The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Glen Greenwald interviewed on Democracy Now on massive leak of documents in Brazil Archived Message

    Posted by Garry on June 12, 2019, 7:30 pm




    ".... I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Our guest is Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, founding editors of The Intercept, just published “The Secret Brazil Archive,” a three-part exposé revealing that the judge overseeing the case that put former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva behind bars likely aided the federal prosecutors in their case against Lula and other high-profile figures.

    Lay out you found in this three-part report, Glenn, and how it’s rocking Brazil right now.

    GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. So, as your audience likely knows, because I have discussed it with you many times and you’ve covered it with other guests, Brazil is a country that has been swamped by multiple political crises—the impeachment of former Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded Lula, the ascension of this far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, economic crises and the like.

    But by far the biggest event in Brazil was the imprisonment last year of former President Lula da Silva, not just because he was such a giant on the world stage democratically, which he is, because he was elected overwhelmingly twice, in 2002 and 2006, and his presidency was so successful in lifting millions of people out of poverty, in transforming Brazil, that he left Brazil and—left office, I mean, with an 87% approval rating, which is unheard of. So, to put somebody like that in prison is an earth-shattering story in and of itself, but it was made all the more consequential by the fact that all polls showed that Lula, who was running again for president last year—he was term-limited out of office the first time—was the overwhelming favorite, was the massive front-runner, was ahead by 20 to 30 points in every poll, including ahead of Jair Bolsonaro. And so, to imprison Lula meant that he was rendered ineligible under the law to run, and that’s what paved the way ultimately for Jair Bolsonaro’s ascension to control over Brazil, which is the fifth most populous country in the world, with massive oil reserves and the most important environmental resource on the planet, which is the Amazon, all of which is now in the hands of Jair Bolsonaro.

    This was done by a task force prosecutors and a judge, Sérgio Moro, who have basically been turned into superheroes, into deities, by the Brazilian press and by the world press. Sérgio Moro was heralded around the world as some great figure. He was named to the Time 100 list in 2016 and went to the gala in New York. He had a huge profile on him on 60 Minutes that was a puff piece, basically turning him into this noble anti-corruption figure. And there’s been almost no questioning of anything that they’ve done, even though they’ve been using highly questionable practices.

    Here in Brazil, there has been a longtime suspicion that they in fact were abusing their powers for political ends, that what they really were, were right-wing ideologues and operatives who were abusing the law to destroy the Workers’ Party—one of the only left-wing parties in the entire democratic world that has dominated politics in a major country and has succeeded in anti-poverty programs—in order to usher in the pro-right faction into power, that they were abusing the law to basically put the leaders in prison to destroy the party. They’ve always vehemently denied this. They’ve said, “We have no ideology. We have no party preference. We don’t care who wins elections. We’re only neutral judges and prosecutors applying the law.”

    The archive that was provided to us by our source, this massive trove of secret documents, about their internal communications, about their internal actions, their chats, their audios, their videos, an archive that, as I’ve said, is bigger in size than the Snowden archive was, which until that point was the largest leak in the history of U.S. journalism, bigger than that, finally enables us to see the truth about what they really did.

    And the three stories that we published on Sunday, the reason they’ve shaken Brazil to the core is because Sérgio Moro, after Bolsonaro won, thanks to Justice Moro putting Lula in prison, became the second most powerful person in Brazil, because Bolsonaro created what he called a “super justice ministry,” that Sérgio Moro now runs. He’s the justice minister of the country. It’s like being an attorney general but on steroids, controlling all law enforcement, surveillance, police actions.

    And what this material shows are three key things. Number one, it shows that inside the prosecutor task force, they were talking openly about how they wanted to make sure that the Workers’ Party lost the election. And we can talk about the specifics, but, in particular, there was a judge who authorized Lula to give an interview from prison 12 days before the election. And they panicked, and they said, “We need to stop this, because if Lula is allowed to be heard from, he will—there’s a good chance he will make PT win the election, and we need to put a stop to this.” They said they were praying every day that PT doesn’t return to power—PT being the Workers’ Party. So, this five-year claim that they had—”we don’t have any preferences for parties, we don’t care who wins elections”—was an absolute lie. They were talking openly and explicitly about how their top priority was making sure PT didn’t win the election—exactly what people have been accusing them of.

    Secondly, just like in the U.S., a judge is required to be neutral. A judge can’t favor one side or the other. And there’s long been a suspicion that Judge Moro, when he was ruling on these cases, like finding Lula guilty, finding other left-wing leaders guilty and people from other parties guilty, that he was in fact collaborating in secret with the prosecutors to design the case. They vehemently and angrily denied this accusation. The head of the prosecutorial task force, who’s a national hero in Brazil, Deltan Dallagnol, wrote a book in which he said, “These accusations are outrageous. They’re disgusting.” We have video of Judge Moro being asked about this, and he was so angry about it that he actually scoffed at it with a smile, saying, “People talk about this as being—as though it’s Judge Moro’s prosecution or Judge Moro’s strategy.” He said, “People don’t understand. Judges in Brazil have no role in prosecuting people. Our value is one of passivity. We simply listen to both sides, listen to the evidence and make decisions.” What the conversations that we published show, between Judge Moro and head of the prosecutorial task force, is that Judge Moro in fact was constantly directing, constructing, designing the entire prosecution, screaming at them when they were doing things that he thought were wrong, telling them how to better fortify the case, not just against Lula, but against other people. He was basically the commander of the prosecutorial team and then walking into court as though he were sitting judging Lula’s case and others as a neutral arbiter. So, everything that they vehemently denied to the public they were doing, in fact, they were doing for years, as these documents show.

    And the third key revelation, as you said, is that the specific case for which they prosecuted Lula, namely the charge that he had received a—what they call a triplex apartment, in order to make it sound very glamorous, when in fact it’s kind of rundown and shoddy, and Lula had the capability to buy it 100,000 times over if he wanted—but the charge was he received this triplex apartment and renovations to it in exchange for helping this construction company get contracts, that they knew themselves, three days before they indicted him, that they didn’t have the evidence sufficient to show his guilt or even to justify why this case belonged with them. But they just decided they were going to go forward anyway, because they knew they had a judge, in Judge Moro, now Minister Moro, single-mindedly devoted to the goal of imprisoning Lula, and not just imprisoning him, but doing so in time to make him ineligible to run for 2018’s election, out of fear that PT would win the election.

    So, the consequences of this revelation have been enormous, because Moro, as I said, is the second most powerful person in Brazil, after Bolsonaro, but he’s by far the most respected person, or at least was the most respected person. And even his most ardent and loyal defenders, in light of these revelations, have said there’s no way to defend this conduct. One of the biggest right-wing newspapers in Brazil, Estado de São Paulo, that has spent four years praising and heralding an cheerleading for Sérgio Moro, came out and said he needs to resign, and the head of the task force needs to be fired, just based on the first three stories that we published. And that’s indicative and reflective of widespread sentiment. And that’s why it’s shaking Brazil to the core, because Sérgio Moro is crucial to the legitimacy of the Bolsonaro government.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Glenn—

    GLENN GREENWALD: Getting him to go join the government was a crucial part.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, I wanted to ask you, because these are, obviously, very explosive conclusions that you’ve reached on your reporting. Could you talk a little bit about the archive sources that you have? In other words, I could understand the cellphone texts, let’s say, between different parties involved in this being leaked, but you were even talking about audio. How was the audio compiled? Were these people taping their own conversations? Could you discuss a little bit the nature of the documents that you have?..."

    Continued at link below:

    Democracy Now

    Message Thread: