Vaza Jato, Glenn Greenwald e an intriguing coincidence — Part 2

According to the man who gave up his seat in Congress in favour of Greenwald’s husband, he never questioned how Glenn “meddles in the party (and the power of the money that buys candidacies)”

[This is a translation of a piece originally published on Poder360.]

On September 2nd, 2019, in an interview with the Roda Viva program, Glenn Greenwald sent a weakly encrypted message to the judges of the highest court of Brazilian justice:

“We’ve already said that we do not have, for example, documents about the supreme court judges and we will not publish anything nor any conversations between, for example, supreme court judges — we have already said that.”

Those words, largely ignored, should have made headlines in all the newspapers, because at that moment, in front of the cameras, Greenwald confesses that he is exercising the power to curse some and save others.

We know that this announced kindness towards members of the supreme court (STF) was Greenwald’s choice, rather than an absence of damaging material, because the Federal Attorney offices revealed that at least two of the12 supreme court judges were hacked: Gilmar Mendes and Alexandre Moraes.

It is therefore the 2nd part of the sentence that really matters, because it says more than Greenwald speaks. Why should some STF judges be reassured? What would they have to fear? And what did Greenwald gain in return for that silence? What criteria has Greenwald used to sentence some to the stake and spare others? Why was nothing said about Gilmar Mendes [a nemesis of the Car Wash anti-corruption investigation], while conversations by judge Luís Roberto Barroso [a sympathiser of the Car Wash investigation] were revealed without any crime having been identified? How can we be sure that what was omitted about Gilmar Mendes is irrelevant? What, after all, are Greenwald’s motivations?

Don’t get me wrong — I will never value intentions more than results. Those who read what I write know that I value the fruits of an action more than their motivations. The problem, however, is that we do not know what the fruits of this crime really are. As the saying goes, a thief who robs a thief should have a hundred years of relief — but what about a thief who spares a thief?

Thousands of private conversations have been stolen, 7 terabytes of information have been collected, hundreds of the highest authorities, the most powerful businessmen and the most relevant politicians have had their private messages rummaged through, and yet, defying all probabilities, nothing has showed up that could incriminate or embarrass Lula, PT, Dilma, Manuela D’Ávila, PSOL (the party to which Greenwald’s husband belongs); no friendly journalist was exposed, no bad joke was made by a party comrade, no slip-of-the-tongue used to embarrass an opponent was found to discredit a supporter of Lula. Such coincidences do not exist. [For those who are not in Brazil — the leaks published in newspapers got so low that even innane yet very private remarks were exposed, things that should never be used to condemn someone, like an off-colour joke made by a female supreme court judge. Those things, had they been published in America to discredit Donald Trump, would surely have merited Greenwald’s contempt and endless vituperation.]

For people like me who salivated waiting for revelations about Sergio Moro’s purported association with the CIA, or how he produced false testimonies or fabricated evidence, Vaza Jato was an anticlimax [Sergio Moro is the judge who sentenced Lula to prison]. I’m well aware of the shortcuts we sometimes take to complete a job, procedural deviations of a more logistical than deontological nature, means trying to justify the ends, things that Greenwald must understand better than anyone else — see the stolen material he has at hand.

[The next two paragraphs may be uninteresting to foreign readers. I will keep them in red so readers can skip them at will]

I can understand even that. A long time ago, in a very, very distant galaxy, I investigated and compiled figures that showed that the Brazilian politician most commonly associated with public security, Paulo Maluf, had done the worst government in the area of ​​security when compared to other governors on a few items I compared — vehicle purchase , guns, bulletproof vests; police salary etc. I also found testimonies from policemen saying they were ordered to avoid creating case files so as to tweak statistics.

I was dying to publish all that information, since Maluf was a candidate for the São Paulo government and had just hired William Bratton, the man who implemented the public security program in New York known as Zero Tolerance. In a way, it was as if Maluf had registered the program’s copyright in São Paulo. But my editor at the late Jornal da Tarde, Fernando Mitre, told me that the story would only come out if I got “the other side,” that is, if I got Maluf’s response to my allegations before publication. I had no doubt, then — I took the shortcut. I knew, from his record as a notorious scoundrel, that Maluf would just never accept to answer my questions and the story would perhaps be cancelled, or at least delayed. So I called Paulo Maluf’s advisor and said that I wanted to interview him about the Zero Tolerance program — something that I actually covered in my interview, but that was far from being the core issue. Maluf gladly accpeted the request to talk about what he wanted to talk about, only to end up having his first mandatory visit to a police station after he lost his composure while facing my questions. Unable to explain the figures I compiled, Maluf just resorted to saying his police was the most efficient, and that “when you call the police today, it just doesn’t come to your aid.” I dared him to prove that statement, and he made a phone call to the police, reporting a fake crime and thus committing a misdemeanor. And the police arrived in fewer than 8 minutes…

But back to Vaza Jato, how to condemn judge Sergio Moro for having apparently made the prosecutor’s life easier in his prosecution of Lula, without knowing how many times he may have done the opposite? Any intellectually honest person knows that it is only fair to judge Moro for having “facilitated” procedure for prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol if we know of all the other times he refused to do so, or if we know about all the times he “made it difficult” for the prosecutor, or even how many times he may have done the opposite: facilitated Lula’s defense. Is it likely that such things may have happened many times? I don’t know, and personally I don’t believe they have. But is it possible? Yes, they are not only possible, but The Intercept itself shows that it actually happened — even though the news outlet showed it sneakily, hidden in the middle of a bombastic headline story.

