and politics. Though Bolsonaro rode Car Wash to victory, the investigation and its fallout have become an irritating thorn in his side.

In one important case, Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator for the state of Rio de Janeiro and the president’s eldest son, was recently prosecuted on charges of embezzling employee salaries. Though Flávio Bolsonaro’s case was not related to Car Wash, undermining the Car Wash investigation was a way to weaken and raise suspicions about prosecutorial forces in Brazil — including the officials who were targeting Flávio.

Moreover, larger political considerations are at work: Bolsonaro is also seeking to woo a bloc of centrist and right-wing politicians known as Centrão (Wide Center, in English), in hopes that they will shore up his political position. Centrão, with its reputation for pursuing big-money interests, naturally has in its circle people who have been targeted by the Car Wash probe, allowing Bolsonaro to curry favor with the bloc by curtailing investigations.

One person Bolsonaro can no longer — for now — look to for political support is Moro. Famous for his political ambitions, Moro made a show of resigning from Bolsonaro’s government when the president was purportedly restraining police from investigating his son’s crimes.

Despite the rift and the looming cloud of the likely Supreme Court censure, Moro is still seen as a strong candidate for the presidency in 2022 — but it’s not clear whether this is an ambition he harbors. After leaving his post, Moro dedicated himself to writing seldom-viewed articles on a right-wing website and became director of a law firm that works to recoup funds from the biggest company involved in the Car Wash scandal. If Moro — whose lack of charisma and unfamiliarity with compromise — decides to run, he would face serious obstacles not only in Bolsonaro but also, most likely, in Lula.

Bolsonaro’s utter failure to deal with a rampaging coronavirus pandemic in Brazil left an opening for Lula.

Lula, on the other hand, is gaining momentum. Despite his lack of popularity among right-wing voters, the former president is still in the best position to challenge Bolsonaro in 2022, according to the latest polls. Lula’s and Bolsonaro’s disapproval rates run neck and neck. And Bolsonaro’s homicidal policies in dealing with the rampaging coronavirus pandemic in Brazil — refusing masks, doubting vaccine efficacy, and deferring blame for his chaotic management — left an opening for Lula.

The botched coronavirus response also plays to another of Lula’s strengths. While in office, Lula oversaw a booming economy, bringing countless Brazilians out of poverty. But Bolsonaro’s slow pandemic response has led to a flight of cash as investors see how far the country has to go before public health is restored. Without investors’ cash, the Brazilian real is falling against the dollar, leading to inflation and rising prices for products such as gas and food.

Lula, meanwhile, gave something of a comeback speech to the country earlier this month, calling a news conference two days after his political rights were restored. Most major media outlets picked up the broadcast. Lula said he was willing to build bridges with business and various other political factions — the same strategy that carried him to victory in 2002. Though he spoke without a mask on, he made a case for vaccines and increased caution with respect to the new coronavirus strains. The speech marked such a decisive break from Bolsonaro’s messaging that it incited former Speaker of the House Rodrigo Maia — a right-wing figure from one of the parties that served as the main opposition to Lula’s presidency — to praise Lula on social media.

Lula hasn’t formally announced his candidacy, but his fortunes are clearly ascendant. With the obstacle of the Car Wash probe rapidly fading, all Lula has to do now is convince Brazilians that he can bring back the fast-growing economy of his days in the presidency. If he is successful, Bolsonaro’s defeat could suddenly become a real possibility for Brazil next year.

Translated by Elias Bresnick.

Update: March 23, 2021
This story has been updated to reflect a 3-2 ruling by Brazil’s Supreme Court finding that Moro was biased when he convicted Lula of several corruption charges.

The post In Sharp Rebuke, Brazil Supreme Court Rules Judge Who Locked Up Lula Was Biased appeared first on The Intercept.

The official notice firing the Federal Police head bears Moro’s digital signature, but in a press conference Friday morning, the outgoing justice minister claimed that he was not informed of the move and did not sign the document. This and other revelations made by Moro could serve as grounds for impeachment, if the Brazilian body politic can muster the political will to support such a drastic measure. Members of Congress are already gathering signatures for a congressional inquiry into Moro’s allegations.

“I understood that I could not set aside my commitment to the rule of law.”

In his press conference, Moro suggested that Bolsonaro removed Valeixo because the president opposed investigations being conducted by the Federal Police. “He was concerned about investigations underway in the Federal Supreme Court and that a change would also be opportune at the Federal Police,” Moro said of Bolsonaro’s thinking. Moro said Bolsonaro’s concerns were not a reasonable justification for firing Valeixo, but added that he nonetheless searched for “an alternative solution, to avoid a political crisis during a pandemic.” In the end, Moro said, “I understood that I could not set aside my commitment to the rule of law.”

Notably, the Federal Police are conducting several investigations that could impact Bolsonaro, his politician sons, and several members of their inner circle.

Moro loomed large over Brazilian politics during the past several years, even before he accepted Bolsonaro’s offer to serve as justice minister. He was the judge at the center of the influential Operation Car Wash anti-corruption investigation that put former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in prison, removing the popular politician from the 2018 presidential election and clearing the way for Bolsonaro’s victory.

When he entered government, Moro was among the most popular political figures in the country and was seen as an important ally for Bolsonaro, but also as a potential rival in the 2022 elections. The ex-judge’s standing, however, was seriously weakened after The Intercept began publishing an explosive series, in English and Portuguese, on malfeasance and potential illegal actions by Moro and Car Wash prosecutors. As a result of the series, Lula was eventually released from prison.

Though the fate of Valeixo had been a source of long-simmering tension between Moro and Bolsonaro, the clash heated up in recent days. Last August, Bolsonaro threatened to oust Valeixo, whom Moro had handpicked for the post, but eventually relented after Moro had threatened to resign, provoking an institutional crisis. In recent days, Bolsonaro made clear to aides that he was looking to fire Valeixo, and Moro restated his threat to resign. By Thursday evening, it appeared that Bolsonaro had again backed off, but then the notoriously capricious president made the move, prompting Moro to quit.

Investigations Into Bolsonaro and Sons

The Federal Police and Supreme Court are conducting multiple investigations that threaten Bolsonaro and his politician sons directly, as well as key allies in their orbit. A Federal Police investigation into fake news attacks directed at the Supreme Court recently began looking into the so-called Office of Hate, a pro-Bolsonaro online messaging operation run by the president’s son, Rio City Council Member Carlos Bolsonaro.

The Public Prosecutor’s Office requested on Monday that the Supreme Court investigate whether a rally in Brasília last Sunday violated national security laws. The demonstration was held in opposition to quarantine measures and called for a military coup and the forced shutdown of Congress. Bolsonaro spoke at the rally, and some of his allies in Congress reportedly helped organize it.

Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, the president’s son, is also under investigation for an alleged money-laundering scheme and has repeatedly appealed to the Supreme Court to halt the investigation on technicalities. The case connects him directly to a gangster who was a key suspect in the assassination of Rio City Council Member Marielle Franco. (The gangster was killed in a police raid on his hideout in February, after months on the run.) Last August, Bolsonaro removed the financial oversight agency that first identified the suspicious transactions from Moro’s portfolio.

And the list of police and judicial probes into the Bolsonaros and their allies doesn’t end there. The various investigations have led to calls for more dramatic actions against the government.

Vladimir Aras, an influential member of the Public Prosecutor’s Office — who worked closely with Car Wash investigators for years and was briefly a member of the task force — tweeted, “The facts narrated by [Moro] are very serious. There were reports of forgery, obstruction of justice and crimes of responsibility” — referring to the standard for impeachable offenses, the equivalent of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in the U.S. Aras added that the allegations must be investigated by the Public Prosecutor and Congress.

Fernando Haddad, the presidential candidate from Lula’s Workers’ Party who lost to Bolsonaro in 2018, echoed these concerns, but called on government ministers to quit and force Bolsonaro to resign, rather than drag the country through a drawn-out impeachment process. And former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso also called for Bolsonaro’s resignation.

Political Crisis During a Pandemic

Last Thursday, Bolsonaro fired Health Minister Henrique Mandetta, who had publicly opposed the president’s overt denialism of the risks of the coronavirus crisis, which undermined Brazil’s early response strategy. The health system in multiple Brazilian states are currently in collapse, with long lines for intensive care beds in hospitals and mass graves being dug for the victims. The new health minister focused his messaging on the path to reopening the economy and easing quarantine regulations, which are already being relaxed in multiple states and had nonetheless been poorly enforced nationwide.

Bolsonaro is also at odds with the other most influential member of his cabinet, Finance Minster Paulo Guedes. Guedes, a hard-right former adviser to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, opposed government spending to ease the financial crisis and insisted that Brazil must continue to enact neoliberal reforms that would cut public spending, regulation, and taxes.

Guedes chafed this week at the announcement of a new plan to spend $37.7 billion over five years in public works. The project was endorsed by the increasingly powerful cohort of former military leaders that occupy the majority of important positions in the administration. Guedes did not attend the press conference to announce the package. In response that night, a Bolsonaro-aligned media outlet used three minutes of prime time television to attack Guedes, saying that he “lost relevance in the government during the fight against Covid-19.” Meanwhile, the Brazilian stock market is down 38 percent from an all-time high in January, and foreign investors are pulling their money out of Brazil at the fastest rate in all of Latin America.

When Bolsonaro came into office, his political support emanated from three key groups of power brokers: the center-right, who fiercely opposed Lula’s Workers’ Party and were represented by Moro; oligarchs and international capital, who put their faith in Guedes’s reform agenda; and the military elite, who long distrusted Bolsonaro, a retired Army captain, but saw him as a vehicle to quickly secure political power democratically. Bolsonaro’s natural base is the far right: extremists who are vocal online, but have never before had much influence in national politics.

The president’s public approval rating plummeted since the onset of the coronavirus crisis and key allies have been jumping ship. With Moro gone and Guedes on the ropes, the far-right extremists cannot keep the government afloat and the military — most influentially represented in the administration by presidential chief of staff Gen. Walter Braga Netto — has filled the vacuum of leadership, despite the generals’ own serious misgivings about Bolsonaro’s erratic behavior.

Whether or not the far-right Bolsonaristas get the military coup that many of them are out in the streets demanding, for the time being it would appear that the military is now calling the shots in Brazil.

Even if Bolsonaro is impeached — a subject that is increasingly discussed in Brazil lately — Bolsonaro’s replacement would effectively implement de facto military rule through constitutional means. Impeachment would result in Vice President Hamilton Mourão, a retired general and proud admirer of the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985, would take power — an option that even some on the left are wearily looking at as the lesser of two evils.

The post Brazil Justice Minister Resigns Over Bolsonaro’s Interference in Investigations — and Impeachment Talk Ramps Up appeared first on The Intercept.

Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato in Portuguese, rocked Brazil’s political and business establishment, leading to the imprisonment of former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva — a move that barred him from reelection and paved the way for a win for far-right Jair Bolsonaro. It also led to massive fines and economic and reputational harm for some of Brazil’s most important companies. Yet the investigation itself has been mired in controversy, especially after reporting by The Intercept and partners revealed clear misconduct and political bias by the judge and prosecutors who handled the case against Lula.

The nature of the U.S. government’s role in the operation has also generated much public speculation and suspicion among many Car Wash critics. The chats published today show that prosecutors on the Car Wash team intentionally ignored procedures outlined in Brazilian law and a bilateral treaty agreement with the U.S., apparently to keep the executive branch of the Brazilian government — then led by Lula’s successor and ally, Dilma Rousseff — in the dark about their activities. They also appear to have misrepresented their potentially illegal actions to superiors and the Justice Ministry of Brazil. They secretly hosted a delegation of U.S. officials, and coached and facilitated U.S. efforts to secure cooperating witnesses in corruption investigations into state-controlled oil giant Petrobras. With the approval of Car Wash prosecutors, the U.S. negotiated deals with some witnesses without following treaty procedures, which would have given Brazil greater control over the process.

By circumventing the treaty and other relevant law, the Brazilian prosecutors also opened themselves up to criticism that the U.S. had undue influence over politically sensitive investigations — where U.S. interests may not always have lined up with Brazil’s.

Last summer, members of the U.S. Congress demanded answers from Attorney General William Barr about the scope of the relationship and whether the Justice Department was aware of wrongdoing by their Brazilian counterparts, but they have yet to receive a response. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who signed the letter to Barr, said it is “deeply concerning” that the Justice Department has not responded. “The United States has a dark history of intervention in domestic Latin American politics,” she wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Especially given the cozy relationship between the current Brazilian Administration and the Trump Administration, we in Congress need to be sure that our own Department of Justice was not party to this corruption.” The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

The bilateral relationship, touted by U.S. Justice Department officials as exemplary, resulted in multiple plea deals in U.S. courts in which companies paid over $8 billion in fines to settle corruption charges. A large portion of that money was funneled back to Brazil. Car Wash chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol had his eye on this cash from early on, and early last year, he announced a vague and unprecedented plan to use a portion of the windfall to create an independent fund to “fight corruption,” rather than return the money to the Brazilian government. The proposal was widely criticized as a power grab and eventually deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court last year. The leaked chats suggest that cash was a central consideration in the Car Wash team’s relationship with the Justice Department, and a reason to keep the U.S. partners happy.

The information on the collaboration comes from a massive archive of documents and Telegram chat logs provided exclusively to The Intercept Brasil by an anonymous source. The archive does not include direct conversations with U.S. officials, but some of their dialogues, emails, and working documents were shared in chats between Brazilian prosecutors.

In response to questions from The Intercept and Agência Pública, a Car Wash spokesperson defended the practice of informal international cooperation and argued that the source materials for this article were “obtained in a criminal manner” and “have been decontextualized or altered over the past few months to produce false accusations, which do not correspond to reality.”

The Intercept and partner news outlets have published over 90 articles from the leaked materials, revealing, among other things, extensive evidence 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 against Lula. Last September, opposition leaders in Brazil’s lower house of Congress attained enough votes to open a formal congressional inquiry into the facts revealed in the reporting. Six months later, this has yet to happen.

“They Asked Us to Keep It Confidential”

Operation Car Wash prosecutors’ relationship with their American counterparts began in March 2014, during the early days of the investigation, and culminated in a series of plea deals in 2018. The task force’s strategy for dealing with the Americans is well-illustrated in their conversations about an early set of meetings presided over by Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor. In February 2015, Dallagnol and two colleagues flew to Washington, D.C., for informal meetings with officials from the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security. At the Justice Department’s request, Dallagnol’s team tried to keep the trip out of the press, but when the U.S. delegation came to Brazil, he went one step further: He tried to keep the Brazilian Justice Ministry out of the loop as well.

In Brazil, the roles that the Justice Department performs in the U.S. are split between two entities: the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Justice Ministry. Car Wash task force is part of the former, which is led by the prosecutor general and is responsible for prosecuting crimes. The Justice Ministry, which has oversight of federal law enforcement agencies — like the Federal Police, equivalent to the FBI — is responsible for many investigative and enforcement functions and helps guide the government’s policy agenda in the area.

A bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or MLAT, sets the rules for how two countries can cooperate for international law enforcement purposes, such as requesting evidence like foreign bank records or police reports, facilitating search warrants, interviewing foreign suspects, and processing extradition requests. Under the MLAT and other relevant treaties, the Justice Ministry’s Department of Asset Recovery and International Legal Cooperation, or DRCI (its Portuguese acronym), should be the DOJ’s point of contact in Brazil, not representatives of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

But on October 5, 2015, unbeknownst to the Justice Ministry, at least 17 officials from the Justice Department, the FBI, and possibly Immigration and Customs Enforcement landed in Curitiba, the capital of the southern state of Paraná, for a four-day conference at the Operation Car Wash headquarters. Dallagnol instructed his press aide to keep the meetings under wraps, as the “Americans don’t want us to divulge things,” he advised. It is not unusual for agents to want to keep an ongoing investigation shielded from public view, but in this case, some details had already leaked to the Brazilian press.

Rather than respond with the names and titles of his American guests and how long they planned to stay, Dallagnol counseled Aras to stonewall. “I suggest that you suggest that they consult the DOJ, because they asked us to keep it confidential. If you understand that you should open up, I can send you the list, but I suggest you think on it, because this could create noise with the Americans.” He later added in a private chat that opponents within the Justice Ministry could “also use this info against us.”

In response to the Justice Ministry’s final question, asking for “other information that you understand to be relevant,” Dallagnol cracked wise: “The contacts are being made in accordance with national and international rules. I suggest that you suggest that the DRCI stop being jealous of the SCI’s relationship with other countries lol,” he said, referring to Aras’s department within the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Aras thanked Dallagnol for his response, but took a more diplomatic tact in the draft response he sent back 20 hours later. He ensured his colleagues that the purpose of the meeting was merely to “facilitate the formalization of future requests for cooperation,” which would go through the DRCI, and that the “American authorities did not come to carry out investigations in Brazil, which would be irregular.” He also reminded them that the Car Wash prosecutors had already made a similar trip to Washington earlier that year and claimed that his team had sent an email the month before to notify the DRCI of the meetings.

Meanwhile, the visit with the Americans continued.

Political Implications

Keeping the DRCI out of the loop was a conscious choice. The Car Wash team was eager for its sprawling investigation to move quickly, and gaining approval through formal channels, like MLATs, can sometimes bog a case down for months or years. For that reason, prosecutors from many countries argue that informal contact, within limits, is a necessity. It’s also clear in the chats that the Car Wash team was wary of potential political interference from the Brazilian government to protect allies who were under investigation — an understandable instinct, but one which legally cannot override the rules governing international cooperation.

Months earlier, Dallagnol had expressed his distrust of the DRCI and Rousseff’s government. In a group chat that included Aras, he said, “I don’t like the idea of the executive looking at our requests and knowing what’s up.” Rousseff and her justice minister are longtime members of Lula’s Workers’ Party, and, as president, Rousseff was under strong pressure to clip the prosecutors’ wings from politicians who feared being swept up in the probe. But she repeatedly refused to do so, which eventually provoked her 2016 impeachment.

Aras also appeared to believe that the country’s political leadership was fearful of U.S. involvement with Car Wash.

October 7, 2015 – Group Chat FTS MPF

Vladimir Aras – 09:16:08 – The Executive is “indignant” (that’s what they told me) with the presence of an American delegation in Curitiba. I think the nervousness is because of the FCPA. There are people afraid of falling on the American’s radar. I already foresee international end of year trips being canceled.

FCPA refers to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the legislation through which the U.S. claims jurisdiction to prosecute the bribery of foreign officials, even if the acts occurred outside of the U.S., as long as the transactions — or the corporations or individuals who made them — use the U.S. financial system. Petrobras is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and many of the financial transactions under investigation at the time involved U.S. financial institutions or U.S. dollars.

Dallagnol may have wanted to avoid political interference in his investigation, but — speaking generally and not about this specific situation — Eduardo Pitrez, international law professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande, says there are good reasons why the Justice Ministry is in charge of matters of international law enforcement cooperation. Under the Brazilian Constitution, the executive branch and Supreme Court are given authority over these processes “because they involve very sensitive elements, such as national sovereignty, international interests and disputes, and bilateral relations,” Pitrez said. Excluding the elected government and courts from the process creates “fragmentation,” he added. Without a central authority, “any judge or prosecutor” could independently establish relationships that directly affect “the government’s agenda on important national concerns, such as an oil company or the competitive capabilities of large national companies.”

In an email to The Intercept, the Car Wash spokesperson wrote that “the federal government’s department for international cooperation was called in whenever necessary.” However, he added, “there is no duty or obligation to share the entire investigation.”

From the U.S. side, even when it comes to informal meetings, the Justice Department requires agents traveling overseas to get permission both from the department’s Office of International Affairs as well as from the foreign government, according to Robert Appleton, a former senior U.S. attorney whose portfolio focused on international investigations. In this case, the Brazilian approval came from the Car Wash prosecutors.

“For a U.S. prosecutor to do anything abroad, they’re out of their country, so they don’t have any power,” said Appleton. “Policy-wise, they’re not supposed to run around any country” and conduct investigations “without the host country’s approval,” he added. “So if someone is doing that, they’re violating the Department of Justice protocols.”

Still, he cautioned, U.S. agents would not typically question whether the people they’re meeting with have gone through the proper channels — in this case, the DRCI.

A U.S. agent could “have a relationship with an agent or prosecutor in a foreign country, and you get your approvals and then go — you don’t know what that person is doing on their end,” Appleton said. “You presume that they’ve gotten their approvals to meet with you, but it’s not like you ask them, ‘Well, show me your approval that you can meet with me.’ That’s usually not something you ask. You take it for granted.”

These issues were particularly sticky with Operation Car Wash, as the investigations involved a former president from the governing party and likely frontrunner in the upcoming 2018 elections. In his eight years in office, Lula had defiantly worked to build regional alliances and weaken U.S. influence in the hemisphere. Also under investigation were Petrobras, the crown jewel of Brazil’s network of state-controlled businesses, and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction firm which, under Lula, ramped up operations across South America and beyond. Both companies were seen as key tools in Brazil’s foreign policy aims — and as a threat to the U.S. corporations that they supplanted. In 2013, the Rousseff government famously canceled a state visit with then-President Barack Obama, after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency had been spying on Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy. The U.S. government, in other words, might have an interest in bringing down certain Brazilian corporations that went beyond pure motives to stamp out corruption.

“A lot of people think that the U.S. came to investigate these companies in the attempt to find something that would give it a chance to interfere in these processes, by which these companies were evolving and gaining markets,” said Fabio de Sá e Silva, a professor of Brazilian studies at the University of Oklahoma.

Car Wash prosecutors were well aware that any collaboration with the U.S. would inevitably generate suspicions, and were careful to control how the relationship was covered in the media. Nonetheless, the press reported multiple details about the relationship that politicians and others argued were clear examples of improper U.S. influence on the investigations.

A congressman from the Workers’ Party submitted a report to the EU Parliament last year denouncing U.S. cooperation with Brazil as illegal because it did not flow through the Justice Ministry. “Our prosecutors and judges established, in clear defiance of the Constitution, a specific and independent foreign policy towards the U.S.,” the document read.

Eventually, the two countries signed multiple agreements under the MLAT related to Car Wash, but only after the U.S. investigation was well underway and perhaps irreversible. As Dallagnol put it to Aras, the help he and his team provided in secret had set in motion a scenario that “meets the Americans’ needs and they will no longer depend on us. From there on, we will lose strength to negotiate sharing the money they recover. Hence our rush.”

“This Investigation by the Americans Really Worries Me”

Dallagnol and Aras stayed in contact throughout the visit as they attempted to contain the backlash from Brasília, Brazil’s capital. On the evening that the U.S. delegation ended, Aras, who was on vacation in Germany, expressed his concerns in a private chat with Dallagnol, who he called “Delta”:

October 9, 2015 – Private chat

Vladimir Aras – 20:56:12 – Delta, Delta, as we already talked about, this investigation by the Americans really worries me. I was put at ease when you guaranteed that this group of Americans did not do investigations in Curitiba when they were there. You know they have few limitations for using evidence there. Even if they obtain them abroad less formally, they can use them validly in some cases. Hence my initial fear, since the [Public Prosecutor] and [Secretariat for International Cooperation] cannot allow this […] As I said on Monday, the [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] even mentioned the possibility of “unsettling bilateral relations.” Of course, we must comply with passive requests whenever possible, but without falling into traps. As I told you on the phone today, the government remains “nervous” about this story. The temperature in [Brasília] rose because of their numerous presence in Curitiba.

Aras said his worries were assuaged by the assurance that the delegation did not practice “investigative acts”; however, the agenda for the four-day meeting suggests that Dallagnol may have deceived his colleague on that crucial point.

According to the document, the first two days focused on presentations by the Brazilians about key cooperating witnesses in the Petrobras case. The second two were dedicated to U.S. officials meeting with the defense attorneys for Brazilians with whom they hoped to sign cooperation agreements. All of this was facilitated by the Car Wash prosecutors and took place in their offices. In chats with Aras and in his response to the Justice Ministry, Dallagnol neglected to mention the meetings with defense counsels.

Visa requests for at least two of the DOJ prosecutors contradict Dallagnol as well, according to official documents from the Brazilian Foreign Ministry obtained recently by The Intercept. The Americans said they planned to travel to Curitiba “for meetings with Brazilian authorities regarding the investigation into Petrobras,” and that “the objective of the meetings is to collect additional evidence in the case and speak with lawyers about their clients’ cooperation with the investigation underway in the USA.”

Dallagnol and Aras told the Justice Ministry that the visit was meant to “facilitate the formalization of future requests for cooperation” but at least three of the men whose cases were discussed that day reportedly later traveled to the U.S. to cooperate without an MLAT agreement.

Brazilian law is clear that any investigation that occurs on Brazilian soil must be conducted formally and, in the case of international cooperation, that process is always mediated by the Justice Ministry’s DRCI, not the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The U.S. investigation into corruption in Petrobras was ongoing at the time that DOJ officials flew down to Curitiba to acquire information and collaborators for their prosecution and, therefore, should have gone through legal channels.

The U.S. was not the only country to sidestep such requirements. In 2016, a Swiss court ruled that prosecutors had illegally shared bank data with Car Wash prosecutors. Last September, the Brazilian news outlet UOL, in partnership with The Intercept, published documents from the leaked archive that revealed Car Wash prosecutors intentionally broke the law by using evidence that they had received informally from colleagues in Switzerland and Monaco in arrest warrant requests. The article also detailed secret visits to Brazil by the Swiss.

A Car Wash spokesperson told The Intercept that “meetings with foreign authorities — and there were dozens, some in person and others virtual, with different countries — do not require any formalization via DRCI, but only internal authorization from the respective interested bodies.” Aras defended the exchange with the U.S. as legal and “good international practice,” and told The Intercept that the prosecutors were “not obliged to reveal or report these contacts to any authority in the Executive Branch.”

Ricardo Saadi, the head of the DRCI at the time, who has become a vocal supporter of Car Wash, told The Intercept that he did not recall whether the Public Prosecutor’s Office responded to his questions about the October 2015 visit. He added that “informal and direct contact between the authorities of different countries is permitted and provided for in international conventions. For this type of contact, there is no need to prepare an order based on the MLAT.”

Helping the Americans Do a Runaround

The week after the meetings in Curitiba, Car Wash prosecutor Orlando Martello sent Dallagnol a draft of a follow-up email he planned to send to the leaders of the U.S. delegation. The Brazilians could now “convince companies and individuals” to cooperate by “threaten[ing] to inform ‘the American authorities,'” Martello wrote, adding “… (lol).”

He then went on to lay out options for how the Americans could legally depose Brazilian suspects. Any interview that took place in Brazil would have to be “presided” over by Brazilian authorities (“I was not really aware of this fact, but Vladimir Aras reminded me about this understanding of our Supreme Court,” the email reads). Therefore, Martello recommended avoiding that altogether.

“First option — To hear the defendants in the US. This is would be the best option, but I think (as does Patrick)” — a reference to Patrick Stokes, the top ranking DOJ official at the meetings — “that just some of them will agree to go to the US,” he wrote. “We could pressure them a little bit to go to the US,” Martello went on. “Things can change in the future (we never know what will happen in the future!!!). So, we could suggest that it is better to guarantee their immunity as soon as possible.” (Stokes declined to comment. The Car Wash spokesperson told The Intercept that the Public Prosecutor’s Office “had no participation in Petrobras’ decision to cooperate voluntarily with the US authorities.”)

The Justice Department followed Martello’s advice and quickly began closing a series of interview negotiations and collaboration agreements directly with key Brazilian suspects, rather than going through the more cumbersome and regimented MLAT process. It’s unclear if this backfired on the Car Wash team or whether it was their plan all along.

On November 30, less than two months after the Curitiba meeting, Dallagnol appeared to surprise Aras with the news that the Americans were already finalizing collaboration agreements with Brazilian defendants.

“We have no control over the interviews, because there are about 10 collaborators who are already negotiating deals, or made deals,” Dallagnol wrote. “As it will be in the USA, it will be without DRCI,” meaning that it would not go through the MLAT process. The situation, Dallagnol informed Aras, meant that the balance of power in ongoing negotiations between Car Wash and the DOJ had swung in the American’s favor. The Car Wash team needed to hurry along with their cases, because, according to him, the Americans had everything they needed to make theirs, and once that happened “we will lose strength to negotiate the division of the money they recover. Hence our rush.”

Aras said it was “craziness” for the defense lawyers to send their clients to the U.S. without the stronger guarantees provided under the treaty. When they resumed the conversation more than two weeks later, Aras insisted that the DOJ should still follow the official channels and “request this via the DRCI.”

Dallagnol’s response was complex. He resisted the suggestion, reminding Aras that they had already told the Americans that “there would be no problem” if collaborators flew to the U.S. directly. However, he conceded, implicitly, that it may have been a mistake: “We had no restrictions yet, we were operating on automatic, unaware of the extent of the consequences,” he said. At the same time, he admitted that they had been “thinking about applying the treaty directly” — meaning to follow the MLAT, but exclude the Justice Ministry from the process. He added that was “still not out of the question, we are all reflecting, I believe.” The conversation ended without a clear resolution.

As the Brazilians fumbled, the Americans pressed forward. In April 2016, news leaked that cooperating witnesses were traveling to the U.S. to be deposed, with the help of the public prosecutor. Aras presented the article in a chat with Car Wash prosecutors to confirm if it was true, as it was the first he had heard of it.

“It would be good if there was an American request for the voluntary transfers of defendants or witnesses,” he wrote. “We could establish guarantees and restrictions. Done directly, they can move forward without any control over the national interest.”

