TSE endorses inclusion of draft in action against Bolsonaro – 02/14/2023 – Power

The TSE (Superior Electoral Court) decided this Tuesday (14), unanimously, 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.

The collegiate’s decision reinforces the thesis of opponents of the former president that the paper collected at Anderson Torres’ house should be evaluated in the context of a strategy designed to discredit the electoral system.

Bolsonaro had appealed against the inclusion of the document in the process, but the electoral inspector general, Benedito Gonçalves, denied it and submitted his decision to a plenary referendum.

The TSE plenary is composed of Alexandre de Moraes (president), Ricardo Lewandowski (vice), Cármen Lúcia, Benedito Gonçalves (electoral general inspector), Raul Araújo, Sérgio Banhos and Carlos Horbach.

Lawyer Tarcísio Vieira de Carvalho Neto, who represents the ticket headed by Bolsonaro at the TSE, asked the president of the court to defend his arguments against the inclusion of the document in the action from the tribune. Moraes denied, on the grounds that there is no rulebook provision for oral support in the class of process in which the controversy was discussed.

In his vote, Gonçalves stated that the investigation aimed at Bolsonaro does not limit the analysis to the facts initially narrated, and should examine everything that may influence the judgment. There is, according to the minister, an “unequivocal” relationship between the original facts of the action and the new facts.

“It is unequivocal that the fact that the former Minister of Justice of the government of the first investigated [Bolsonaro] having in your power a proposal to intervene in this court and invalidate the result of the presidential elections is adherence to the controversial points, especially with regard to the correlation between the speech and the campaign”, he said.

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.

After leaving the Ministry of Justice, Torres took over the Secretariat of Public Security in the Federal District at the beginning of the year. On the eve of the January 8 attacks, he went on vacation to the United States.

Torres is under arrest by order of Moraes, within the scope of the STF inquiry into the acts of January 8. The minister responded to a request from the PF in the inquiry that investigates the omission of district authorities in the episode.

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.

This 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.

In the action in which the coup draft was attached, the general inspector determined some steps, including the hearing of witnesses.

Last week, as Bolsonaro’s witness, senator and former Minister of the Civil House Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI) said he did not know the document. Admiral Flávio Viana Rocha, a former Bolsonaro adviser, was also a witness and repeated that he did not know her.

The request to include the coup draft in the investigation was made by the PDT, author of the representation that started the investigation into Bolsonaro’s meeting with ambassadors in Alvorada.

Party lawyers stated 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.

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 said that the draft does not represent proof for the resolution of the cause, “since it is apocryphal”; which was not found in possession of the investigated nor is it 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 General Inspector, however, maintained that the document is connected to the plaintiff’s initial allegations, in the sense that Bolsonaro’s speech at the meeting with ambassadors “was part of the campaign strategy consistent with casting serious and unfounded suspicions on the system electronic voting.”

“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.