The president of Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF), Justice Edson Fachin, on Saturday (12) rejected requests to review the cases of Justices Alexandre de Moraes and André Mendonça together. The extraordinary session set for Tuesday (September 15) remains dedicated solely to a Federal Police report that logged more than 50 messages from former banker Daniel Vorcaro, owner of Banco Master, to Moraes. In the same ruling, Fachin scheduled for September 23 a session on questions about Mendonça's conduct in the Master and INSS cases, the latter involving Brazil's social security agency.
According to G1, Moraes had asked the court's presidency for the full bench to jointly decide whether investigations would be opened against him and against Mendonça. He argued there was a "concrete risk of contradictory decisions and procedural turmoil" if the cases were heard separately. Folha de S.Paulo reports that Fachin also denied a formal request from the court's senior justice, Gilmar Mendes, to place the report on Mendonça on the same agenda and postpone the date.
Fachin wrote that the two cases are at different stages. The file on the messages involving Moraes was ready and cleared for judgment, while the proceeding on Mendonça still has open deadlines for gathering information and formal submissions. Bringing the second case to the bench before those deadlines close would make the review unfeasible, he concluded. In the ruling cited by Folha, keeping only Moraes's case on Tuesday's agenda "ensures the precise delimitation of the object of the court's deliberation, enabling the examination of a matter whose adversarial review and preliminary clarification will already have been completed".
How the case got here
The standoff grows out of Federal Police investigations into fraud at Banco Master, including Operation Compliance Zero, which led to Vorcaro's arrest. A police report produced at Mendonça's request recorded the messages between the banker and Moraes, first disclosed by the newspaper Estadão. According to Folha, shortly before his arrest Vorcaro asked Moraes for information about the investigation, arranged meetings with him and even asked whether he should flee the country. The material also mentions Federal Police director-general Andrei Rodrigues and Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet. Moraes struck back based on a police "intelligence report" with no evidentiary value, sent to the court under his order in the fake news inquiry, and asked that his colleague be investigated for abuse of authority.
What each side alleges
Moraes accuses Mendonça of a "selective choice" in releasing documents from the Master case. He says the reporting justice lifted secrecy from only part of the proceedings and omitted roughly 180 records and files from the court's system, and he demands full disclosure. Mendonça denies acting selectively and says he made every available proceeding public. He said he met the deadline set by Fachin, who had granted a request from the Prosecutor General's Office to release the documents, and called keeping parts of the file secret a "prudent and responsible" measure to protect ongoing investigations and the personal, banking and tax data of those involved. The intelligence report behind Moraes's counterattack points to a lack of impartiality and a supposed selective targeting of probes against political figures, such as Senate President Davi Alcolumbre, and Moraes himself.
The full bench will now take the two cases on separate dates. On Tuesday (15) the justices are to review the report on the messages and decide whether to open an investigation into Moraes. On September 23 the court examines the questions about Mendonça's conduct in the Master and INSS cases. Folha describes the clash between the two justices as the deepest crisis in the court's recent history, unfolding amid the broader Banco Master inquiry, which includes suspicions that congressional earmarks were steered to finance Dark Horse, a biopic of former president Jair Bolsonaro.