Moraes took 78 days to unsecrecy of 8/1 videos – 04/27/2023 – Power

Minister Alexandre de Moraes, of the STF (Federal Supreme Court), took 78 days to overturn the secrecy of the internal security images of the Planalto Palace on January 8, when the place was invaded and vandalized.

On the last 18th, he voted to make 50 defendants denounced for depredations in the Planalto, the National Congress and the Supreme Court. He made the decision without having watched the entirety of the recordings that show those responsible for the invasion and depredation in the Planalto – seven other ministers accompanied the position of the magistrate, who won.

The minister’s vote was given in the inquiry that investigates 50 people belonging to the group of executors of coup acts; that is, those active in the depredation of public property. There are participants in the vandalization of one or more of the following buildings: the Supreme, the Congress and the Planalto.

A few days after the January 8 depredation, the House and Senate released footage of the attacks on their premises, spanning more than 40 minutes. On January 25, the STF released images of the location on the date of the acts.

Regarding the images from the Planalto security circuit, Moraes obtained access to the entirety of the files after the revelation of videos in which the former minister of the GSI (Institutional Security Office) Gonçalves Dias appears in the palace on the day of the invasion. In the images, it is possible to see GSI agents, subordinate to Dias, cooperating with the vandals.

Some parts of these images were already known. A week after the invasion, TV Globo released videos from security cameras that show Bolsonarists breaking historic items, tearing up paintings and vandalizing the Planalto. No image of members of the GSI or the government was published at the time.

The following day, the government released the same recordings to the entire press – still without records of the reaction of GSI members.

On January 12th, the Sheet requested, via the Access to Information Law, the complete interior images of the Planalto on January 8. The official answer was given on February 1st.

The government imposed secrecy and denied access to the images, arguing that disclosure was not “reasonable”, due to information that would expose methods, equipment, operational procedures and human resources of presidential security.

“Thus, this request for information cannot be met, given that the images of the video monitoring system of the Palácio do Planalto are of restricted access, considering that their indiscriminate disclosure brings damage and vulnerabilities to the security activity of the presidential installations” , said the government’s response at the time.

The news that the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) administration had declared these images confidential was published shortly thereafter. Only 78 days later, however, Moraes signed the decision in which he determined the withdrawal of this secrecy.

The decision was given a day after CNN Brasil released images of Gonçalves Dias on the Planalto while the place was destroyed by Bolsonarists.

Alexandre de Moraes then concluded that secrecy was inadmissible.

“The present hypothesis does not characterize any exception to the necessary publicity and transparency, and it is not possible, based on the Law of Access to Information, to maintain the ban on disclosing all — absolutely all — the images verified on the occasion of the nefarious and criminal attack on democracy.”

The magistrate cited the constitutional principle of publicity and said that the State “has the duty of absolute transparency in the conduct of public affairs, under penalty of disrespect” to the Constitution. He also ordered the files to be sent to the STF within 48 hours.

The minister also stated that he had determined that the videos should be sent to the case file on January 8 – which were under the custody of the Federal Police during this period.

In the decision on that date, he ordered the PF to obtain “all the images from the cameras in the Federal District that could help in the facial recognition of the terrorists who carried out the acts”, without specifically mentioning the internal images of the Planalto.

In the vote to make defendants the first investigated of being executors of the acts, the minister did not describe individually the conduct of each defendant. He also did not mention the images or items of the public buildings that each one deprecated.

The magistrate argued that the thesis of the investigated lawyers that, in the complaint of the PGR (Attorney General of the Republic), “there is a clear generalization, without any particularization” of the actions of each one, should not prosper.

According to Moraes, the so-called mass crimes were committed in the case.

“There is, therefore, as well supported by the PGR, the occurrence of the so-called multitudinous crimes, that is, those committed by a large number of people, where the intersubjective bond is significantly amplified, because ‘one agent exerts influence over the other, to the point to motivate actions by imitation or suggestion, which is sufficient for the existence of the subjective bond, even if they do not know each other’.”