Bolsonaro’s defense questions the recovery of video deleted after January 8th in the STF

Jair Bolsonaro’s (PL) defense questioned this Tuesday (19) the Federal Supreme Court (STF) the recovery of a video posted and deleted by the former president after the acts of January 8. After Facebook stated that it no longer had the post, the technical area of ​​the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) announced that it had recovered the content using a publication aggregator website. The lawyers claim that, as they are “different platforms”, there is no way to be sure that the content recovered is the same as that published on the former agent’s official account.

On January 10, Bolsonaro shared a video on Facebook in which a state prosecutor questions the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT). The former president began to be investigated by the Supreme Court, due to the publication of the video, for alleged incitement to crimes against the Democratic Rule of Law. The investigation is being carried out within the scope of the inquiry that determines the intellectual authorship of the acts of vandalism against the headquarters of the Three Powers.

In April, he gave a statement to the Federal Police and said that the post was “accidental”. On the 5th, Moraes gave Meta, Facebook’s controller, 48 hours to send the video shared by Bolsonaro to the STF. However, Meta reported that the video “is not available on the company’s servers.” Last week, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) reported that it managed to recover the content.

The petition from Bolsonaro’s lawyers challenges the inclusion of the publication in the investigation. According to the defense, the video was removed from the “Metamemo” platform – a website that collects posts – requiring expert examination to analyze the veracity of the recording.

“Caution is necessary when analyzing said content as evidence, since the mere association between a deleted video and a supposedly saved one cannot be taken as a definitive correspondence. After all, we are dealing with different contexts and providers. The notion that the recovered video faithfully reflects the content of the deleted video is a sensitive conjecture, however, far from being an indisputable statement”, argued the defense.

The lawyers pointed out that “to maintain with absolute certainty that the video hosted on the Metamemo platform is the same as the one that was deleted requires technical, meticulous and detailed reasoning, going beyond the simple association between different platforms”. The defense reinforced that the post was made “by mistake” by the former president.

“Within this scenario, it is essential to emphasize that even the Petitioner [Bolsonaro]according to his previous statements, could attest to the reliability of the content of the video in question, since he did not watch it, but only shared it – it is worth remembering: by mistake – while trying to send it to himself via WhatsApp, with the intention of watch it later”, highlighted the lawyers.