Dallagnol responded that they’d already discussed this issue multiple times and Aras had agreed to everything along the way. Aras shot back that he remembered the discussions, but not “having agreed with the practice of collaborators receiving some kind of guarantee from the [Public Prosecutor] to travel to the USA, as people are saying.” That should have been approved in a formal treaty request, Aras insisted, and asked whether there was a paper trail. “No papers from us agreeing, for sure,” Dallagnol responded; rather, they had listened to the Americans’ proposal and “didn’t oppose it.”

“It’s better that way. Great,” said Aras.

But Dallagnol appeared determined to break the rules. In a separate instance, in February 2016, Dallagnol alerted Aras of an email he’d sent to American counterparts in which he offered to avoid the proper legal channels to help the Americans with another request. Aras was taken aback, explained at length all of the reasons why this was improper, and responded directly to the Americans to say that they would have to follow the protocols and go through the Justice Ministry.

“Thank you, Vlad, but […] in this case it is not convenient to pass something through the executive,” Dallagnol replied.

“The matter is not convenience. It’s legal,” Aras insisted. “The treaty has the force of ordinary federal law and assigns intermediation to the [Justice Ministry]. […] For now, we need to observe the current rules.”

Money in the Middle

One subject infuses the Car Wash team’s key conversations about collaborations with the U.S. government: money.

An illustrative example of this arose in May 2016. Prosecutor Roberson Pozzobon shared an update with colleagues about their investigation into the Singapore-based Keppel Offshore & Marine, a Petrobras service provider. Pozzobon said that a Keppel lawyer had confirmed a trip to Brazil to meet with Car Wash prosecutors. “I think we have a very good chance to recuperate lots of   .”

Dallagnol had another idea:

May 8, 2016 – Group Chat FT MPF Curitiba 3

Deltan Dallagnol – 23:57:26 – Is there anything visible that would give an opening for American action? Something that happened in the USA, meetings, accounts, headquarters? I ask because if we do an agreement and the USA acts afterward, our fine may become small… If we do it together and with division, we prob increase the value. Perhaps it is the case to ask the USA if they are interested during the negotiations… Just a suggestion…

May 9th, 2016 – Group Chat FT MPF Curitiba 3

Roberson Pozzobon – 00:01:24 – Yes, I think that’s a good one, Delta. It is quite possible that in one of the platforms they have built for Petrobras they have used the US legal or banking structure.

The Car Wash prosecutors felt that the Americans were able to negotiate larger settlements than they could and, in some cases, complex agreements stipulated that fines levied in one country could be discounted from amounts paid to another. Negotiating a settlement only to have a larger one negotiated later for the same crimes would be embarrassing. Nineteen months later, Keppel pleaded guilty to violating the FCPA in a U.S. court and agreed to pay $422 million in fines to the U.S., Brazilian, and Singaporean governments. Half of it went to Brazil.

In the FCPA case against Petrobras, it would appear that money was a determining factor in the Car Wash prosecutors’ strategy in dealing with their U.S. counterparts. In the same message in which Aras lays out the legal and political concerns about their secret meeting in Curitiba in October 2015, he added: “I thought Januario’s idea was great that the USD 1.6 billion (or is it 4 billion?!) fine that the DOJ may apply to Petrobras would be divided between Brazil and the USA. If Patrick Stokes gave a positive sign for Brazil to keep a quarter of that, so much the better.”

Brazil kept 80 percent of the $853 million fine under the final agreement.

In one conversation between Aras and Dallagnol, Dallagnol cited asset sharing as a reason why they had delayed cooperating with the Americans on access to Brazilian suspects. “The reason we’ve held off so far is because we’re still in doubt as to whether we’re going to facilitate things for them and because we wanted to negotiate the issue of asset sharing,” Dallagnol wrote.

In December 2015, there was internal discussion of whether or not to continue assisting the Americans (and whether or not to take a trip to meet with them in the U.S.). Again, at the center of the considerations was receiving a cut from the U.S. agreement with Petrobras. Dallagnol listed two considerations: One, should they end cooperation and how, and two, “can the asset sharing agreement influence the decision in point 1?”

On that point, Aras, the man responsible for ensuring that international partnerships follow the law, counseled the Car Wash prosecutors that it was “best not to invite the DRCI” to conversations with American authorities so as to not “lose negotiating positions” related to asset sharing.

The following year, Aras explained to the task force that there were serious problems in the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s relationship with the DOJ — a lack of reciprocity and long delays in fulfilling requests. Aras requested that Car Wash deny a DOJ request they were then helping with in order to send a message. “Vlad, we understand the need to generate pressure on Americans and that someone has to pay the price,” Dallagnol responded. “However, there are some things that concern me a lot in this specific context of Petrobras, especially the division of assets in the petrobras case. Because of this, I believe that it would be a very high risk to suspend in this specific case, at this time.”

In September 2018, Petrobras agreed to pay the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission $1.78 billion in fines, forfeiture of illicit gains, and interest. Eighty percent of the $853 million fine was transferred to Brazil. In recent years, Brazil-related settlements were also reached with Walmart, Odebrecht, Braskem, Embraer, Rolls-Royce Holdings, SBM Offshore, Keppel Offshore & Marine, Samsung Heavy Industries, and TechnipFMC, among others.

The big-dollar settlements have been touted by Car Wash as signs of success, but the plan to distribute the money also resulted in one of their most high profile defeats. Of the $682.5 million in Petrobras fees destined for Brazil, prosecutors proposed that half go to pay back investors and the rest into a new, privately-controlled “social investment” fund to support initiatives that “reinforce Brazilian society’s fight against corruption.” However, details about the private fund and how it would be administered were vague and prompted a fierce backlash from critics, who considered it to be unconstitutional maneuver. One Supreme Court minister said the proposal was part of a “power struggle” and the Car Wash prosecutors “were participating in a gold rush.” A former Petrobras director convicted under Car Wash filed to have his sentence overturned, arguing that the prosecutors stood to personally gain from his conviction. Last September, the Supreme Court ordered that the funds must be publicly administered, with a portion allocated to protecting the Amazon rainforest and the rest divided between the ministries of education, health, science and technology, and human rights.

The post The Secret History of U.S. Involvement in Brazil’s Scandal-Wracked Operation Car Wash appeared first on The Intercept.

In a decision announced Thursday, Judge Ricardo Augusto Soares Leite ruled that Greenwald’s prosecution would not go forward, but only on account of a previous finding by the Brazilian Supreme Court that The Intercept’s reporting on Operation Car Wash had not transgressed any legal boundaries. In the absence of the injunction issued by a Supreme Court minister that prohibited investigations into Greenwald related to this case, Leite said he would have let the charges against Greenwald move forward. The judge also said that, if the Supreme Court injunction were to be overturned, he would be open to charging Greenwald.

“I decline, for now, to receive the complaint against GLENN GREENWALD, due to the controversy over the extent of the injunction granted by Minister Gilmar Mendes in ADPF nº 601, on 08/24/2019,” Leite wrote, referring to the ruling by Mendes, a Supreme Court minister.

Greenwald had been accused of criminal misconduct related to his reporting on Operation Car Wash, a wide-ranging anti-corruption investigation. The cybercrimes charges stemmed from allegations by a public prosecutor that Greenwald worked in collaboration with hackers to obtain an online chat group used by prosecutors and judges in the Car Wash cases.

“While I welcome the fact that this investigation will not move forward, this decision is insufficient to guarantee the rights of a free press,” Greenwald said in a statement. “The rejection is based on the fact that the Supreme Court already issued an injunction against attempts of official persecution against me. This is not enough. We seek a decisive rejection from the Supreme Court of this abusive prosecution on the grounds that it is a clear and grave assault on core press freedoms. Anything less would leave open the possibility of further erosion of the fundamental freedom of the press against other journalists.”

“We will continue the fight against this authoritarian escalation before the Supreme Court, all while we keep reporting on the archive provided by our source,” Greenwald said.

The Intercept also welcomed the ruling, with reservations.

“Today’s ruling rightly rejects the charges against Glenn Greenwald. As federal police investigators affirmed last year, he did nothing wrong,” said Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. “However, the ruling is narrow and procedural, based on the injunction issued by a Supreme Court minister last year.”

“There remains enormous pressure to prosecute Glenn in retaliation for his work on The Intercept’s Secret Brazil Archive series,” Reed continued. “We will continue to fight for the complete exoneration Glenn deserves, and for the rights of all journalists to exercise the freedoms they are entitled to under the Brazilian constitution.”

Beginning last June, The Intercept has published a series of stories, in both English and Portuguese, based on leaks about Operation Car Wash. Car Wash rocked Brazilian politics by charging high-profile companies, as well as two former presidents. Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was imprisoned as part of the investigation and prevented from running in the 2018 presidential election, clearing the way for the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro to take office.

The Intercept’s stories document high-level misconduct in the Brazilian justice system relating to the sweeping investigation. The Intercept reported on leaked chats between prosecutors and judges in the case — revealing scheming by purportedly apolitical prosecutors to ensure that Lula’s Workers’ Party did not win the election; prohibited collaboration between the Car Wash prosecutors and a key judge; and controversial personal enrichment by prosecutors through speaking events, among many other noteworthy details.

The decision to dismiss the charges against Greenwald, albeit while leaving the door open to his prosecution should the Supreme Court change its decision, comes in the wake of an international campaign of support for Greenwald and condemnation of the Bolsonaro government. Last week, a coalition of more than 40 civil liberties groups denounced the legal intimidation of Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil. That message has also been echoed by high-profile political figures in the United States, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., both 2020 presidential hopefuls. Other progressive figures, such as Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also condemned the charges. A statement from the Committee to Protect Journalists described the charges as “a disproportionate abuse of power by Brazilian authorities [that] poses a threat to any investigative journalist.”

Bolsonaro has attempted to throttle civil liberties in Brazil since coming to power, waging a campaign of intimidation against rival politicians, the independent press, and civil society activists. The Car Wash investigation represented arguably the largest and most embarrassing episode for Bolsonaro since he came to power, highlighting, based on internal leaks, conversations that had taken place between Bolsonaro allies to help subvert Brazil’s democratic institutions.

Greenwald and The Intercept Brasil never planned to cease or scale back coverage at any time since being charged.

The post Brazilian Judge Declines to Move Forward With Charges Against Glenn Greenwald “for Now” appeared first on The Intercept.

The denunciation will now go before a judge who can approve or deny the request for charges.

The Intercept and Greenwald both released statements Tuesday decrying the federal prosecutor’s accusation as an attack on Brazil’s free press in line with recent abuses by the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Abuses committed by Justice Minister Sergio Moro when he served as the presiding judge in Operation Car Wash were central to The Intercept’s reporting in the Brazil Secret Archive series.

“We are appalled that Brazil’s Public Ministry has decided to file such a blatantly politically motivated charge against Greenwald, in apparent retaliation for The Intercept’s critical reporting.”

“The Bolsonaro government has repeatedly made it clear that it does not believe in basic press freedoms. Today’s announcement that a criminal complaint has been filed against Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald is the latest example of journalists facing serious threats in Brazil,” The Intercept said in its statement, which can be read below in full. “We are appalled that Brazil’s Public Ministry has decided to file such a blatantly politically motivated charge against Greenwald, in apparent retaliation for The Intercept’s critical reporting on abuses committed by Justice Minister Moro and several federal prosecutors.”

“We at The Intercept see this as an attempt to criminalize not only our journalism but also that of the dozens of partners who collaborated with our staff in over 95 stories based on the archives,” The Intercept said. “There is no democracy without a free press, and defenders of the press everywhere should be deeply concerned about Bolsonaro’s latest authoritarian move.”

Greenwald denied the charges in his statement, citing a previous Brazilian Federal Police investigation that concluded he had committed no crimes and noted his “careful and distant posture regarding the execution” of the alleged hacks.

“Less than two months ago, the Federal Police, examining all the same evidence cited by the Public Ministry, stated explicitly that not only have I never committed any crime but that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist never even to get close to any participation,” Greenwald said in the statement, which can be read below in full. “Even the Federal Police under Minister Moro’s command said what is clear to any rational person: I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist — ethically and within the law.”

“This accusation — brought by the same prosecutor who just tried and failed to criminally prosecute the head of the Brazilian Bar Association for criticizing Minister Moro — is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government,” said Greenwald, who also co-founded The Intercept Brasil. “We will not be intimidated by these tyrannical attempts to silence journalists. I am working right now on new reporting and will continue to do so.”

Operation Car Wash prosecuted major Brazilian construction firms and politicians. Among its most controversial convictions was that of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose imprisonment on corruption charges removed him from contention in the 2018 presidential elections, despite leading in the polls. Instead, Bolsonaro won the office and quickly appointed Moro, the judge who convicted Lula, as his justice minister. After the Secret Brazil Archive reporting, the Brazilian Supreme Court released Lula on the basis of a procedural argument, a stinging rebuke of Moro’s work.

The series of Intercept stories about Operation Car Wash relied on a trove of previously undisclosed materials and provided an unprecedented insight into the anti-corruption investigation. The revelations included scheming by purportedly apolitical prosecutors to ensure that Lula’s Workers’ Party did not win the election; prohibited collaboration between the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro; and controversial personal enrichment by prosecutors, among many other revelations published in English and Portuguese.

The Brazilian federal prosecutor who filed the criminal complaint, Wellington Divino Marques de Oliveira, who works in Moro’s Justice Ministry but has prosecutorial independence, wrote in the complaint that Greenwald had “directly assisted, encouraged and guided the criminal group, DURING the criminal practice, acting as guarantor of the group, obtaining financial advantage with the conduct described here.”

Bolsonaro has himself previously suggested that he would like to deport Greenwald and threatened to imprison the journalist for his work. At the time, The Intercept condemned the threat in a statement and reiterated that Greenwald and The Intercept’s other reporters enjoy free-press protections under the Brazilian constitution.

Read The Intercept’s full statement:

The Bolsonaro government has repeatedly made it clear that it does not believe in basic press freedoms. Today’s announcement that a criminal complaint has been filed against Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald is the latest example of journalists facing serious threats in Brazil.

The evidence cited today by Brazil’s Public Ministry is the same that was rigorously analyzed by the country’s Federal Police, leading the agency to conclude that Greenwald did not commit any crimes in his contacts with the alleged source of our Secret Brazil Archive stories. Glenn Greenwald was not formally investigated by the Federal Police, but they concluded that there was no indication of wrongdoing committed by him.

We are appalled that Brazil’s Public Ministry has decided to file such a blatantly politically motivated charge against Greenwald, in apparent retaliation for The Intercept’s critical reporting on abuses committed by Justice Minister Moro and several federal prosecutors.

We at The Intercept see this as an attempt to criminalize not only our journalism but also that of the dozens of partners who collaborated with our staff in over 95 stories based on the archives. There is no democracy without a free press, and defenders of the press everywhere should be deeply concerned about Bolsonaro’s latest authoritarian move.

