Rapporteur at TSE reinforces bet against Bolsonaro in context – 06/28/2023 – Politics

By voting for Jair Bolsonaro (PL) to be declared ineligible for eight years, the rapporteur for the action at the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), Benedito Gonçalves, reinforced his bet on considering not only the former president’s meeting with ambassadors, but the entire context that preceded it and the developments that occurred after it.

“The meeting of July 18, 2022, at Palácio da Alvorada, is not a photograph on the wall, but a fact inserted in a context”, said the minister of electoral general, in reference to the meeting in which Bolsonaro spread lies about the electoral system repeated on other occasions. “It is within this context, well described by the initial petition, that it must be examined.

Benedito refutes, however, that there was an expansion of the initial petition, with the later inclusion of evidence in the process, a question that is part of Bolsonaro’s defense strategy. For the rapporteur, the other situations only contextualize the episode.

The minister cast his vote on Tuesday night (27th), and the TSE judgment will continue in the next session, scheduled for 9 am on Thursday (29th), when the other six members of the court are expected to speak.

The meeting with ambassadors is the central element of the PDT’s action. At the time, less than three months before the first round of elections, Bolsonaro made false and distorted statements about the electoral process, based on a Federal Police investigation into a hacker attack against the court in 2018. He also sought to discredit TSE ministers .

The inclusion in the process, at the request of the PDT, of the so-called coup draft of a state of defense decree found in January at the house of Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s former minister, is the subject of contestation by the defense, as well as ex officio evidence (without request of the parties) by the rapporteur — transcripts of lives and interview of the former president to Jovem Pan radio in 2021.

In addition to defending the maintenance of the coup draft in the action, during his vote, Benedito reaffirmed his arguments in an intermediate decision throughout the process for inclusion, among the evidence of the process, of the lives of 2021.

The minister argues that the former president’s speeches at the meeting with ambassadors “have chronological markers, which connected the past, the present moment, and projections for the future”.

When talking about the 2021 lives, the rapporteur states that they “were successful in their pragmatic proposal to cultivate the feeling that a serious threat was surrounding the 2022 elections, and that this threat came from the TSE”. Already at the meeting with ambassadors, he says, Bolsonaro “added another chapter” to his saga against the electronic ballot box.

“At the meeting with heads of diplomatic missions, the investigator resumed the epic of attacks on the electronic voting system without evidence, adding another chapter to the saga: the last attempt by the Armed Forces to present supposed solutions to avoid fraud in the imminent election.”

The draft, in turn, appears in the vote as an example of unfolding speeches against the electoral system.

“The trivialization of the coup -merely symbolized, in these records, by the draft that proposed to intervene in the TSE and dozed, without causing unrest, in a folder in the residence of the former Minister of Justice- is a serious development of unfounded attacks on the electoral voting system .”

When contesting the inclusion of the draft in the action, Bolsonaro’s lawyers say that it could not have been included after the object of the action was defined, in this case, the presentation to the ambassadors.

The argument is that there would be “the admission of a new fact, and not a new document”. The controversy in this case is whether the draft would actually be expanding the object of the action or if it would be a new element connected to the object of the action.

The defense of the former president cites the trial of the ticket of Dilma Rousseff (PT) and Michel Temer (MDB), in 2017, when the TSE decided by majority to disregard the inclusion of new evidence presented after the action was filed. The material pointed to other suspicions, related to box 2, against the two politicians.

In his vote, the rapporteur states that, by allowing the inclusion of the draft in the action, the guidance outlined by the court in 2017 was not changed. His understanding is that the decision now does not change the object pointed out in the initial PDT.

“In the 2022 election, the court admitted that it can be discussed in this Aije [ação de investigação judicial eleitoral] a fact subsequent to the filing of the action that was raised to demonstrate the seriousness of the conduct narrated in the initial petition”, said Benedito in his vote. “In the 2014 election, the TSE refused to insert, in an ongoing Aije, a cause to ask autonomous.”

Bolsonaro’s defense also considers that the minister’s performance, by including evidence without provocation by the parties, exceeded the limits of what the electoral legislation provides, which in Aijes gives broader powers to the judge, enabling a more proactive action.

According to the lawyers, it is not credible that, based on this, action is taken to “make up for the deficient performance” of the PDT, the author of the action.

In his vote, Benedito reaffirms “that the complementary steps, after the instruction hearing are expressly provided for in the Aije procedure and were carefully reasoned”. According to the minister, it is impossible “to support the allegation that any evidence produced in this Aije was impertinent”.