Brazil’s second chamber of the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that lawyers for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could have access to material that could call into question the two convictions he received for alleged corruption.
The decision was taken by four votes to one and allows Lula’s defense to access a series of messages that prosecutors in the anti-corruption operation Lava Jato exchanged at the time with then-judge Sergio Moro, who in two different cases convicted the former president. to sentences totaling almost 25 years in prison.
“The content is extremely serious” and may reveal that there was “an inappropriate association between the trial body and the prosecution,” said Magistrate Ricardo Lewandoski, the case’s investigator, in clear reference to Moro and prosecutors.
These messages, obtained by hackers and partially transmitted to The Intercept portal, suggest that in those trials in which Lula was found guilty of corruption, Judge Moro guided and even coordinated in some way the action and investigation of prosecutors, which is strictly prohibited by law.
The hackers, who had cloned Moro’s phones, some prosecutors and even government officials, were arrested and the material confiscated by the police, which did not provide the contents of the former president’s lawyers.
Lula’s defense claims that these messages “prove” that the trials led by Moro, both in the first instance and with the decisions upheld in the higher courts, were neither “transparent” nor “impartial”, for which they have already filed. numerous applications for annulment to the Supreme Court.
The former president, who ruled from 2003 to 2011, has already spent a year and seven months in prison and has been released by a Supreme Court ruling that a convicted person can go to prison only after the highest court confirms punishments, which has not yet occurred in any of the cases.
Lula’s defense claims that Moro convicted him without any evidence with the intention of preventing him from running in the 2018 presidential election, which was eventually won by the current far-right president Jair Bolsonaro while the leader of the progressive camp was in prison. .
The former president’s lawyers reinforce this idea with the fact that Moro, once Bolsonaro won the elections, resigned from the judiciary and accepted the position of Minister of Justice in the new government.
However, in April last year, Moro resigned in enmity with Bolsonaro, whom he even accused of trying to intervene illegally and politically in the federal police and of betraying his promise to continue the fight against corruption.
Lula’s lawyers are now confident that those conversations between Moro and prosecutors, especially through messaging networks, will strengthen the demand for annulment of the trials and, therefore, of the sentences, which they have already presented before the Supreme Court.
However, according to prosecutors’ lawyers, the content of these messages was obtained illegally by hackers and, in addition, there are no guarantees that it was not “manipulated” by the hackers themselves, so it could not be used as a test.
However, this issue must be decided by the plenary session of the Supreme Court, which has not yet decided when it will examine the application for annulment that Lula’s defense filed against the lawsuits led by then-judge Sergio Moro.