Bolsonaro and allies are targets of PF operations in the 8/1 investigations

Former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) and allies are targets of the Operation Tempus Veritatis, launched by the Federal Police on the morning of this Thursday (8) as part of the investigations into the acts of January 8, 2023. In total, 37 arrest, search and seizure warrants were served in nine states and the Federal District.

Bolsonaro is the target of the operation with compliance with precautionary measures, such as handing over his passport to the authorities within 24 hours. The former president has not yet commented, but his lawyer, Fábio Wajngarten, stated that the document will be handed over to the authority. He also said that Bolsonaro ordered his direct assistant, who is also the target of the operation and who was in Mambucaba (Angra dos Reis, RJ), to return to his home in Brasília in compliance with the order not to maintain contact with the others being investigated.

The PF’s action takes place one day after Bolsonaro held an event in the city of São Sebastião (SP), in which he said that “the current president [Lula] wants to censor social media […] I’m only here with you thanks to social media.”

Among the former president’s allies targeted by the PF are former ministers Walter Braga Netto (Casa Civil), Augusto Heleno (GSI), Anderson Torres (Justice) and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira (Defense), former aide-de-camp Marcelo Câmara , former advisors Filipe Martins and Tercio Arnaud Thomaz, among others.

The national president of the PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, is also in the PF’s sights. The party’s national headquarters was searched and seized.

There are also more military personnel targeted by the operation, such as Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, former commander-general of the Navy who refused to participate in the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT); General Estevan Teóphilo Gaspar de Oliveira, former head of the Army’s Land Operations Command; and retired Army colonel, Ailton Barros.

Garnier stated that he was woken up by the PF at 6:15 am and that “they took my phone and papers from projects that I have been trying to work on in the private sector. I ask everyone to pray for Brazil and for me.”

See below who are some of the targets of this Thursday’s operation (8):

The PF also targets members of the Army Special Forces known as “black kids”, who would have participated in the invasion of the headquarters of the Three Powers on January 8, 2023.

The first information indicates that Câmara and Martins were arrested by the PF in the operation, along with active military personnel Colonel Romão Correa Neto and Major Rafael Martins de Oliveira.

Câmara is an Army colonel and was mentioned in the investigation investigating the gifts received by the former president that would have been taken to the United States at the end of his term, in 2022. Martins was Bolsonaro’s advisor on international affairs.

A People’s Gazette contacted the Army to comment on the execution of warrants against military personnel and is awaiting feedback.

The PF states, in a note, that this Thursday’s operation (8) seeks to “investigate a criminal organization that acted in the attempted coup d’état and abolition of the Democratic Rule of Law, to obtain a political advantage with the maintenance of the then President of the Republic [Bolsonaro] in the power”.

In total, there are 33 search and seizure warrants, four for preventive detention and 48 precautionary measures authorized by Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), and are carried out in the states of Amazonas, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso do Sul, Ceará, Espírito Santo, Paraná, Goiás and the Federal District.

Among the precautionary measures are the prohibition of maintaining contact with the other people being investigated and the prohibition of leaving the country, with the delivery of passports within 24 hours and suspension of the exercise of public functions.

Preliminary information indicates that the targets of this Thursday’s operation (8) were determined based on the testimony of Bolsonaro’s former aide-de-camp, Mauro Cid, arrested in May last year during the investigation into the insertion of false vaccination data against Covid -19 on the former president’s vaccination card.

The deputy attorney general of the Republic, Carlos Frederico Santos, even stated last year that Cid’s accusation was “weak” and did not bring concrete evidence against the former president. “What was said didn’t have all these things. There’s an annex on the coup, there’s an annex on jewelry, there’s an annex on the vaccine, there’s an annex on the office of hate, digital militias,” he said.

President Lula said he hoped that “no excess will occur and the rigor of the law will be applied. We know about the attacks on democracy. We need to know who financed the camps. Let’s wait for the investigations”, he said in a radio interview Itatiaiafrom Belo Horizonte, where he has a schedule this Thursday (8).

Group worked in groups to question elections

The Federal Police investigations indicate that the group investigated was divided into action groups to “disseminate the occurrence of fraud in the 2022 Presidential Elections”, even before the election took place, in order to “enable and legitimize a military intervention, in dynamic of digital militia”.

The nuclei, says the PF, were divided into two lines of action, the first being in the “construction and propagation of the version of fraud in the 2022 elections, through the fallacious dissemination of vulnerabilities in the electronic voting system”.

This, according to the PF, was a speech reiterated by those investigated since 2019 and which persisted even after the results of the second round of the election in 2022.

The second axis acted in the practice of “acts to subsidize the abolition of the Democratic State of Law, through a coup d’état, with the support of military personnel with knowledge and tactics of special forces in a politically sensitive environment”.

According to the Federal Police, the Army monitors compliance with some of the warrants against military personnel, such as Braga Netto and Heleno.

More information in a moment.