TSE assesses whether to keep draft in investigation that targets Bolsonaro – 02/13/2023 – Politics

The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) must decide this Tuesday (14) whether to keep the coup draft found in the house of former minister Anderson Torres (Justice) in the investigation records that could lead Jair Bolsonaro (PL) to ineligibility.

The document was attached to the lawsuit targeting the former president for attacks on the electoral system at a meeting with ambassadors at the Alvorada Palace in July last year.

Bolsonaro appealed, but the electoral inspector-general, Benedito Gonçalves, denied it and submitted his decision to a plenary referendum, composed of him and six other ministers.

In addition to Gonçalves, the TSE plenary is composed of Alexandre de Moraes (president), Ricardo Lewandowski (vice), Cármen Lúcia, Raul Araújo, Sérgio Banhos and Carlos Horbach. The tendency is for the decision of the magistrate to be endorsed, as in previous cases involving investigations into the presidential campaign.

This Tuesday, Carmen will be in Lisbon for an event in the electoral area that will bring together representatives of Portuguese-speaking countries. Until the conclusion of this text, the TSE still did not have information about her participation in the trial, carried out in a hybrid system (face-to-face and virtual).

Appointed by Bolsonaro to the STF (Federal Supreme Court), ministers Kassio Nunes Marques and André Mendonça are alternates in the electoral court. Minister Dias Toffoli is also an alternate.

The coup draft was seized by the Federal Police during a search at the home of Anderson Torres, who is also a former Secretary of Public Security for the Federal District. The seizure of the document was revealed by the Sheet.

The text dealt with a proposal for a decree for the former chief executive to establish a state of defense in the TSE and, with that, reverse the result of the election in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) won. Such a measure would be unconstitutional.

Torres was Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and is currently in prison by order of Moraes, within the scope of the STF inquiry into the coup acts of January 8. Moraes responded to a request from the PF in the inquiry that investigates the omission of DF authorities in the episode.

Former President Bolsonaro is the target of a series of investigations in the electoral court on the allegation of abuse of political or economic power, in addition to the misuse of the media.

The range can be expanded if there are indications of the use of the public machine in spending with the corporate card in the months that coincide with the period of the electoral campaign.

The request to include the coup draft in the investigation was made by the PDT, author of the representation that started the investigation of the episode.

Party lawyers claimed that the paper collected at Torres’ house was the “embryo conceived with the intention of a coup d’état” and, therefore, capable of “densifying the arguments that show the occurrence of abuse of political power tending to promote discredit to this Justice and the electoral process, with a view to altering the outcome of the election”.

When deliberating on the inclusion of the coup draft in the records under his rapporteurship, Gonçalves pondered that the PDT’s thesis is, from the beginning, that Bolsonaro’s speech to the ambassadors, held on July 18, did not target only foreign representatives, but would be part of the campaign strategy of “mobilizing their bases” through knowingly false facts about the voting system.

The draft of the state of defense decree at the TSE would be inserted in this context by proposing to change the result of the election, maintained the party.

The minister stated that there was an “unequivocal correlation” between the new facts and documents and the investigation that was already underway.

Lawyers for Bolsonaro and Walter Braga Netto, candidate for vice-president and also the target of the investigation, argued that the attachment of the document in the action would represent “the admission of a new fact, and not a new document, at such an advanced stage of the procedural march”.

They also alleged that the draft does not represent proof for the resolution of the case, “since it is apocryphal”; which was not found in possession of the investigated and is not signed by them.

In addition, he argued that there was no evidence that the duo had participated in its drafting or that they had acted “so that the measures supposedly intended by the document were materialized”.

The minister, however, maintained that the document is connected to the initial allegations of the author of the action, in the sense that Bolsonaro’s speech at the meeting with ambassadors “was part of the campaign strategy consisting of casting serious and unfounded suspicions on the electronic system of vote.”

“This defense strategy, as can be easily seen, seeks to deflate the legitimate vocation of the action to protect very complex legal interests, such as isonomy, electoral normality and the legitimacy of the results”, said Gonçalves.

The magistrate also states that due legal process has, among its virtues, the ability to decant the facts and enable their analytical examination and that the results of the 2022 presidential elections, “although a legitimate and authentic result of the popular will manifested in the ballot boxes, became the target of severe threats”.

“It is central to the consolidation of the results of the 2022 elections to find out whether this desolate scenario is a result of conduct imputed to Jair Messias Bolsonaro, then President of the Republic, and his surroundings. This debate cannot be silenced or inhibited by an artificial separation of the causes of ask in the various AIJEs (Electoral Judicial Investigation Actions)”, he said.