Read Glenn Greenwald’s full statement:

The Bolsonaro government and the movement that supports it has made repeatedly clear that it does not believe in basic press freedoms — from Bolsonaro’s threats against Folha to his attacks on journalists that have incited violence to Sergio Moro’s threats from the start to classify us as “allies of the hackers” for revealing his corruption.

Less than two months ago, the Federal Police, examining all the same evidence cited by the Public Ministry, stated explicitly that not only have I never committed any crime but that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist never even to get close to any participation. Even the Federal Police under Minister Moro’s command said what is clear to any rational person: I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist — ethically and within the law.

This accusation — brought by the same prosecutor who just tried and failed to criminally prosecute the head of the Brazilian Bar Association for criticizing Minister Moro — is an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister Moro and the Bolsonaro government. It is also on an attack on the Brazilian Supreme Court, which ruled in July that I am entitled to have my press freedom protected in response to other retaliatory attacks from Minister Moro, and even an attack on the findings of the Federal Police, which concluded explicitly after a comprehensive investigation that I committed no crimes and solely acted as a journalist.

We will not be intimidated by these tyrannical attempts to silence journalists. I am working right now on new reporting and will continue to do so. Many courageous Brazilians sacrificed their liberty and even life for Brazilian democracy and against repression, and I feel an obligation to continue their noble work.

The post The Intercept Condemns Brazilian Criminal Complaint Against Glenn Greenwald as an Attack on Free Press appeared first on The Intercept.

The same Brazilian prosecutors who for years exhibited a single-minded fixation on jailing former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are now seeking his release from prison, requesting that a court allow him to serve the remainder of his 11-year sentence for corruption at home. But Lula — who believes the request is motivated by fear that prosecutorial and judicial improprieties in his case, which were revealed by The Intercept, will lead to the nullification of his conviction — is opposing these efforts, insisting that he will not leave prison until he receives full exoneration.

In seeking his release, Lula’s prosecutors are almost certainly not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Quite the contrary: Those prosecutors have often displayed a near-pathological hatred for the two-term former president. Last month, The Intercept, jointly with its reporting partner UOL, published previously secret Telegram messages in which the Operation Car Wash prosecutors responsible for prosecuting Lula cruelly mocked the tragic death of his 7-year-old grandson from meningitis earlier this year, as well as the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years from a stroke at the age of 66. One of the prosecutors who participated publicly apologized, but none of the others have.

Far more likely is that the prosecutors are motivated by desperation to salvage their legacy after a series of defeats suffered by their once-untouchable, widely revered Car Wash investigation, ever since The Intercept, on June 9, began publishing reports based on a massive archive of secret chats between the prosecutors and Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw most of the convictions, including Lula’s, and who now serves as President Jair Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Public Security.

The prosecutors’ cynical gambit, it appears, is that the country’s Supreme Court — which two weeks ago nullified one of Moro’s anti-corruption convictions for the first time on the ground that he violated core rights of defendants — will feel less pressure to nullify Moro’s guilty verdict in Lula’s case if the ex-president is comfortably at home in São Paulo (albeit under house arrest) rather than lingering in a Curitiba prison.

But this strategy ran into a massive roadblock when Lula demanded that he not be released from prison unless and until he is fully exonerated. He wants to ensure that nobody — least of all Supreme Court judges who will rule on his appeal — feel relieved of their obligation to decide correctly by telling themselves that there is no need to take such a drastic step as nullifying Lula’s conviction given that he is no longer in jail but at home.

“I won’t trade my dignity for my freedom,” the former president proclaimed in a hand-written letter “to the Brazilian People,” explaining why he would resist efforts to swap his home for his cage as his prison. “I’ve already proven that the accusations against me are false. It is [the Car Wash prosecutors and Sergio Moro], not me, who are now prisoners of the lies they told Brazil and the world.”

In response, Deltan Dallagnol, the task force’s nominal chief and a prime subject of The Intercept’s reporting, insisted that Lula has no say in that matter: that if he is ordered to leave prison, he has no power to resist or reject the terms. So weakened is the Car Wash prosecution that, in a surreal spectacle, the prosecutors who worked for years and broke numerous rules to ensure Lula’s imprisonment are now demanding that he leave prison (albeit on their terms), while Lula categorically refuses to do so absent full acquittal of the crimes of which they accused him.

The Car Wash prosecutors have good reason to worry that Moro’s and their gross misconduct could lead to a nullification of Lula’s conviction. Beyond the alarming-to-them Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago, numerous developments reflect a newfound hostility to their work.

On Friday morning, Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, reported that the Supreme Court is moving to judicially authenticate The Intercept’s archive so that its contents can be used in judicial proceedings to review the legitimacy of the anti-corruption probe’s convictions. Meanwhile, President of the Court Dias Toffoli announced this week that the court will shortly decide several looming questions about Car Wash that could, by themselves, lead to an annulment of Lula’s conviction.

Beyond the Supreme Court, Moro’s “anti-crime” package — which is principally designed to fulfill Bolsonaro’s dream of immunizing the police and military when they kill poor, innocent favela residents — has suffered multiple defeats in Congress. Bolsonaro’s choice for chief prosecutor, Augusto Aras, was confirmed by the Senate in September only after he publicly condemned the “excesses” of the Car Wash prosecutors, claiming that the prosecutors’ youth and lack of adult supervision made them believe they could cross all ethical lines.

Longtime defenders of the Car Wash probe — including one of the center-right leaders in the Senate of the 2016 impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff, as well as the former chief prosecutor in his new book — have expressed remorse about the unethical components of the prosecutors’ actions as revealed by The Intercept’s last several months of reporting. One Supreme Court minister, Gilmar Mendes, this week read from The Intercept’s published Telegram chats to accuse Moro and the prosecutors of engaging in “organized criminality” and being “torturers” (for using the tactic of “preventative imprisonment” as a means of forcing defendants to accuse others as a condition for being released).

A new bill to punish prosecutors and judges for abusing their power — aimed at least in part at the abuses of Moro and the prosecutors — easily passed both houses of Congress last month, and most of Bolsonaro’s vetoes of parts of the bill were swiftly overridden. Numerous disciplinary proceedings are pending against Dallagnol and at least several harsh punishments are expected. A clear anti-Car Wash momentum is now driving many of Brazil’s key institutions.

The erosion of Moro and Car Wash’s credibility is now global: Last month, 17 leading anti-corruption scholars from around the world — including one, Yale Law School’s Susan Rose-Ackerman, repeatedly heralded by Dallagnol as the “world leading anti-corruption expert” — signed a letter that, citing The Intercept’s reporting, condemned Moro’s “illegal and immoral practices” and demanded Lula’s immediate release; on Thursday, the Paris City Council, citing The Intercept’s reporting, voted to make Lula an honorary citizen of Paris; last month, members of the Democratic House of Representatives caucus wrote a letter to the Justice Department which, referencing The Intercept’s reporting, proclaimed that “these reports appear to confirm that the actions of both Judge Moro and the Lava Jato prosecutors have been motivated by a political agenda that seeks to undermine the electoral prospects of Brazil’s Worker’s Party.”

To be sure, there will be significant pressure applied to, and even not-so-subtle threats against, the Supreme Court to avoid anything that would exonerate Lula. Each time Lula’s case has made its way to the highest court, members of the military, both active and retired, have warned the court in quite explicit terms that they were being watched, and expected the court to keep Lula where he was. Shortly prior to his father’s successful election victory, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo (who the president is currently attempting to nominate as his ambassador to the U.S.) warned that any adverse Supreme Court decisions could be addressed by “sending a solider and a corporal” to the doors of the court.

Notwithstanding those pressures and threats, Moro and the legitimacy of the Car Wash probe are far weaker and more vulnerable than they were four months ago. The prosecutors clearly fear that the crowning jewel of their work — Lula’s head on a stake — is in jeopardy. Much of their legitimacy has already been eroded, but any reversal of what they regard as their most cherished accomplishment would be a fatal blow.

Trying to get Lula out of his jail cell and into a more palatable prison — his home — is a desperate attempt to avert that catastrophe. And Lula knows it, which is why — remarkably — he is so insistent on remaining in prison until he receives the full acquittal he believes he is due and which, with the truth about Moro and the prosecutors’ actions finally known, he believes is imminent.

As more revelations continue to be published by The Intercept and its reporting partners about the misconduct of Moro and the prosecutors, the likelihood of a full reckoning for the once-revered prosecutors and the judge who led them increases. Lula’s calculation that he should remain in prison until he is fully cleared may prove to be erroneous, but there is certainly a solid basis in fact for his conclusion.

The post Fearful of Lula’s Exoneration, His Once-Fanatical Prosecutors Request His Release From Prison. But Lula Refuses. appeared first on The Intercept.

In fact, in the months preceding his false claim, Dallagnol was a participant in secret chats exclusively obtained by The Intercept, in which prosecutors plotted to leak information to the media with the goal of manipulating suspects by making them believe that their indictment was imminent even when it was not, in order to intimidate them into signing confessions that implicated other targets of the investigation.

Critics of the so-called Car Wash investigation — which imprisoned dozens of Brazilian elites including, most significantly, the center-left ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was leading all polls to win the 2018 presidential election (ultimately won by Jair Bolsonaro after Lula was barred) — long suspected that the prosecutorial team was responsible for numerous media reports that revealed sensitive details about suspects targeted by the investigations.

Dallagnol and his team always publicly, even angrily, denied this. Yet the Secret Brazil Archive obtained by The Intercept, which we began reporting on June 9, contains numerous instances of the prosecutorial team planting exactly the sorts of leaks they repeatedly denied involvement in — often with motives that rendered the outcome legally questionably, if not outright illegal.

One illustrative example came relatively early in the investigation. On June 21, 2015, in a Telegram group for task force members, the Car Wash prosecutor Orlando Martello Júnior asked one of his colleagues, Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima: “what is the strategy for revealing the next steps in the cases of Electrobras, etc.?” Santos Lima replied that while he did not know what specifically his colleague was referring to, “my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentivize them to collaborate.”

According to Brazilian law of criminal prosecutions (which provides rules governing confessions as part of plea bargains), a plea bargain can be accepted only if it has been offered “voluntarily.” But the prosecutor admitted to his colleagues that he used media leaks to forge an intimidating environment and, with that, could obtain confessions through manipulative means. These actions are squarely at odds with what are required to be the voluntary nature of confessions and plea bargains.

June 21, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Orlando Martello – 09:03:04 – CF(leaks) what is the strategy for revealing the next steps of Electrobras, etc?

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 09:10:08 –http://m.politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/geral,na-mira-do-chefe-,1710379

Santos Lima – 09:12:21 – I don’t know what you’re talking about, but my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentive them to collaborate.

Santos Lima – 09:15:37 – I read the news of Flores on the other list. It’s just reheated news.

Santos Lima – 09:18:16 – Incidentally, Moro told me that he will have to use this week’s Avancini term on Angra

Martello – 09:25:33 – CFleaks, we don’t know want to do BA on Angra e Eletrobrás? Why alert them to this fact in the press conference?

Martello – 09:26:00 – In order not to lose our habit?

In the chat, Santos Lima boasted, without any embarrassment, that he “leaked” information to the press. In addition, his comment implied that this was a customary practice, since it referred to the plural: “my leaks.” And the prosecutor stated with apparent pride that he did so with well-defined objectives: to use fear of indictments in order to induce suspects to act in the prosecutors’ own interests by “collaborating.”

Notably, the prosecutor’s boast of these types of leaks did not elicit any objections from the other Car Wash prosecutors. Throughout the conversations, the rest of the group remained silent, suggesting that leaks of this type were far from unusual.

On the same day, the task force’s chief prosecutor, Dallagnol, along with Martello, announced in the chat that — in order to pressure the suspect — they had leaked information to a reporter with the right-wing newspaper Estadão that the U.S. government would help investigate Freiburghaus. They were expecting that this media leak would advance their investigation by pressuring Freiburghaus. It was Dallagnol who was personally responsible for the leak, as shown in his secret conversation with the newspaper reporter (The Intercept has translated the Portuguese conversations into English).

June 21, 2015 – Private chat

Deltan Dallagnol – 11:43:49 – The operator of Odebrecht was Bernardo, who is in Switzerland. The U.S. will act on our request, because the transactions passed through the U.S. We have already made a request for US cooperation regarding deposits received by PRC. This is something new. Are you interested in publishing this today or tomorrow, REDACTED, keeping my name off? You can say “source in the MPF.” At the press conference, Igor said there is a red notice to arrest him, and there is. He can be arrested anywhere in the world. Now with the US in action, which is new, let’s see if we can do what was done in the FIFA case to Bernardo, which is what inspired us.

REDACTED – 11:45:44 – Whoa awesome! !!!! I will publish today!!!!!!!

As the conversation progressed, the reporter advised that the story about U.S. aid in the Odebrecht case (which was not formalized at the time) would be the Estadão headline the next day.

Back in the prosecutor’s Telegram chat group, a conversation between June 21 and 22 detailed the task force’s intentions toward Freiburghaus:

June 21, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Deltan Dallagnol – 20:33:52 – Tomorrow the cooperation with the US regarding Bernando is the headline in Estadão.

Dallagnol – 20:34:00 – Confirmed

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 20:55:16 – I tried to read, but I couldn’t. Tomorrow I’ll look. Let’s closely control the media. I have space at FSP [Folha], who knows how we can use them if we need.

The information leaked by the Car Wash prosecutorial task force was indeed the newspaper headline, and the methods of pressure imposed on the investigative source were resumed shortly thereafter in the same chat:

June 22, 2015 – Chat Group: FT MPF Curitiba 2

Deltan Dallagnol – 01:56:40 – I think we need to request a freeze of his assets in Switzerland

Dallagnol – 01:56:48 – Bank account, real estate and others

Dallagnol – 01:57:00 – Go and tell him he’ll lose everything

Dallagnol – 01:57:20 – Have him on his knees and then offer redemption. There’s no way he won’t take it

Cover of the newspaper Estadão de S. Paulo on June 22, 2015, the headline of which reads: “Americans will help to investigate Odebrecht.”

At the end of the day, the strategy failed, as Freiburghaus never provided any plea bargain or cooperation.

Beyond the use of media leaks to intimidate and manipulate confessions, what makes all of this particularly incriminating is that Dallagnol has publicly, and vehemently, denied that Car Wash prosecutors have ever used any leaks, claiming that all the leaks about Car Wash came instead from defense attorneys and their clients. In the interview with BBC Brasil following a speech he gave at Harvard Law School in April 2017, Dallagnol said that “public officials do not leak information — the loophole is inevitable access to secret data by defendants and their clients.” When asked directly if the task force had leaked, the chief prosecutor replied, “In cases where only public officials had access to the data, the information did not leak.”

