Reprinted from fair.org by SEAN T. MITCHELL
Glenn Greenwald's book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro's Brazil, (Haymarket Books (2021))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 Ina'cio "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
Intercept (6/9/19)
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).
Those early releases also showed that, despite their denials, the "task-force members openly plotted how to use their prosecutorial powers to prevent Lula's Workers' Party from winning the 2018 election" (p. xv). And they showed that the task force brought criminal charges against Lula despite "an absence of evidence"secure in the knowledge that Moro would be the one adjudicating the charges" (p. xv).
Over the coming months, the explosive revelations kept on coming, released by the Intercept Brasil and a variety of Brazilian journalistic partners. To name just a few sordid examples discussed in Securing Democracy: Moro instructed the task force to protect Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former center-right president, because he was "an important political ally"; the task force mocked the death of Lula's seven-year-old grandson; and they "conspired to conceal information from the Supreme Court" (pp. 158-159).
The work that Greenwald recounts in Securing Democracy leaves no reasonable doubt about the corrupt and politicized character of the "anti-corruption" operation that took down the left and brought the far-right to power in Brazil through extra-democratic means. The book also offers harrowing accounts of the dangers and threats (both legalistic and violent) that Greenwald and his collaborators faced from Bolsonaro's government and followers for their journalistic work.
For all this, the book is well worth reading, and provides a fundamental service to democracy and freedom of the press in Brazil and globally. But the omissions in the book about the sources that Greenwald utilized are also telling and important.
The missing US connectionAs Brian Mier (Brasilwire, 2/18/21) noted, the Intercept and its partners had already published 95 articles based on the Vaza Jato archive, over the course of nine months, before releasing the first article examining the frequent appearance of US government officials in that archive. This, and the series of articles that followed, "The FBI and Lava Jato," would go on to win Brazil's Vladimir Herzog Prize. Greenwald's earlier Vaza Jato reporting had also won this prize, and he refers to it in Securing Democracy as "the most prestigious and meaningful prize a journalist can receive in Brazil" (p. 222), although Securing Democracy does not mention this second Vladimir Herzog Prize.
Intercept Brasil (3/12/20): "Lava Jato did everything to help American justice-including circumventing the Brazilian government."
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