Greenwald's Bombshell Brazil Scoops Have Curious Blindspot for US Involvement
APRIL 3, 2022
Review: Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, by Glenn Greenwald. 2021. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
SEAN T. MITCHELL
Glenn Greenwald’s book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, opens with his recollection of a conversation in which Carl Bernstein, the US journalist of Watergate fame, told him that he’d never get another scoop as “big or impactful” as the Snowden archive (p. viii), for which Greenwald was the principal journalistic source.
Not so. On Mother’s Day 2019, just a few months into the administration of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, Greenwald, the US-born, Rio de Janeiro–based journalist (and endless source of Twitter controversy), would receive his second “once-in-a-lifetime scoop” (p. vii). The scoop arrived from a source who had hacked a massive archive of leaks that would go on to transform Brazilian politics. The archive contained years of conversation on the Telegram app by the key prosecutors and judge of the Brazilian “anti-corruption” task force known as Lava Jato (Portuguese for “Car Wash”). Securing Democracy tells the story of the reporting on those leaks by Greenwald and his colleagues at the Intercept.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of all this for Brazil. While the massive, multi-year Lava Jato investigation was receiving rapturous praise in Brazilian and foreign media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21), it was releasing illegally obtained and misleading wiretaps to the media that created the conditions for the soft coup that unseated President Dilma Rousseff of the PT (Workers’ Party) in 2016. And then Lava Jato put the PT’s 2018 presidential frontrunner, former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, behind bars, securing Bolsonaro’s election. The work done by Greenwald and his colleagues (and, later, by Lula’s defense team, once they got the archive) showed all this to be deliberate and farcical: Lava Jato was operating illegally with a key goal of destroying the electorally successful left.
Explosive revelations
Working in secrecy, Greenwald and his colleagues simultaneously released three articles at the Intercept in June 2019, all based on those Telegram conversations. Cleverly named “Vaza Jato” (vaza means “leak” in Portuguese), the series in its first installments showed that Sergio Moro, the key judge involved in Lava Jato (who by then was Bolsonaro’s security minister), had been acting unlawfully as “clandestine chief of the prosecution” (p. xiv).
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https://fair.org/home/greenwalds-bombshell-brazil-scoops-have-curious-blindspot-for-us-involvement/
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