Justices of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) have begun reviewing, under restricted access in their chambers, copies of data extracted from the phone of former banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is under investigation in the Banco Master case. The compressed file, sent by the Federal Police at the request of justices, holds 500 gigabytes. According to accounts given to G1 on Saturday (19), the justices have not yet decided the next steps and there is no deadline for the review to end, in the middle of a crisis that has stalled major items on the court's agenda during the presidential campaign.
To show the scale, G1 compares the size to about 140,000 photos in high resolution, more than 120,000 MP3 audio files or roughly 40 hours of high definition film. The data are organized in folders of chats, audio files and logs, records of activity on the device. The Federal Police processed the material with IPED, a forensic software that allows keyword searches and generates a code that guarantees the integrity of the evidence and flags attempts to alter it. Experts also used tools to recover deleted or password protected data. According to G1, the sweep combines a broad search of points flagged by the justices themselves with a check of the selection the Federal Police made for its reports, with care to protect personal matters found in the extraction. In a statement, the force said:
"The copies delivered are identical to the extraction performed on the device. The original material remains entirely within the institution's facilities, inside a formally documented chain of custody, with the respective seals intact and digital integrity verification mechanisms."
The copy went to Justices Cristiano Zanin, Gilmar Mendes, Alexandre de Moraes, Luiz Fux, André Mendonça and Nunes Marques, according to G1. As of Thursday (17), five of them had received the material, Poder360 reported. The delivery follows an internal dispute over unrestricted access to Vorcaro's digital archive: Zanin and Mendes asked court president Edson Fachin for the full mirror of the device, and Fachin chose to hear Mendonça, the justice in charge of the Master case, who argued that disclosure would disrupt the trial. Even without a decision from the president, Zanin, Mendes and Moraes ordered the Federal Police to send copies, and Mendonça and Fux later requested the material too. Mendonça said the copy he received was a sealed, encrypted backup, to be used only in case the original was ever lost, and that he had not handled the media.
How the case got here
The phone was seized by the Federal Police on November 17, 2025, the day the courts first ordered Vorcaro into preventive detention. The extraction found contacts with officials from all three branches of government, including Supreme Court justices and their relatives, members of Congress and Central Bank directors. The material has already supported searches against Senators Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI) and Jaques Wagner (PT-BA). On September 12, Fachin provisionally suspended Mendonça's reporting duties in both the Master case and the investigation into fraud in INSS benefit deductions, Brazil's social security system, Poder360 reported. On September 15, the court opened a session to decide whether to open an investigation of Moraes, after Mendonça lifted the seal on a Federal Police report that identifies him as a party to 52 messages from Vorcaro. Justice Flávio Dino's request for time to review the case interrupted the session before a vote.
According to the Federal Police report, prepared at Mendonça's order, Moraes worked directly on the review and editing of a R$130 million contract signed between Banco Master and the Barci de Moraes law firm of Viviane Barci, the justice's wife. The police also say that two days before his arrest, Vorcaro asked Moraes whether he had to leave Brazil, and that he sought the justice's help to contain Federal Police and federal prosecutors' actions against the bank. The report records eight meetings between the two. Moraes called the messages in which the police identify him as an interlocutor fanciful and said he never favored Vorcaro or Master. He also asked the court to open an investigation of Mendonça for abuse of authority and administrative misconduct, and Fachin ruled that the request will only be scheduled after the preliminary question on the Vorcaro-Moraes case is settled.
What comes next
With Mendonça temporarily removed from the two cases and the vote suspended by Dino's review request, the Master and INSS investigations are in practice frozen, according to Poder360, and the review of the Vorcaro-Moraes question may only resume in mid-December. Behind the scenes, the justices say they have not decided what to do after reading the material, and no deadline has been set.