Brasil’s Report of Dirty Tricks

Glenn Greenwald Discusses the Intercept Brasil’s Report of Dirty Tricks Used in the Prosecution of Leftist Former President Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva

Jeremy Scahill: But, we begin in Brazil where The Intercept has just broken a bombshell series of stories about some of the most powerful people in that country. The series of investigative stories is based on messages, conversations, photos, videos, audio recordings and documents exchanged between members of the anti-corruption “Operation Car Wash” task force in Brazil. That was a multi-year anti-corruption investigation in the country that led to the imprisonment of the leftist former president of that country. The conversations included in these stories are part of a massive trove of files sent weeks ago to The Intercept in Brazil by an anonymous source. Now, after receiving these files, Intercept journalists and security specialists analyzed the material, consulted individuals close to members of the “Car Wash” operation, with the goal of verifying dates and private events mentioned in these conversations. And once the authenticity was confirmed, The Intercept Brasil began examining and reporting on that material.

Amy Goodman: A damning new report by The Intercept reveals the judge overseeing the case that put former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva behind bars likely aided federal prosecutors in their corruption cases against Lula and other high profile Brazilian figures.

JS: At the heart of these stories are the utterly scandalous revelations that top judicial officials in Brazil conspired to prevent the party of the former left wing president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from winning the presidential election. It was these elections that brought the fascist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, to power. And one of the figures at the center of these new documents obtained by The Intercept is Sérgio  Moro, Bolsanaro’s Justice Minister.

Moro was the presiding judge in “Operation Car Wash” and the documents show, in the words of my colleagues, that Moro “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.” This reporting is already causing a major controversy in Brazil. The country’s Supreme Court on Monday said that it was going to start a review of an appeal by Lula, the jailed former president.

And we go now to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where I am joined by my colleague Glenn Greenwald. He’s one of the key journalists reporting this story out. Glenn, congrats on this very significant reporting to you and the whole team at Intercept Brasil and thanks for coming back again on Intercepted.

Glenn Greenwald: Thank you, Jeremy. I’m happy to talk to you about it.

JS: Give us the top line, headline here of what the significance of what you guys have obtained and begun publishing.

GS: Well, everyone knows there’s been a lot of political crises in Brazil — the impeachment of the former President Dilma Rousseff, the ascension to the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro — but by far the most significant event over the last five years has been this sweeping corruption probe that has put billionaires and extremely powerful politicians into prison. By far the most significant of which was last year when they put Lula, the two-term highly popular president, into prison at exactly the moment when he was intending to run for president in 2018. And all polls showed him as by far the bleeding front runner. Nobody could have beaten Lula and by convicting and imprisoning Lula, they made him ineligible to run and that’s what paved the way for Bolsonaro’s victory.So, it’s almost impossible to have done anything more significant.

And obviously there was a lot of suspicion that when you remove the front runner for president by putting him into prison, you’re doing it for political reasons, but you couldn’t prove it because everything they did was in secret. And so, we got this massive archive of secret documents that includes all their private chats and internal documents.

JS: When you say you got the internal communications and chats of these people, what people are you talking about?

GG: The people who have led this anti-corruption probe are what’s called the Carwash Task Force, who are a team of prosecutors led by someone who’s in his 30s named Deltan Dallagnol has become a huge celebrity and hero in Brazil. And then the most important figure is the judge who has presided over all of these cases and who has been finding everyone guilty and sentencing them to you know, he put Lula in prison for 10 years, Judge Sérgio Moro. And now, after Bolsonaro’s victory, he made Sérgio Moro, his super justice minister, which obviously looked like a quid pro quo.

So, our documents that we got are about Judge Moro, now Minister Moro, and this task force led by Deltan. Internally, they were actively saying that one of their critical goals was to prevent PT from winning the 2018 election. Judge Moro, who was presiding over these cases, and had the same duty as judges in the United States, which is to be neutral, to issue verdicts from a position of impartiality, was in fact doing what people long suspected he was doing, which was not just collaborating with the prosecutors, but basically being the chief of the whole operation — telling them how to construct their cases, how to prosecute the cases, what arguments to make, what arguments not to make.

So, he was designing the very criminal accusations that he was then pretending to neutrally adjudicate including the criminal charges against Lula that sent Lula to prison for a decade and removed him from the presidential race — a complete and undeniable violation of every ethical rule that governs what a judge can do. Almost nobody is defending Sérgio Moro who is after Bolsonaro, by far the most powerful figure in Brazil and even with Bolsonaro, by far the most admired one.