Responding to inquiries from The Intercept about this story, the press spokesperson for the Car Wash task force denied that the prosecutors had ever leaked information to Estadão, insisting that it “never leaked sensitive information to the press, contrary to what the questioning suggests.” To justify this denial, the task force argues that information passed to the press must violate the law or a court order to be characterized as a “leak.” Using this newly created definition of “leak,” the task force argues that the material sent by Dallagnol to Estadão did not, in its view, violate either the law or any court order and therefore, cannot be accurately described as a “leak.”

“Is there any chance to release the news to GOL?”

But The Intercept’s reporting here does not claim or suggest that Dallagnol or Santos Lima committed a crime or violated court orders by leaking information that was not known to the public. The point of the reporting is that the prosecutors did exactly what Dallagnol told the BBC they never did: namely, leaked inside information about investigations of which the public and the media were unaware in order to advance their investigative goals.

To defend Dallagnol from this clear evidence that he lied, the task force is trying to invent a new definition of “leak,” a meaning that only considers an act to be a “leak” if it entails a violation of the law or a court order. But that, to put it generously, is not a commonly recognized understanding of what leaking means. Indeed, in his interview with the BBC, Dallagnol did not deny that the task force illegally leaked. He denied that the task force used leaks of any kind — “public officials do not leak information,” he said, adding: “In cases where only public agents had access to the data, the information did not leak.”

The task force’s insistence that it never used leaks is especially bizarre given that Santos Lima himself boasted that he did just that, using the word “leak” to describe his own actions: “my leaks are always designed to cause them to think that investigations are inevitable and thus incentive them to collaborate,” he wrote, demonstrating that even the prosecutors themselves do not understand leaks to have the definition they are now trying to impose on it. Moreover, in his conversation with the Estadão reporter, Dallagnol himself described the information he was sending about the proposed collaboration with the U.S. as “new” and for this reason, insisted that the information he sent could only be published if they keep “my name off” the record.” If the information published was already public, as the Car Wash task force is now claiming through its spokesperson, why would Dallagnol insist on anonymity?

Thus, the task force’s denial that prosecutors did exactly what Dallagnol falsely insisted they never did — leaking information that was not known to the public — is contradicted by the prosecutors’ own words, as posted in the chat above, in which they themselves describe their actions as “leaks.” It is also negated by Dallagnol’s insistence to the Estadão reporter that information passed to the paper should not be attributed to him. It is further refuted by other repeated episodes in which prosecutors admit to leaking information about investigations to the media, often using specifically the word “leaks” that they now seek to redefine.

Selective Leak

These leaks were not isolated cases. In 2016, Car Wash prosecutors spoke explicitly about their use of “selective leaking” to the media intended to influence and manipulate a rumored petition for habeas corpus from former Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha, to be filed in the Supreme Court:

December 12, 2016 – Chat Group: Filhos do Januario 1

Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – 18:45:31 – I received from the Russian: off the record I received news, I don’t know if it’s true, that there would be an order from the Supreme Court that would release Cunha tomorrow

Roberson Pozzobon – 18:51:49 – This info is circulating here at the federal prosecutor’s office also

Paulo Roberto Galvão – 18:57:24 – The Supreme Court would be drained. I don’t believe it.

Athayde Ribeiro Costa – 18:57:40 –toffi, lewa and gm. I don’t doubt it.

Santos Lima – 18:58:37 – It’s necessary to see who goes to the hearing.

Jerusa Viecili – 18:58:39 – Pqp

Santos Lima –19:00:58 – Is there any chance to release the news to GOL?

Costa – 19:01:35 – selective leak …

These dialogues prove that Dallagnol lied to the BBC when he denied the use of leaks. That denial came after Dallagnol participated in several conversations in which his task force colleagues explicitly discussed doing what he publicly denied: namely, promoting leaks and using the media for their own interests. Ironically, Dallagnol himself pointed out to the BBC how complex the task of proving leaks was because, according to him, those involved always deny it.

“It is very difficult to identify the point (source of the leak), because if you listen to these people, they will deny it,” he said. Indeed they do. That’s precisely what Dallagnol and his colleagues spent years doing falsely — until the truth was finally revealed through the publication of their own words.

João Felipe Linhares has contributed research to this article.

The post Brazil’s Chief Prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, Lied When He Denied Leaking to the Press, Secret Chats Reveal appeared first on The Intercept.

The answer, in one word: None.

The public interest in reporting this material has been obvious from the start. These documents revealed serious, systematic, and sustained improprieties and possible illegality by Brazil’s current Minister of Justice and Public Security Sergio Moro while he was a judge, as well as by the chief prosecutor of the Car Wash investigation, Deltan Dallagnol, and other members of that investigative task force. It was the Car Wash task force, which Moro presided over as a judge, that was responsible for prosecuting ex-President Lula da Silva and removing him from the 2018 election, paving the way for the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to become president. The corruption exposed by our reporting was so serious, and so consequential, that even many of Moro’s most loyal supporters abandoned him and called for his resignation within a week of the publication of our initial stories.

As the revelations of corruption by Moro and Dallagnol grew — reported both by us and our journalistic partners in Brazil — those officials resorted to the tactics used by government officials everywhere when their improprieties are revealed in the press: They tried to distract attention away from their own misconduct by fixating on the actions of the source as well as the journalists who revealed their wrongdoing.

That is what Sergio Moro, exploiting his position as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, has been attempting to do for weeks. He and his defenders in Bolsonaro’s party constantly speak about the alleged crimes committed by our source and imply that the reporters and editors at The Intercept and other media outlets working with us are criminals and “accomplices” for the role we have played in exposing their corruption. Moro consistently refers to The Intercept’s reporters as “the allies of the hackers.”

And on July 27, Bolsonaro directly weighed in, with the scurrilous charge that Glenn Greenwald got married and adopted children in order to avoid deportation (his marriage occurred 14 years ago), and threatened Greenwald with imprisonment with the line, “He may take a cane here in Brazil.”

But despite their aggressive efforts, Moro and his defenders have been unable to obtain any evidence to support their insinuations that The Intercept did anything in this matter other than exercise our right to practice journalism, which is guaranteed and protected by the Brazilian Constitution.

At the end of last week, after Brazil’s Federal Police had announced the arrests, they released what they called the “confession” of the person they claim is the principal hacker who provided us with this material, Walter Delgatti Neto. After being interrogated for hours and allegedly “confessing” to the hacking, Delgatti Neto said in his official police statement that:

• he never spoke to any Intercept reporter until he had already completed his hacking;
• he never requested or received any payment from The Intercept (or any other party) for providing the documents;
• he only spoke to The Intercept anonymously;
• he never altered any of the chats he provided to us and does not believe that it would be technically possible to have altered the chats given how he downloaded them from Telegram; and
• his claimed motive for obtaining and leaking these documents was inspired by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: to improve his country by exposing hidden corruption that the public had the right to know.

Because we have not only the right but the duty — under both the Constitution in Brazil and the code of ethics that governs our profession — to protect our sources, we have not and will not comment on the individuals accused by the Federal Police of having hacked into Telegram accounts and then providing information to our journalists.

But what we can confirm is that, as we have said emphatically from the beginning, the work we have done is classic public interest journalism: receiving authentic information that reveals serious wrongdoing by the country’s most powerful officials and then carefully and responsibly reporting it. Even the Federal Police’s account of what their suspect says aligns with what we have said from the start about our role.

When we published our first series of exposes on June 9, we included an editorial explaining the journalistic principles that guided our reporting of the archive and what our role was in obtaining it. We wrote:

Until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening. …

The Intercept’s only role in obtaining these materials was to receive them from our source, who contacted us many weeks ago (long before the recently alleged hacking of Moro’s telephone) and informed us that they had already obtained the full set of materials and was eager to provide them to journalists.

When we received the archive, we asked ourselves two questions, the same two key questions journalists around the world ask when embarking on a story: 1) Can we determine that this material is authentic? and 2) Is it in the public interest to report it?

If the answer to those two questions is “yes” — as it was in this case — then we have not only the right but the duty to inform the public about it. That is what we have been doing since June 9 and will continue to do until all of the material in the public interest is reported. This is also why we opened our newsroom and archive to Brazilian journalistic partners, including the major newspaper Folha, the news magazine Veja, and others. 

We were able to authenticate this material using the same methods that at least six other journalistic outlets used to authenticate it, many of which were the same methods used to authenticate the Snowden archive before reporting on it. They include comparing the contents to nonpublic material to determine that it was genuine; consulting with sources whose nonpublic knowledge aligned with its contents; and confirming with legal specialists that the highly intricate, nonpublic legal material could have been created only by someone with in-depth, inside knowledge of the Car Wash investigations. We were also able to see in the chats the prosecutors’ past conversations with our own reporters, and we found that they were authentic. The other journalists who had access to the material did the same check and came to the same conclusion: The chats are real.

If history is any indication, the attempt by Moro and his defenders to encourage the public to fixate on the actions of the alleged source rather than the content of our journalistic revelations about his misconduct will fail spectacularly. Much of the most important journalism of the last several decades was made possible by sources who illegally obtained vital information and furnished it to journalists. What history remembers is what the reporting revealed, not the actions of the sources who helped reveal it.

In 1971, a former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg stole tens of thousands of pages of top-secret documents proving that the U.S. government was lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. He gave those stolen documents to the New York Times and then to the Washington Post, both of which reported them. What people remember are the lies revealed by those stolen documents. To the extent Ellsberg is discussed, he is widely regarded as a hero for enabling this official deceit to be exposed by journalists.

Throughout the war on terror waged by the U.S. and its allies since the attacks of September 11, 2001, the largest media outlets in the West — the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, BBC, the Guardian — repeatedly received vital information from sources who risked prosecution to expose grave wrongdoing, such as torture, CIA black sites, and illegal domestic NSA spying. While a few authoritarian voices called for the imprisonment of the journalists who revealed those secrets, most regarded the reporting as vital and necessary, and all of those exposes received the top prizes of journalism, including the Pulitzer Prize.

The same was true of the reporting in 2013 and 2014 about the secret mass spying on the internet and entire populations around the world by the U.S. government and its allies — reporting that was enabled by documents unlawfully disseminated by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Dozens of media outlets around the world, including Globo in Brazil, were eager to use those illegally obtained documents to report on the secret spying by government officials because journalists understand that what matters is not the acts or motives of the source but the content of what the journalism reveals to the public.

And, of course, what history remembers most about that reporting are not the moral judgments by the U.S. government and its defenders about Edward Snowden’s actions. What matters — what history has recorded — is what the reporting revealed about the mass and indiscriminate invasions of privacy carried out in secret by security state agencies.

We have no doubt that Moro, Dallagnol, and their allies will continue to use the same tactics pioneered by Richard Nixon and his top aides against Daniel Ellsberg and other sources during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals: namely, to focus public attention on the acts of those who revealed their corruption rather than on the corruption they themselves committed.

But we also have no doubt that these tactics will be no more successful in this case than they were in all these prior cases of crucial journalism over the last several decades. What matters to the public is what their most powerful leaders have done in secret. And that’s why a free press is so vital, so indispensable, to a healthy democracy: because only journalism that is independent of the government and unconstrained by corrupt officials can ensure that the public remains informed and aware of what their leaders are doing and that those officials are prevented from carrying out corrupt acts in secret.

Those are the principles on which The Intercept was founded in 2013. Those are the principles that have driven the reporting we have done from the inception of our news organization. And those are the principles that — with your help and support — will continue to drive our ongoing reporting of the Secret Brazil Archive.

The post The Bolsonaro Government’s Aggressive Response Shows Why Our Reporting on the Secret Brazil Archive Is So Vital appeared first on The Intercept.

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.

“Nothing came out in the press.”

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:

February 8, 2018 – Private chat

Deltan Dallagnol – 15:51:25 – Robito, we received the following invitation: XP Investimentos wants you again this year but wants to do a panel with you, Dr. Carlos Fernando, Diogo and Robinho. They want all 4. Someone from XP will ask questions. Isn’t it great??? You guys would do this, right? I got super excited, I think it will be the best panel EVER! We have to set a date between September 20 and 22. Tell me what you think, please? For you they offered 25,000 [$7,700]. There is an image risk, but CF and I think we can go, despite the risk.

Roberson Pozzobon – 16:28:37 – Castor also thought there’s no risk, Delta?

Dallagnol – 16:58:41 – castor replied: “I’m gonna be rich”

Dallagnol – 16:58:54 – We think there’s a risk, yes, but the risk is well paid lol.

Dallagnol – 16:59:16 – Dude, I look at all the beatings I take publicly. One more will not make a difference lol.

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.”

The post Brazilian Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Gave Secret Talk to Bankers and Took Money From a Company He Was Investigating appeared first on The Intercept.

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?”

December 8, 2018 – Telegram group “Filhos do Januario 3”

 

Deltan Dallagnol – 00:56:50 –  https://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias/2018/12/07/bolsonaro-diz-que-ex-assessor-tinha-divida-com-ele-e-pagou-a-primeira-dama.htm

Dallagnol – 00:58:15 – [image not found]

Dallagnol – 00:58:15 – [image not found]

Dallagnol – 00:58:38 – COAF [money-monitoring agency] under Moro

Dallagnol – 00:58:40 – Aiaiai

Julio Noronha – 00:59:34 –

Dallagnol – 01:04:40 – [image not found]

Januário Paludo – 07:01:20 – This reminds.

Paludo – 07:01:48 – Reminds you or anything, Deltan?

Paludo – 07:03:08 – Aiaiai

Jerusa Viecilli – 07:05:24 – I’m saying nothing… Just watching

Dallagnol – 08:47:52 – LOL

Dallagnol – 08:52:01 – It’s obvious what happened…  What now, José?

Dallagnol – 08:53:37 – Moro should wait for the investigation and see who will be implicated. The son certainly. The problem is, will the father let him? Or worse, if the father is implicated, what does this thing with the loans indicate?

Dallagnol – 08:54:21 – 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?

Dallagnol – 09:04:38 – During interviews, they will certainly ask about this. I don’t see any way to avoid the question, but I can go to different depths. 1) this is something that needs to be investigated; 2) everything indicates this is one of those salary kickback schemes, like the one involving Aline Correa that we prosecuted, or, even worse, phantom employees.

Dallagnol – 09:05:54 – Now, to what extent will [the president] really fight for Moro’s anti-corruption agenda if his  son is in the firing line?

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.

December 8, 2018 – private chat:

 

Roberson Pozzobon – 09:12:41 – During interviews, they will certainly ask about this. I don’t see any way to avoid the question, but I can go to different depths. 1) this is something that needs to be investigated; 2) everything indicates this is one of those salary kickback schemes, like the one involving Aline Correa that we prosecuted, or, even worse, phantom employees.