In the most recent revelation of the stolen messages, published by The Intercept, we learn that Justice Moro refused to allow the breach of fiscal and banking secrecy of Lula’s daughter-in-law, as had been requested by Car Wash. Moro reportedly refused the prosecutor’s request because “he did not see ‘sufficient cause’ for the measure against her.” That’s right, readers: we are facing a man biting a dog and yet this unusual, newsworthy fact did not make headlines. If journalism should focus on the unusual, and Moro’s attitude is so rare and unexpected because “he hates Lula so much,” why not make that refusal the title of the story? Wouldn’t that “detail” be more amazing, unexpected and thus newsworthy for the readers of The Intercept?

But who would be naive enough to believe the interest there was to do journalism? Such information was only present in the article because it served to corroborate the narrative summarized in the headline, otherwise we may have never known about that act by Moro, that Moro refused to accept a request that would harm the defense of former President Lula. And how many other times has such thing happened? How to know that such a case was rare or common without knowing all the messages, and not just what The Intercept wanted to show us?

We all know that it is not possible to prove a negative — in other words, the fact that something is not evident is not proof that it does not exist. And this is one of the biggest problems in leaving a 7 terabyte library in the hands of a single narrator who will choose, collect, discard and use whatever he thinks is best for the reconstruction of the story. Does anyone here believe that The Intercept has any intention of showing messages that contradict its reporting? Does anyone here imagine that The Intercept will publish conversations that contradict what it has made into its general theory — that the Car Wash investigation has been corrupted in its methods to punish an innocent politician? But what about the stolen billions that have already been physically returned to the public coffers? How did that money materialise? And what about conversations between Lula’s friends, relatives, lawyers — is there nothing ugly coming from the side Greenwald chose to spare, while he searched for the faintest sign of immorality on its opponent?

In this same Intercept article, which I use as an example simply because it’s the most recent, another incident goes unnoticed. But it makes clear the way The Intercept twists the truth and uses something that could be used as evidence of probity to smear the target of the week, the prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol. In that article, The Intercept shows Dallagnol supported none other than Mario Bonsaglia for the position of Attorney General: not only the candidate most voted for by the prosecutors, but one of the favorites on the left — and possibly Lula’s favourite as well. If this is the level of disreputable messages The Intercept could find about Dallagnol, one could only wonder how many of the messages omitted could legitimise Car Wash.

What is most striking in all of this is how this leak makes an involuntary ode to the absence of symmetry. What The Intercept did was to submit all those exposed people to an ethical and moral test that Greenwald would likely have failed, should he be tested on the same level of privacy. That is why he would never offer his own private communications to be examined: because he knows that no one — absolutely no one — could escape the guillotine of lack of context, and the microscopic examination of one’s private conversations. What would we find on Greenwald’s phone if we wanted to understand what Jean Wyllys meant when he said this: [Jean Wyllys is the man who was elected to congress but gave up his seat in favour of Greenwald’s husband just before the beginning of his term. Wyllys’ resignation is the only reason why David Miranda is in parliament, since he never got enough votes to get a seat.]

I’ll translate here the relevant part Jean Wyllys’ tweet:

“I never publicly questioned his [Greenwald’s] party interference (the power of the money that buys candidacies)”

If Wyllys, who is from the same party as Greenwald’s husband, manages to suggest in public that Greenwald buys candidacies — and Greenwald has enough money for that, not only from his salary but because The Intercept was financed with $ 250 million from billionaire Pierre Omidyar — what wouldn’t we find in his phone messages? How can Greenwald and The Intercept judge the news outlet The Antagonist’s behavior without revealing how The Intercept negotiate stories themselves; or how they got their exclusive interview with Lula; how they negotiated with the hackers to receive stolen material and maybe even the theft itself; and how they chose the journalists to whom they would grant the very limited right to go to The Intercept newsroom and check thousands and thousands of messages without being able to use any recording device or copying method, and without an internet connection? I asked in public to have this right in a tweet that I addressed to Leandro Demori, the editor of The Intercept who follows [followed] me on twitter and whom I follow.

To this day I am waiting for an answer.

It is true that several journalists were allowed to read — but not to copy or save — the messages they checked on the spot at The Intercept. But what if these journalists had the same kind of friendly relationship with their sources, as O Antagonista had with Dallagnol, and this was evidenced in some conversations? What if they did something even worse? Would they dare publish something that displeased The Intercept — the sole holder of the treasure that could be used to blackmail people and destroy families? Who can guarantee that those journalists have not been coerced into behaving, however silently that may have been done? If I show you that I know you cheat on your wife, will I need to ask you for a favour or will you just willingly offer me one? Does anyone think that only The Antagonist exchanged pleasantries with interviewees and sources?

If you believe that everything that hasn’t been shown doesn’t exist, and every journalist who hasn’t been publicly vilified in Vaza Jato is innocent of the same charges that Intercept used to destroy The Antagonist, I have a bridge to sell you — and a story to tell next week about the billionaire behind Greenwald and how he makes private information one of the sources of his wealth.

Paula Schmitt is a journalist, a writer, and has a master’s degree in political science and Middle Eastern studies from the American University of Beirut. She is the author of the fiction book “Eudemonia” and the nonfiction book “Spies”. She won the Bandeirantes Prize for Radiojournalism, was a correspondent in the Middle East for SBT and Radio France Internationale and was a political columnist for the newspapers Folha de S.Paulo and Estado de S.Paulo. She published reports and articles in Rolling Stone, Vogue Homem and 971mag, among other outlets. Paula writes weekly to Poder360, always on Thursdays