Bolsonaro’s defense calls coup draft apocryphal – 01/19/2023 – Power

The defense of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) asked the TSE (Superior Electoral Court) not to consider in the actions against the former president the draft of a decree in which the then representative would determine the establishment of a state of defense at the headquarters of the electoral court.

Bolsonaro’s lawyers classify the draft as an “apocryphal document” and argue that the topic is unrelated to the ongoing case at the TSE in which the former president is accused of abuse of political power and misuse of the media for carrying out a meeting with ambassadors to spread untruths about electronic voting machines.

Last week, the Electoral Inspector General, Minister Benedito Gonçalves, included the draft in the action that deals with the meeting with representatives of other countries held at the Alvorada Palace last year.

Gonçalves’ decision responded to a request from the PDT, which, last week, filed a petition for the document to be attached to the investigations proposed by the party.

THE Sheet revealed that the Federal Police found the draft of the decree at the residence of Anderson Torres, former Minister of Justice. The objective of the document would be to reverse the result of the election, in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) won. Such a measure would be unconstitutional.

The piece now signed by lawyer Tarcísio Vieira de Carvalho states that the court should not accept the inclusion of the draft because the action deals only with the issue of ambassadors and this has already been defined by the court.

Bolsonaro’s defense also cites that the document was found with the former Minister of Justice and that he is not the target of the action.

“It is necessary to state that the apocryphal document, attached to the file, was not found in the possession of the investigated, nor signed by them, and the attached piece does not indicate any concrete acts or at least indicia that they participated in its writing”, says .

It also says that the decree “was never published – nor would it be, since the mandate of the first investigated as President of the Republic ended on December 31, 2022”.

“Moreover, there is no evidence or news that any authority or citizen was made aware of it, and, as far as is known from journalistic coverage, in a reliable thesis, it may well have been left in a pile of papers indistinct and impertinent signs intended for disposal or destruction in the private residence of the former Minister of Justice.”

The lawyers go on and claim that there is no information about “any measure of transposition from the world of the paper draft to that of phenomenal reality, that is, it never went beyond the plan of cogitation”.

The defense says that, even if the draft is reliable, the fact that there was no act carried out by Bolsonaro in this regard leads to the conclusion that the document has no probative value to be included in the action.

The ongoing investigation at the TSE could make Bolsonaro ineligible and remove him from future election races.

The action is being reported by the court’s corregidor, with a profile contrary to Bolsonaro. He was quick to accept the inclusion of the draft in the action, in an indication that he will make the process move quickly.

Gonçalves stated that there is “an unmistakable correlation between new facts and documents and stabilized demand”.

The PDT argued that the draft found would be an “embryo conceived with the intention of a coup d’état”, being capable of “densifying the arguments that show the occurrence of abuse of political power tending to discredit this Electoral Justice and the electoral process, with a view to to alter the outcome of the election”.

In the decision, the minister stated that the facts presented by the party “have adherence” with the event held with ambassadors, “especially with regard to the correlation of the speech with the election and the quantitative aspect of gravity”.

“As can be seen, the thesis of the plaintiff, from the beginning, is that the speech made on 07/18/2022 was not aimed only at the ambassadors, as it would be inserted in the campaign strategy of the first investigated to ‘mobilize their bases’ through knowingly false facts about the voting system”, wrote the minister.

He continued: “In the petition now under analysis, it alleges that the draft of the state of defense decree, by materializing the proposal to change the result of the election, ‘denses the arguments that show the occurrence of abuse of political power tending to discredit this Electoral Justice and the electoral process’.”