Pozzobon – 09:13:05 – I was just now writing a tweet about this

Pozzobon – 09:13:11 – “Reports that an ex-aide to state deputy and senator elect by PSL, Flavio Bolsonaro, has moved over 1,2 million reais between 2016 and 2017”. Should that be investigated? Absolutely. That’s what the financial intelligence reports from COAF are for. Flag suspicious behaviour amid the half a billion transactions that occur everyday.

https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/brasil/movimentacao-atipica-de-ex-assessor-de-flavio-bolsonaro-pode-levar-a-investigacao,8bb3ff45edd7744a4cad8dab9d014e87963u9zqu.html

Dallagnol – 10:04:00 – Not sure if  level 2 is a good idea. We can’t sit quiet, but at this moment it’s like it is with RD. We will depend on him for our reforms… Not sure if it’s worth it to hit hard

Pozzobon –10:07:15 – Yeah

Pozzobon – 10:07:26 – I have the same doubts

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).

January 21, 2019 – Telegram group: Filhos do Januario 3

 

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – Guys, we have an interview request from fantástico about special forum. The main case is good, involving Paulo Pimenta, if true lol. The risk is that they may want to focus on Flavio Bolsonaro, and then use our quotes in this other context. One way or the other, what we have to say is the same. Additionally some of the information they want we don’t have (they are with the PGR). The question is whether or not it is convenient for us to give an interview for this report. I don’t see how we could benefit since the question with regards to special forum is already settled. Different if the report were about jailing after the first appeal.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 –  [pasting an email he had received]: Dr., Geovani, with RBS will email you requesting an interview with Fantástico. The report is about special privilege. They have unearthed a story about Paulo Pimenta, who has a case who was been lowered from STF. And will also touch on the case of Bolsonaro’s son/Queiroz.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – He requested an interview before Wednesday. As soon as I get the email we’ll paste it here.

Dallagnol – 16:44:44 – [pasting the forwarded email from Fantastico requesting the interview] Dear, good afternoon Sunday we will air, in Fantástico, a report in which we will talk about a process against Paulo Pimenta in the STF alleging larceny. We will have an exclusive interview with a cousin of his, who is a laranja in a scheme involving the buying and selling of rice, with the involvement of an ex Dnit director, Hideraldo Caron. The allegations against Pimenta will be our main case in a report about the cases in which politicians lost their special privilege thanks to the new jurisprudence from the [Supreme Court] that the special privilege can only apply to crimes that were committed during the politicians term. Thus, we will also mention F. Bolsonaro’s case, that came up after we began working on the report. We will include, also, a STF survey detailing how many cases have been sent to the lower courts, the politicians who face the most cases, etc. Thus, I ask if Dr. Deltan could record and interview with us, to talk about the consequences of restricting the application of the special forum to those involved in Lava Jato, and also about the question of special forum in general. Do you have any data about how many politicians you are investigating are in this situation, that is, are defending their cases in the lower courts? Are you already able to affirm that these processes are being dealt in a speedier way? How many have sued to keep the cases in the STF? Awaiting your response Thank You

Dallagnol – 16:44:48 – What do you think?

Julio Noronha – 16:50:02 – Don’t think this it’s a good idea. In addition to the divided ball regarding Flavio Bolsonaro, it is being something already settled by the [Supreme Court], Paulo Pimenta has already filed several complaints against us.

Antonio Carlos Welter – 16:59:18 – I see no problems with regards to Pimenta. The problem is the divided ball. But not going for it could be worse. It’s selective.

Welter – 17:03:00 – If it’s discussed in theory, I don’t see a problem. But what about Raquel, won’t she complain again?

“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

The post In Secret Chats, Brazil’s Chief Corruption Prosecutor Worried That Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Would Protect President’s Son From Scandals appeared first on The Intercept.

“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:

August 6, 2017 – Filhos do Januario 2 group

Deltan – 14:48:25 – We have civil facts and we’re sharing them for criminal purposes. I don’t see it as a question of effectiveness, but symbolic. Like Maluf has an arrest warrant in NY and is convicted in France. I see no issue of sovereignty. And there is a justification for doing this in Venezuela and not other places because the prosecutor general was dismissed and it’s a dictatorship

Deltan – 14:50:42 – The purpose of prioritizing would be to contribute to the struggle of a people against injustice, revealing facts and showing that if there is no accountability there it’s because there is repression. As to ending the possibility of a prosecution there, we can act on only some of the facts, which would solve the problem

“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.

August 5, 2017 – Filhos do Januario 2 group

Paul – 19:23:59 – But folks, let’s reflect. I had already talked to Orlando about this. Realize that a civil war is possible there and any action by us could lead to more social upheaval and more deaths (even if the action is just or right). It’s not Brazi over there.

Paul – 19:24:33 – I’m not saying yes or no, just that it needs to be thought out

Roberson MPF – 19:26:38 – Daaaaamn

Orlando SP – 19:29:47 – Guys, about Venezuela. You can’t just open up what we have. We’d violate the agreement. We can’t risk a breach of agreement, including civil consequences for us, as well as for the nation.

Orlando SP – 19:30:44 – The solution of doing something here, I think would take a long time. We would have to put together an indictment or something similar, without hearing people, etc. I don’t think the timing would work.

Roberson MPF – 19:30:47 – I think that if we take action here we wouldn’t violate the agreements, Orlandinho

Orlando SP – 19:31:02 – But the problem is the timing

Orlando SP – 19:31:50 – The solution I see is to make a spontaneous communication to the country itself. Along the way this will surely leak somewhere, without our involvement. This I can do right away.

Orlando SP – 19:32:39 – Without the onus of working on an indictment

Orlando SP – 19:33:25 – As for the indictment, we would certainly face fierce criticism, but then Moro will decline to the capital and good …. the fact will be revealed.

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:

August 5, 2017 – Filhos do Januario 2 group

Deltan – 21:47:19 – PG, regarding risk, it’s something that is up to the Venezuelan citizens to ponder. They have the right to rebel.

[Unidentified Prosecutor] – 22:21:18 – In any case, it’s necessary to analyze the facts thoroughly, because if they’re under seal by the STF it won’t be possible to use them. Furthermore, Maduro has immunity and, except for human rights issues, it’s difficult to prosecute, at least while he’s in power. But we shouldn’t dismiss the idea entirely. Anyway, we’d still have to convince Russo.

Deltan – 22:35:57 – Russo says that we have to evaluate the viability. Meaning, he’d consider it

Deltan – 22:36:19 – He did not reject it prima facie, which I take as an opening to concretely analyze it with perspective

Deltan – 22:36:22 – good

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:

October 13, 2017 – Filhos do Januario 2 group 

Roberson MPF – 15:36:44 – Good evening. Unfortunately, as in August, we were once again surprised by the disclosure of a video of one of our cooperating witnesses’s depositions conducted by PGR during the final phase of the cooperation process. This time, unlike what has happened in the past, the audio became public through the ex-prosecutor of Venezuela, Ms. Luiza Ortega, exiled and in opposition to the current Government, as you can see in the link below. More serious still is that the video was disclosed at a time when we are conducting delicate negotiations with that country, as we informed you. The video’s disclosure significantly increased the risk to our members, Venezuelan citizens, and our operations. We are already taking precautionary measures. Tomorrow we will make a new request for the leak of these videos to be investigated. It is important that the PGR opens an investigation as soon as possible to ascertain the facts and ensure that events of this nature do not continue, since in addition to harming the upright investigation of the facts, they put at risk the physical integrity of our employees and their families. Thank you always for your attention, Mauricio Link: https://www.oantagonista.com/en/video-executivo-da-odebrecht-confirma-us-35-milhoes-para-maduro/

Roberson MPF – 15:36:44 – Dear colleagues, good morning. The above message was sent by dr mauricio Bezerra to dr Carlos Bruno this morning. I’m sharing it with you.

Roberson MPF – 15:38:01 – Do you know if the audio had already been shared with them, PG?

Paulo – 15:48:22 – We did not pass it on … Only if it were Vlad

Paulo – 15:48:28 – Or Orlando, secretly

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.

The post At Sergio Moro’s Suggestion, Brazil’s Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Plotted to Leak Secret Evidence Aimed at Helping Venezuela’s Opposition appeared first on The Intercept.

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.”

“You should prepare a press release explaining the contradictions between his testimony and the rest of the evidence or with his previous testimony. After all, 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:

Moro – 22:11 – The communication is complicated, because the press does not pay much attention to details.

22:11 – And some of them expect something conclusive.

22:12 – Maybe, tomorrow, you should prepare a press release explaining the contradictions between his testimony and the rest of the evidence or with his previous testimony

22:13 – Since the defense already put on their little show.

Santos Lima – 22:13 – We can do this. I’ll talk to the group.

Moro – 22:13 – Think on it. I haven’t made up my mind yet.

Santos Lima – 22:16 – I won’t be here tomorrow. But the most important thing was to block the idea that he would be able to turn everything into his persecution.

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:

Santos Lima – 22:26:23 – Do you think we can book an interview with someone from Globo in Recife tomorrow about today’s hearings?

Press Aide 1 – 22:28:19 – It’s possible, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it. What about all the journalists here that already asked for an interview?

Press Aide 2 – 22:28:32 – But, sir, what’s the reason?

Press Aide 2 – 22:29:13 – What’s the need, actually..

Santos Lima – 22:30:50 – Just something I need taken care of. How’s the repercussion of the lawyers’ press conference?

Press Aide 2 – 22:30:58 – Typical procedure…you never gave interviews about the hearings…it will give reason for the defense to attack…once again…

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:

Dallagnol – 22:46:46 – So, we need to take into account the following points: 1) create comfort for the judge and take the spotlight to give him more protection and to shift the focus away from him; 2) to counterbalance the defense’s show.

22:47:19 – These are the reasons we should take into account, because no one is sure.

22:47:50 – The “what” would be: to point out the contradictions of the testimony.

22:49:18 – And the format, I agree, would have to be a press release, for protection and risk reduction. JN will still explore this tomorrow. If we do this, we would have to work intensely on this during the day to release it around 4 p.m.

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:

Press aide 2 – 23:15:30 – Those who attack us will keep attacking us. Those who don’t will notice a change in behavior and will question it. It’s part of the process. The way I see it, it’s issuing an opinion about the case before its conclusion… and creating an opening to say that you are trying to influence the judge. Their role will be to make this a political issue. The press knows this. And they already know that you don’t usually talk about the hearings. Changing your behavior will create the opportunity to raise other questions. Why did you decide to talk now? Because it was the ex-president? And bring back the narrative of persecution… it is what the defense did, does… because there is no way to refute the accusation. For the prosecution to use the same strategy might be shooting yourself in the foot.

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:

Dallagnol – 22:16:26 – I also want to inform you that we discussed it since yesterday, over the course of the entire day, and we understand, unanimously and along with our press secretary, that the media was covering the contradictions well and that if we spoke out about it, it could make things worse. We passed along some relevant [points] to journalists. We decided to make a statement only addressing the false information, saying that we will focus on other contradictions in the closing arguments.

Moro – 23:07:15 – Cool, no worries, I’m still preparing the decision but I’m leaning towards denying it, yes

The post Exclusive: Brazilian Judge in Car Wash Corruption Case Mocked Lula’s Defense and Secretly Directed Prosecutors’ Media Strategy During Trial appeared first on The Intercept.

The archive, provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source, includes years of internal files and private conversations from the prosecutorial team behind Brazil’s sprawling Operation Car Wash, an ongoing corruption investigation that has yielded dozens of major convictions, including those of top corporate executives and powerful politicians.

In the files, conversations between lead prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and then-presiding Judge Sergio Moro reveal that Moro offered strategic advice to prosecutors and passed on tips for new avenues of investigation. With these actions, Moro grossly overstepped the ethical lines that define the role of a judge. In Brazil, as in the United States, judges are required to be impartial and neutral, and are barred from secretly collaborating with one side in a case.

Other chats in the archive raise fundamental questions about the quality of the charges that ultimately sent Lula to prison. He was accused of having received a beachfront triplex apartment from a contractor as a kickback for facilitating multimillion-dollar contracts with the state-controlled oil firm Petrobras. In group chats among members of the prosecutorial team just days before filing the indictment, Dallagnol expressed his increasing doubts over two key elements of the prosecution’s case: whether the triplex was in fact Lula’s and whether it had anything to do with Petrobras.

These two questions were critical to their ability to prosecute Lula. Without the Petrobras link, the task force running the Car Wash investigation would have no legal basis for prosecuting this case, as it would fall outside of their jurisdiction. Even more seriously, without proving that the triplex belonged to Lula, the case itself would fall apart, since Lula’s alleged receipt of the triplex was the key ingredient to prove he acted corruptly.

Operation Car Wash is one of the most consequential political forces in the history of Brazilian democracy and also one of the most controversial. It has taken down powerful actors once thought to be untouchable and revealed massive corruption schemes that sucked billions out of public coffers.

The probe, however, has also been accused of political bias, repeated violations of constitutional guarantees, and illegal leaks of information to the press. (A separate article published today by The Intercept reveals that the Car Wash prosecutors, who long insisted that they were apolitical and concerned solely with fighting corruption, were in fact internally plotting how to prevent the return to power by Lula and his Workers’ Party).

The successful prosecution of Lula rendered him ineligible to run in the 2018 presidential election at a time when all polls showed that the former president was the clear frontrunner. As a result, Operation Car Wash was scorned by Lula’s supporters, who considered it a politically motivated scheme, driven by right-wing ideologues masquerading as apolitical anti-corruption prosecutors, in order to prevent Lula from running for president and to destroy the Workers’ Party.

But on the Brazilian right, there was widespread popular support for the corruption probe, the team of prosecutors, and Moro. The yearslong corruption probe transformed Moro into a hero both in Brazil and around the world, a status that was only strengthened once he became the man who finally brought down Lula.

After the guilty verdict from Moro was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, Lula’s candidacy was barred by law. With Lula out of the running, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro shot up in the polls and then handily won the presidency by defeating Lula’s chosen replacement, former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad.

Bolsonaro then named Moro, the judge who had presided over the case against Lula, to be his justice minister. Jurists and scholars will continue to debate the role of Car Wash for decades, but these archives offer an unprecedented window into this crucial moment in recent Brazilian history.

Sergio Moro Crosses the Line

Telegram messages between Sergio Moro and Deltan Dallagnol reveal that Moro repeatedly stepped far outside the permissible bounds of his position as a judge while working on Car Wash cases. Over the course of more than two years, Moro suggested to the prosecutor that his team change the sequence of who they would investigate; insisted on less downtime between raids; gave strategic advice and informal tips; provided the prosecutors with advance knowledge of his decisions; offered constructive criticism of prosecutorial filings; and even scolded Dallagnol as if the prosecutor worked for the judge. Such conduct is unethical for a judge, who is responsible for maintaining neutrality to guarantee a fair trial, and it violates the Judiciary’s Code of Ethics for Brazil.

In one illustrative chat, Moro, referring to new rounds of search warrants and interrogations, suggested to Dallagnol that it might be preferable to “reverse the order of the two planned [phases].”

Numerous other instances in this archive reveal Moro — then a judge, and now Bolsonaro’s justice minister — actively collaborating with the prosecutors to strengthen their case. After a month of silence from the Car Wash task force, Moro asked: “Hasn’t it been a long time without an operation?” In another instance, Moro said, “You cannot make that kind of mistake now” — a reference to what he considered to be an error by the Federal Police. “But think hard whether that’s a good idea… the facts would have to be serious,” he counseled after Dallagnol told him of a motion he planned to file. “What do you think of these crazy statements from the PT national board? Should we officially rebut?” he asked, using the plural — “we” — in response to criticisms of the Car Wash investigation by Lula’s Workers’ Party, showing that he viewed himself and the Car Wash prosecutors as united in the same cause.

As in the United States, Brazil’s criminal justice system employs the accusatory model, which requires separation between the accuser and judge. Under this model, the judge must analyze the allegations of both sides in an impartial, disinterested manner. But the chats between Moro and Dallagnol show that, when he was a judge, the current justice minister improperly interfered in the Car Wash task force’s work, acting informally as an aid and advisor to the prosecution. In secret, he was helping design and construct the very criminal case that he would then “neutrally” adjudicate.

Such coordination between the judge and the Public Prosecutor’s Office outside of official proceedings squarely contradicts the public narrative that Car Wash prosecutors, Moro, and their supporters have presented and vigorously defended over the years. Moro and Dallagnol have been accused of secret collaboration since the early days of Car Wash, but these suspicions — until now — were not backed by concrete evidence.

Another example of Moro crossing the line separating prosecutor and judge is in a conversation with Dallagnol on December 7, 2015, when he informally passed on a tip about Lula’s case to the prosecutors. “So. The following. Source informed me that the contact person is annoyed at having been asked to issue draft property transfer deeds for one of the ex-president’s children. Apparently the person would be willing to provide the information. I’m therefore passing it along. The source is serious,” wrote Moro.

“Thank you!! We’ll make contact,” Dallagnol promptly replied. Moro added, “And it would be dozens of properties.” Dallagnol later advised Moro that he called the source, but she would not talk: “I’m thinking of drafting a subpoena, based on apocryphal news,” the prosecutor said. While it is not entirely clear what this means, it appears that Dallagnol was floating the idea of inventing an anonymous complaint that could be used to compel the source to testify. Moro, rather than chastise the prosecutor or remain silent, appears to endorse the proposal: “Better to formalize then,” the judge replied.

Moro has publicly and vehemently denied on several occasions that he ever worked in partnership with the team of prosecutors. In a March 2016 speech, Moro denied these suspicions explicitly:

Let’s make something very clear. You hear a lot about Judge Moro’s investigative strategy. […] I do not have any investigative strategy at all. The people who investigate or who decide what to do and such is the Public Prosecutor and the [Federal] Police. The judge is reactive. We say that a judge should normally cultivate these passive virtues. And I even get irritated at times, I see somewhat unfounded criticism of my work, saying that I am a judge-investigator.

In his 2017 book, “The Fight Against Corruption,” Dallagnol wrote that Moro “always evaluated the Public Prosecutor’s requests in an impartial and technical manner.” Last year, in response to a complaint from Lula’s lawyers, Brazil’s prosecutor general — the presidentially-appointed chief prosecutor who runs the Car Wash investigation — wrote that Moro “remained impartial during the entire process” of Lula’s conviction.

Doubts, Misinterpretations, and a Triplex

Beyond Moro’s interjections, the documents obtained by The Intercept Brasil reveal that, while publicly boasting about the strength of the evidence against Lula, prosecutors were internally admitting major doubts. They also knew that their claimed jurisdictional entitlement to prosecute Lula was shaky at best, if not entirely baseless.

In the documents, Dallagnol, the Operation Car Wash lead prosecutor, expressed concerns regarding the two most important elements of the prosecution’s case. Their indictment accused Lula of receiving a beachfront triplex apartment from the construction firm Grupo OAS as a bribe in exchange for facilitating millions of dollars in contracts with Petrobras, but they lacked solid documentary evidence to prove that the apartment was Lula’s or that he ever facilitated any contracts. Without the apartment, there was no case, and without the Petrobras link, the case would fall out of their jurisdiction and into that of the São Paulo division of the Public Prosecutor’s office, which had argued that it, rather than Operation Car Wash prosecutors, had jurisdiction over the case against Lula.

“They will say that we are accusing based on newspaper articles and fragile evidence … so it’d be good if this item is wrapped up tight. Apart from this item, so far I am apprehensive about the connection between Petrobras and enrichment, and after they told me I am apprehensive about the apartment story,” wrote Dallagnol in a group Telegram chat with his colleagues on September 9, 2016, four days before filing their indictment against Lula. “These are points in which we have to have solid answers and on the tips of our tongues.”

None of Dallagnol’s subordinates responded to his messages in the materials examined for this article.

Prosecutors in São Paulo had publicly questioned the Petrobras connection in an official court filing, noting, “In 2009-2010 there was no talk of scandal at Petrobras. In 2005, when the presidential couple, in theory, began to pay installments on the property, there was no indication of an ‘oil scandal’.”

The Curitiba-based Car Wash team eventually prevailed over their São Paulo counterparts and were able to maintain the high-profile, politically explosive case in their jurisdiction. But private chats reveal that their argument was a bluff — they weren’t actually sure of the Petrobras link that was the key to maintaining their jurisdiction.

On Saturday night at 10:45 p.m., a day after expressing his original doubts, Dallagnol messaged the group again: “I’m so horny for this O GLOBO article from 2010. I’m going to kiss whichever one of you found this.” The article, headlined “Bancoop Case: Lula Couple’s Triplex Is Delayed,” was the first to publicly mention Lula owning an apartment in Guarujá, a coastal town in São Paulo state. The 645-word article, published years before the Car Wash investigation began, does not mention OAS or Petrobras and instead covers the bankruptcy of the construction cooperative behind the development and how it could negatively impact the delivery date of Lula’s new vacation apartment.

The article was submitted as evidence and, in his decision to convict Lula, Moro wrote that the O Globo article “is quite relevant from a probative point of view.” But Lula’s defense attorneys dispute that he was the owner of a triplex, claiming instead that he purchased a smaller, single level apartment on a lower floor, and the O Globo article presented no documentation proving otherwise.

Moreover, there is a small but telling inconsistency between the O Globo article and the claims of the prosecution regarding the triplex. The article itself puts Lula’s penthouse in Tower B, and even notes that Tower A is yet to be built at the time the article was written: “The second tower, if constructed according to the project blueprints, finalized in the early 2000s, may end part of Lula’s joy: the building will be in front of the president’s property, obstructing his ocean view at Guarujá.” But the prosecutors alleged that Lula owned the beachfront triplex in Tower A. Without noting this contradiction, Item 191 of the indictment cites the O Globo article: “This article explained that the then President LULA and [his wife] MARISA LETÍCIA would receive a triplex penthouse, with a view to the sea, in the said venture.” That is the apartment that would eventually be seized by authorities and that Lula would be convicted of receiving.

Car Wash prosecutors used the article as evidence that the triplex belonged to the presidential family, but indicted and convicted Lula on a triplex in a different building — demonstrating that the investigation was imprecise on the central point of their case: identifying the bribe that Lula allegedly received from the contractor.

When the indictment was revealed during a press conference on September 14, the triplex and its provenance as a bribe from OAS were the key pieces of evidence on the charges of passive corruption and money laundering. In a now infamous moment, Dallagnol presented a typo-laden PowerPoint presentation that showed “Lula” written in a blue bubble surrounded by 14 other bubbles containing everything from “Lula’s reaction” and “expressiveness” to “illicit enrichment” and “bribeocracy.” All arrows pointed back to Lula, whom they characterized as the mastermind behind a sprawling criminal enterprise. The presentation was widely spoofed and criticized by critics as evidence of the weakness of the Car Wash prosecutors’ case.

O PowerPoint de Deltan Dallagnol foi corroborado no TRF-4. https://t.co/qFCU9UbWe5 pic.twitter.com/2Kd7LQKBpY

— O Antagonista (@o_antagonista) January 24, 2018

Two days later, Dallagnol messaged Moro and, in private, explained that they went to great lengths to characterize Lula as the “maximum leader” of the corruption scheme as a way to link the politician to the R$87 million (US$26.7 million, at the time) paid in bribes by OAS for contracts at two Petrobras refineries — a charge without material evidence, he admitted, but one that was essential so that the case could be tried under Moro’s jurisdiction in Curitiba.

“The indictment is based on a lot of indirect evidence of authorship, but it wouldn’t fit to say that in the indictment and in our communications we avoided that point,” Dallagnol wrote. “It was not understood that the long exposition on command of the scheme was necessary to impute corruption to the former president. A lot of people did not understand why we put him as the leader to gain 3,7MM in money laundering, when it was not for that, but to impute 87MM of corruption.”

Moro responded two days later: “Definitely, the criticisms of your presentation are disproportionate. Stand firm.” Less than a year later, the judge sentenced the former president to nine years and six months in prison. The ruling was quickly upheld unanimously by an appeals court and the sentence was extended to 12 years and one month. In an interview, the president of the appeals court characterized Moro’s decision as “just and impartial” before later admitting that he had not yet obtained access to the underlying evidence in the case. One of the three judges on the panel was an old friend and classmate of Moro’s.

Even Lula’s most vehement critics, including those who believe him to be corrupt, have expressed doubts about the strength of this particular conviction. Many have argued that it was chosen as the first case because it was simple enough to process quickly, in time to fulfill the real goal: to bar Lula from being re-elected.

Until now, most of the evidence necessary to evaluate the motives and internal beliefs of the Car Wash task force and Moro remained secret. Reporting on this archive now finally enables the public — in Brazil and internationally — to evaluate both the validity of Lula’s conviction and the propriety of those who worked so tirelessly to bring it about.

The Intercept contacted the offices of the Car Wash task force and Sergio Moro immediately upon publication and will update the stories with their comments if and when they provide them. Read the editors’ statement here.

Update: June 9, 2019, 8:13 p.m. ET

The Car Wash task force did not refute the authenticity of the information published by The Intercept. In a press release published Sunday evening, they wrote, “possibly among the illegally copied information are documents and data on ongoing strategies and investigations and on the personal and security routines of task force members and their families. There is peace of mind that any data obtained reflects activities developed with full respect for legality and in a technical and impartial manner, over more than five years of the operation.”

Update: June 9, 2019, 9:53 p.m. ET
Justice Minister Sergio Moro also published a note in response to our reporting: “About alleged messages that would involve me, posted by The Intercept website this Sunday, June 9, I lament the lack of indication of the source of the person responsible for the criminal invasion of the prosecutors’ cell phones. As well as the position of the site that did not contact me before the publication, contrary to basic rule of journalism.

As for the content of the messages they mention, there is no sign of any abnormality or providing directions as a magistrate, despite being taken out of context and the sensationalism of the articles, they ignore the gigantic corruption scheme revealed by Operation Car Wash.”

The post Exclusive: Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

The massive archive, provided exclusively to The Intercept, shows multiple examples of politicized abuse of prosecutorial powers by those who led the country’s sweeping Operation Car Wash corruption probe since 2014. It also reveals a long-denied political and ideological agenda. One glaring example occurred 10 days before the first round of presidential voting last year, when a Supreme Court justice granted a petition from the country’s largest newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, to interview Lula, who was in prison on corruption charges brought by the Car Wash task force.

Immediately upon learning of that decision on September 28, 2018, the team of prosecutors who handled Lula’s corruption case — who spent years vehemently denying that they were driven by political motives of any kind — began discussing in a private Telegram chat group how to block, subvert, or undermine the Supreme Court decision. This was based on their expressed fear that the decision would help the PT — Lula’s party — win the election. Based on their stated desire to prevent the PT’s return to power, they spent hours debating strategies to prevent or dilute the political impact of Lula’s interview.

The Car Wash prosecutors explicitly said that their motive in stopping Lula’s interview was to prevent the PT from winning. One of the prosecutors, Laura Tessler, exclaimed upon learning of the decision, “What a joke!” and then explained the urgency of preventing or undermining the decision. “A press conference before the second round of voting could help elect Haddad,” she wrote in the chat group, referring to the PT’s candidate Fernando Haddad. The chief of the prosecutor task force, Deltan Dallagnol, conducted a separate conversation with a longtime confidant, also a prosecutor, and they agreed that they would “pray” together that the events of that day would not usher in the PT’s return to power.

Many in Brazil have long accused the Car Wash prosecutors, as well as the judge who adjudicated the corruption cases, Sérgio Moro (now the country’s justice minister under President Jair Bolsonaro), of being driven by ideological and political motives. Moro and the Car Wash team have repeatedly denied these accusations, insisting that their only consideration was to expose and punish political corruption irrespective of party or political faction.

But this new archive of documents — some of which are being published today in other articles by The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil — casts considerable doubt on the denials of the prosecutors. Indeed, many of these documents show improper and unethical plotting between Dallagnol and Moro on how to best structure the corruption case against Lula — although Moro was legally required to judge the case as a neutral arbiter. Other documents include private admissions among the prosecutors that the evidence proving Lula’s guilt was lacking. Overall, the documents depict a task force of prosecutors seemingly intent on exploiting its legal powers for blatantly political ends, led by its goal of preventing a return to power of the Workers’ Party generally, and Lula specifically.

The secrets unveiled by these documents are crucial for the public to know because the massive Car Wash corruption probe, which has swept through Brazil for the last five years, has been one of the most consequential events in the history of the world’s fifth-most populous country — not just legally but also politically.

Until now, both the Car Wash task force and Moro have been heralded around the world with honors, prizes, and media praise. But this new archive of documents shines substantial light on previously unreported motives, actions, and often deceitful maneuvering by these powerful actors.

While the Car Wash team of prosecutors has imprisoned a wide range of powerful politicians and billionaires, by far their most significant accomplishment was the 2018 imprisonment of Lula. At the time of Lula’s conviction, all polls showed that the former president — who had twice been elected by large margins, in 2002 and then again in 2006, and left office with a 87 percent approval rate — was the overwhelming frontrunner to once again win the presidency in 2018.

But Lula’s criminal conviction last year, once it was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, rendered him ineligible to run for the presidency, clearing the way for Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate, to win against Lula’s chosen successor, Haddad, the former São Paulo mayor. Supporters of the PT and many others in Brazil have long insisted that these prosecutors, while masquerading as apolitical and non-ideological actors whose only agenda was fighting corruption, were in fact right-wing ideologues whose overriding mission was to destroy the PT and prevent Lula’s return to power in the 2018 election.

These documents lend obvious credibility to those accusations. They show extensive plotting in secret to block and undermine the September 28 judicial order from Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, which authorized one of the country’s most prominent reporters, Folha’s Mônica Bergamo, to interview Lula in prison. Lewandowski’s decision was expressly grounded in the right of a free press, which he said entitled the newspaper to speak to Lula and report on his perspectives.

