BRIAN MIER: Well, on the eve of the Supreme Court decision which ruled on whether Lula should be imprisoned or not, exceptionally, in a moment when his appeals were still going on, contrary to hundreds of other politicians who remained free and allowed to run for office in similar legal situations. On the eve of that decision he made two threatening tweets to the Supreme Court, reminding them of their duties to not let impunity stand, and using kind of cloaked, threatening language. And then on the most popular news program in Brazil, Journal National on TV Globo, which is one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world, the nightly newscaster read the tweets over the air in this kind of somber voice as they dimmed the lights at the end of the newscast.
So during the Supreme Court ruling the next day it was a split decision. And Rosa Weber, a Supreme Court minister, she announced that she was going to rule against her basic feeling and side with the majority, who was going to go against what she really believed, and sided with the majority. And she was visibly nervous. And so she appeared like she was afraid. And so in a split decision, with a one-vote majority, Lula was sent off to prison, and remained running for office regardless, you know, even from behind bars. And then during this period when he announced he was going to run for president, another judge issued a habeas corpus to release Lula. And this guy Sergio Moro jumped out of his beach vacation, called up the federal police, called up the court at Curitiba, and blocked Lula from being freed.
And then one week before the election, he leaked incriminating evidence- it wasn’t incriminating evidence, it was audio from a plea bargain testimony that already been dismissed for not having any incriminating evidence- against Fernando Haddad. He leaked that to Globo one week before the presidential election. And Haddad’s popularity immediately dropped like 5 or 6 points. And apparently, according to Bolsonaro’s vice president-elect, General Hamilton Mourao, Bolsonaro’s people already met with Mourao before he leaked that incriminating audio to the television networks.
And so there’s a sequence of events from the moment when the General Villas Boas threatened the Supreme Court, which he now, as you mentioned, last Sunday gave an interview to Folha de Sao Paolo newspaper admitting that he threatened the Supreme Court, right. Since his threat there have been a series of actions that Sergio Moro has been in the middle of which hindered the PT party’s candidacy for the presidency, not least of which was arresting the leading candidate. Even after Lula had been in jail for two and a half months, he still had more than double the popularity in the polls as this neofascist, Jair Bolsonaro. So he was removed from running for office, and then Moro leaked information damaging Lula’s successor’s candidacy, who was looking like he had a good chance of winning, at that point.