JS: Now, Sérgio Moro was on the Time 100 list. There also was just an embarrassingly soft puff interview on 60 Minutes.

Anderson Cooper: A small band of prosecutors is working long hours in cramped quarters on the biggest investigation Brazil has ever seen, Operation Carwash.

AC: How does Car Wash compare to Watergate?

Deltan Dallagnol: Car Wash is much, much bigger.

AC: Deltan Dallagnol is the lead prosecutor.

AC: Bigger than Watergate?

DD: Much bigger.

JS: Did all of these U.S. news outlets get it wrong in their praise of Sérgio Moro and their characterization of Operation Car Wash?

GG: I, like a lot of people, found it admirable that they were going after the most powerful people and finally putting an end to systemic corruption. But they went very wrong, because the power got to their head, and it turned political, and it became clear that they were only interested after a while, in making sure that PT — the Workers’ Party — was the only one that was destroyed so that the right wing could return to power. And that’s what these documents show. So, there were good parts of the Car Wash investigation. There still are good parts of it. The problem is that they abuse their celebrity, their unquestioned power, and the power of the state, the power of prosecutors for overtly political ends in a way that makes them just as corrupt as the people who they began imprisoning.

JS: Now, of course, Jair Bolsonaro, the relatively new president of Brazil, is an extreme right winger, very authoritarian, is waging war on all sorts of vulnerable classes of people in Brazil. What has been the response from the Bolsonaro government to your reporting?

GG: In general, the most important people who speak for the Bolsonaro government are his three sons, one of whom is a senator, one of whom is a member of the House of Representatives who got elected with the largest vote and one of whom is his sort of informal spokesman who’s a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro. And they have been relentlessly attacking me, my husband David, who’s a congressman from a left wing party and The Intercept Brazil just trying to kind of claim that we’re doing this because we’re enemies of Brazil. Thus far, though, there’s been no official response from the Bolsonaro government in the way of, say things we’re expecting and have been expecting like searches of our office to find out who our source is.

They are accusing our source of being a hacker saying he committed grave crimes. Minister Moro himself did respond and he just very arrogantly dismissed the notion that he did anything wrong. He said we took things out of context and sensationalized it, but nobody’s buying it. So, the tide is really turning against them. So, I think the Bolsonaro government feels very constrained in what they can do, because you just read the conversations between Morro and these prosecutors and there’s no way to conclude anything other than he egregiously broke every ethical rule that he was limited by and people are really, actually feel betrayed, those who have been supporting him to learn his true character.

JS: I cannot emphasize enough how significant this reporting is in Brazil, and at the same time we have to recognize, doing stories like this in the United States are very dangerous particularly for journalistic sources that they try to throw the book at. And in Brazil, people do get killed, people get killed for challenging established power. What are the threats you’re potentially facing in the current political context with Bolsonaro in power in Brazil?

GG: There’s been under Bolsonaro a series of censorship and prior restraint orders where they’ve gotten more aggressive, severely more aggressive with trying to censor and suppress reporting. But the biggest danger is that, you know, we’ve done a lot of reporting about the fact that the Bolsonaro family and the Bolsonaro movement is linked to paramilitary gangs who only know violence, and they kill indiscriminately. As you know, one of our best friends Marielle Franco, the black LGBT woman from the favelas who served on the city council with David was brutally murdered last March. They caught the two police officers who killed her but we still don’t know who ordered her murder. Her phone and her computer were seized and they found that they had been monitoring mine and David’s public events along with other left wing journalists and politicians.

So, political violence is a real thing here in Brazil, especially if you’re a journalist. And I mean, I have to say we have a team of mostly young Brazilian editors, journalists, and staff members. I think they’re all under 40. They are completely vulnerable. I cannot express how courageous they have been in doing this reporting — how unflinching, and aggressive, and professional. And we published four major exposes, you know, 3,000 words each about highly complex matters. There wasn’t a single error in any of the articles that anybody could point to and it was done in the most aggressive way possible.

And unlike me, who at least has the protection of being more public and having a husband who’s a member of Congress, but still faces threats, they face huge amounts of threats. And everybody here has just sort of jointly joined together and said, this is our job as journalists and have been really fearless about how their reporting has been done. They deserve huge credit for that.

JS: All right, Glenn, well, I hope you and the team there at Intercept Brazil stay safe. Thank you so much for this incredibly vital reporting you guys are doing.

GG: Thank you, Jeremy, really appreciate you having me on for this.

JS: Glenn Greenwald is co-founder of The Intercept and Intercept Brazil. Make sure to check out this series at TheIntercept.com and The Intercept Brazil. They’re both available in English and Portuguese. 

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