In his decision, Lewandowski also explained that the arguments that had been used all year to prevent a prison interview with Lula — namely, “security fears“ and the need to keep prisoners silent — were blatantly invalid given the numerous other prison interviews “permitted for prisoners condemned of crimes such as trafficking, murder and international organized crime.” The ruling also noted that Lula was neither in a maximum-security prison nor under a specially restrictive prison regime, further eroding the rationale for a ban on interviewing him.

Up until that point, Lula — widely regarded as one of the most effective and charismatic political communicators in the democratic world — had been held incommunicado, prevented from speaking to the public about the election. Any pre-election interview of Lula, in which he could have offered his views on Bolsonaro and the other candidates, including the PT’s Haddad, would have commanded massive media attention and likely influenced a decisive bloc of voters who, to this day, remain highly loyal to the former president (which is why Lula, even once he was imprisoned, remained the poll frontrunner).

The Car Wash prosecutors learned of the judicial decision authorizing Folha’s pre-election prison interview with Lula when an article about it was posted in their encrypted Telegram chat group. The panic among them was immediate. They repeatedly worried that the interview, to be conducted so close to the first round of voting, would help the PT’s Haddad win the presidential election. Based explicitly on that fear, the Car Wash prosecutors spent the day working feverishly to develop strategies to either overturn the ruling, delay Lula’s interview until after the election, or ensure that it was structured so as to minimize its political impact and its ability to help the PT win.

Reacting to the decision, Tessler, one of the prosecutors, exclaimed: “What a joke!!! Revolting!!! There he goes hold a rally in prison. A true circus. After Mônica Bergamo, based on the principle of equal treatment, I’m sure many other journalists will also be coming … and we’re left here, made to act like clowns with a supreme court like that …” Another prosecutor, Athayde Ribeiro Costa, responded to the decision with one word and numerous exclamation marks: “Mafiosos!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The prosecutors, according to the time stamps on their chats, spent nearly a full day inventing strategies for how to prevent the Lula interview from taking place before the election or at least dilute its impact — from speculating whether a press conference would be less effective than a one-on-one interview, or whether they should petition to allow all other prisoners to be interviewed to distract attention from Lula. Tessler then made clear why these prosecutors were so deeply upset that the public could be allowed to hear from the former president so soon before the election: “Who knows … but an interview before the second round of voting could help elect Haddad.”

While these chats were taking place within the Car Wash chat group, Deltan Dallagnol, the task force’s chief, was also having his own side conversation with a close confidant, a prosecutor who does not work on the Car Wash task force. They both expressly agreed that the chief objective was preventing the return of the PT to power, and the chief prosecutor — who often boasts of his religious piety — agreed that they would “pray” that this did not happen:

Carol PGR – 11:22:08 – Deltannn, my friend

11:22:33 – all of my solidarity in the world to you with this episode …. We’re on a runaway train and I do not know what’s waiting for us

11:22:44 – The only certainty is that we’re together

11:24:06 – I remain very worried about the possible return of PT, but I have prayed frequently for God to enlighten our population and for a miracle to save us

Deltan – 13:34:22 – I’m with you, Carol!

13:34:27 – Pray indeed

13:34:32 – We need this as a country

These admissions of the prosecutors’ true concerns — that a Lula interview could “elect Haddad” and usher in a “return of PT” to power — were hardly isolated confessions. To the contrary, the entire discussion, held over many hours, reads far less like a meeting of neutral prosecutors than a war-room session of anti-PT political operatives and strategists, focused on the goal of determining the most effective way to prevent or minimize the political impact of Lula’s interview.

Athayde Ribeiro Costa, for instance, cynically suggested that the omission of any date in Lewandowski’s decision could allow the Federal Police to purposely schedule the interview for after the election while pretending to comply with the order: “There’s no date. So the Federal Police could just schedule this for after the election, and we’ll still be in compliance with the decision.”

Another prosecutor, Januário Paludo, proposed a series of actions designed to prevent or minimize the Lula interview: “Plan A: we could enter an appeal on the Supreme Court itself, zero probability [of success]. Plan B: open it up for everybody to interview him on the same day. It’ll be chaotic but reduces the likelihood that the interview is directed.”

At no point did Dallagnol, who actively participated in the discussion throughout the day, or any other Car Wash prosecutor, suggest that it was improper for such political considerations to drive prosecutorial strategizing. Indeed, this Telegram chat group, which was used by its participants for many months, suggests that political considerations of this kind were routinely incorporated into the task force’s decision-making process.

The prosecutors lamented among themselves that they were barred from appealing the decision because an appeal in the name of the task force would make them look too political and would create the public perception that their intentions were to silence Lula and prevent him from helping the PT win — which, as these documents reveal, was indeed their actual motive. But later in the day, they learned that a right-wing party, called Novo (meaning “New”), had appealed the decision, and that the authorization to interview Lula was stayed by the court. They boisterously celebrated this news by, among other things, mocking the conflicts that were likely to arise within the Supreme Court (STF) and heaping praise on those responsible for trying to stop the interview:

Januário Paludo – 23:41:02 – Just heard about it…

Deltan – 23:41:32 – lol

Athayde Costa – 23:42:02 – The atmosphere at the STF must be great

Januário Paludo – 23:42:11 – it’s gonna be a war of judicial decisions…

Paludo added, ironically, that “we should thank our Prosecutors’ Office: the Novo Party!” meaning that this right-wing political party, which was also contesting the 2018 election, had performed what the task force themselves wanted to achieve by preventing Lula from being heard.

The appeal from that party resulted in a judicial stay of Lewandowski’s interview authorization. As a result, no pre-election interview with Lula was permitted and he was thus never heard from prior to the voting. Only once the election was concluded and Bolsonaro won did the Supreme Court begin authorizing media outlets to interview Lula in prison. Last month, Bergamo of Folha was permitted to interview Lula jointly with El País Brasil, and shortly thereafter, Lewandowski granted The Intercept Brasil’s petition to interview Lula alone, the video and transcript of which were published by The Intercept.

Once Bolsonaro was elected president, he quickly offered Moro — whose corruption ruling had resulted in Lula’s candidacy being barred — a newly created and unprecedentedly powerful position as what is now called the “super justice minister,” designed to reflect the massive powers vested in Moro.

That the same judge who found Lula guilty was then rewarded by Lula’s victorious opponent made even longtime supporters of the Car Wash corruption probe uncomfortable, due to the obvious perception (real or not) of a quid pro quo, and by the transformation of Moro, who long insisted he was apolitical, into a political official working for the most far-right president ever elected in the history of Brazil’s democracy. Those concerns heightened when Bolsonaro recently admitted that he had also promised to appoint Moro to a lifelong seat on the Supreme Court as soon as there was a vacancy.

Now that the actual conversations and actions of the Car Wash team and of Moro can be revealed and seen, the public — both in Brazil and internationally — will finally have the opportunity to evaluate whether their longtime denials of being politically motivated were ever true.

These September 28 discussions are just the start of reporting by The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil on this archive.

Update: June 9, 2019, 8:13 p.m. ET

The Car Wash task force did not refute the authenticity of the information published by The Intercept. In a press release published Sunday evening, they wrote, “possibly among the illegally copied information are documents and data on ongoing strategies and investigations and on the personal and security routines of task force members and their families. There is peace of mind that any data obtained reflects activities developed with full respect for legality and in a technical and impartial manner, over more than five years of the operation.”

Update: June 9, 2019, 9:53 p.m. ET

Justice Minister Sergio Moro also published a note in response to our reporting: “About alleged messages that would involve me, posted by The Intercept website this Sunday, June 9, I lament the lack of indication of the source of the person responsible for the criminal invasion of the prosecutors’ cell phones. As well as the position of the site that did not contact me before the publication, contrary to basic rule of journalism.

As for the content of the messages they mention, there is no sign of any abnormality or providing directions as a magistrate, despite being taken out of context and the sensationalism of the articles, they ignore the gigantic corruption scheme revealed by Operation Car Wash.”

The post Exclusive: Brazil’s Top Prosecutors Who Indicted Lula Schemed in Secret Messages to Prevent His Party From Winning 2018 Election appeared first on The Intercept.

These stories are based on a massive archive of previously undisclosed materials — including private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation — provided to us by an anonymous source. They reveal serious wrongdoing, unethical behavior, and systematic deceit about which the public, both in Brazil and internationally, has the right to know.

These three articles were published today in The Intercept Brasil in Portuguese, and we have synthesized them into two English-language articles for The Intercept. Given the size and global influence of Brazil under the new Bolsonaro government, these stories are of great significance to an international audience.

This is merely the beginning of what we intend to be an ongoing journalistic investigation, using this massive archive of material, into the Car Wash corruption probe; Moro’s actions when he was a judge and those of the prosecutor Dallagnol; and the conduct of numerous individuals who continue to wield great political and economic power both inside Brazil and in other countries.

Beyond the inherent political, economic, and environmental importance of Brazil under Bolsonaro, the significance of these revelations arises from the incomparably consequential actions of the yearslong Car Wash corruption probe. That sweeping scandal implicated numerous leading political figures, oligarchs, Bolsonaro’s predecessor as president, and even foreign leaders in corruption prosecutions.

Most importantly, Car Wash was the investigative saga that led to the imprisonment of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year. Lula’s conviction by Moro, once it was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, rendered him ineligible to run for president at a time when all polls showed that Lula — who was twice elected president by large margins in 2002 and in 2006 before being term-limited out of office in 2010 with an 87 percent approval rating — was the frontrunner in the 2018 presidential race. Lula’s exclusion from the election, based on Moro’s finding of guilt, was a key episode that paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory.

Perhaps most remarkably, after Bolsonaro won the presidency, he created a new position of unprecedented authority, referred to by Brazilians as “super justice minister,” to oversee an agency with consolidated powers over law enforcement, surveillance, and investigation previously interspersed among multiple ministries. Bolsonaro created that position for the benefit of the very judge who found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, and it is the position Moro now occupies. In other words, Moro now wields immense police and surveillance powers in Brazil — courtesy of a president who was elected only after Moro, while he was a judge, rendered Bolsonaro’s key adversary ineligible to run against him.

The Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have been highly controversial in Brazil and internationally — heralded by many as anti-corruption heroes and accused by others of being clandestine right-wing ideologues masquerading as apolitical law enforcers. Their critics have insisted that they have abused and exploited their law enforcement powers with the politicized goal of preventing Lula from returning to the presidency and destroying his leftist Workers’ Party, or the PT. Moro and the prosecutors have, with equal vehemence, denied that they have any political allegiances or objectives and have said they are simply trying to cleanse Brazil of corruption.

But, until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening.

Today’s articles show, among other things, that the Car Wash prosecutors spoke openly of their desire to prevent the PT from winning the election and took steps to carry out that agenda, and that Moro secretly and unethically collaborated with the Car Wash prosecutors to help design the case against Lula despite serious internal doubts about the evidence supporting the accusations, only for him to then pretend to be its neutral adjudicator.

The Intercept’s only role in obtaining these materials was to receive them from our source, who contacted us many weeks ago (long before the recently alleged hacking of Moro’s telephone) and informed us that they had already obtained the full set of materials and was eager to provide them to journalists.

Informing the public of matters in the public interest and exposing wrongdoing was our guiding principle in doing this initial reporting on the archive, and it will continue to be our guiding principle as we report further on the large number of materials we have been provided.

The sheer volume of materials in this archive, as well as the fact that many documents include private conversations among public officials, requires us to make journalistic decisions about which documents should be reported on and published, and which documents should be withheld.

When making these judgments, we employ the standard used by journalists in democracies around the world: namely, that material revealing wrongdoing or deceit by powerful actors should be reported, but information that is purely private in nature and whose disclosure may infringe upon legitimate privacy interests or other social values should be withheld.

Indeed, in our reporting on this material, we are guided by the same rationale that led much of Brazilian society — including many journalists, commentators, and activists — to praise the disclosure in 2016 by Moro and various media outlets of the private telephone calls between Lula and former President Dilma Rousseff, in which the two leaders discussed the possibility of Lula becoming a minister in Dilma’s government. Disclosure of those private calls was crucial in turning public opinion against the PT, helping to lay the groundwork for Dilma’s 2016 impeachment and Lula’s 2018 imprisonment. The principle invoked to justify that disclosure was the same one we are adhering to in our reporting on these materials: that a democracy is healthier when significant actions undertaken in secret by powerful figures are revealed to the public.

But unlike those disclosures by Moro and various media outlets of the private conversations between Lula and Dilma — which included not only matters whose disclosures were in the public interest, but also private communications of Lula that had no public relevance and that many argued were released with the intention of personally embarrassing Lula — The Intercept has resolved to withhold any private communications, audio recordings, videos, or other materials relating to Moro, Dallagnol, or any other parties that are purely private in nature and thus unrelated to matters of public interest.

We have taken measures to secure the archive and all of its component materials outside of Brazil, so that numerous journalists have access to it, ensuring that no authorities in any country will have the ability to prevent reporting based on these materials. We intend to report on and publish stories based on the archive as expeditiously as possible in accordance with our high standards of factual accuracy and journalistic responsibility.

Consistent with journalistic practice in countries where the press operates under the threat of censorship and prior restraint orders, as has been the situation recently in Bolsonaro-led Brazil, we did not seek comment from the powerful legal officials mentioned in these stories prior to publication because we did not want to give them advance notice of this reporting, and because the documents speak for themselves. We contacted them immediately upon publication and will update the stories with their comments if and when they provide them.

Given the immense power wielded by these actors, and the secrecy under which they have — until now — been able to operate, transparency is crucial for Brazil and the international community to have a clear understanding of what they have really done. A free press exists to shine a light on what the most powerful figures in society do in the dark.

Update: June 9, 2019, 8:13 p.m. ET

The Car Wash task force did not refute the authenticity of the information published by The Intercept. In a press release published Sunday evening, they wrote, “possibly among the illegally copied information are documents and data on ongoing strategies and investigations and on the personal and security routines of task force members and their families. There is peace of mind that any data obtained reflects activities developed with full respect for legality and in a technical and impartial manner, over more than five years of the operation.”

Update: June 9, 2019, 9:53 p.m. ET

Justice Minister Sergio Moro also published a note in response to our reporting: “About alleged messages that would involve me, posted by The Intercept website this Sunday, June 9, I lament the lack of indication of the source of the person responsible for the criminal invasion of the prosecutors’ cell phones. As well as the position of the site that did not contact me before the publication, contrary to basic rule of journalism.

As for the content of the messages they mention, there is no sign of any abnormality or providing directions as a magistrate, despite being taken out of context and the sensationalism of the articles, they ignore the gigantic corruption scheme revealed by Operation Car Wash.”

The post How and Why The Intercept Is Reporting on a Vast Trove of Materials About Brazil’s Operation Car Wash and Justice Minister Sergio Moro appeared first on The Intercept.