Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) President Edson Fachin on Wednesday (9) suspended the ruling by Justice André Mendonça that removed Federal Police director-general Andrei Rodrigues and intelligence director Leandro Almada from their posts. Fachin also suspended the decision by Justice Flávio Dino, issued hours earlier, that returned both officers to their jobs. According to news site G1, Rodrigues remains at the head of the Federal Police, Brazil's main federal investigative agency, and the merits of his removal will be examined later.
In orders released on Wednesday, Fachin criticized a pattern of individual rulings by the court's own justices being challenged by one another.
"It is a grave situation when decisions by justices come to be challenged horizontally, especially while the trial under way in this court's Second Chamber and the request to suspend the injunction pending before this Presidency remain unresolved."
"I consider it necessary to suspend the decisions analyzed here because, beyond any judgment on the merits of removing or not removing these officials, which will be carried out in due course, it is necessary to stop a pattern of conflicts and procedural overlaps that in themselves constitute injury to public order and to the integrity of this court," Fachin wrote (translated from Portuguese). The suspension holds while the Second Chamber trial and the injunction request remain pending.
How the dispute began
The fight over the Federal Police command began on Tuesday (8), when Mendonça ordered the preventive removal of Rodrigues and Almada. The ruling granted a request from the Novo party and opened criminal and administrative disciplinary proceedings against the director-general before the force's internal affairs office. Mendonça said he and Solicitor General Jorge Messias had been subjected to illegal "systematic monitoring" by police intelligence. "It was a correct and necessary decision," Novo party president Eduardo Ribeiro said in defense of the justice.
The Second Chamber, a five-justice panel convened in an extraordinary virtual session to endorse the removal, halted the trial after Justice Gilmar Mendes asked for review. Mendes questioned the panel's jurisdiction and argued the full court should judge the case. That same night, the Attorney General's Office (AGU), the government's legal counsel, asked Fachin to suspend the removal urgently. In its statement, the office said the measure causes "grave injury to public and administrative order" and "frontally violates the constitutional prerogative vested exclusively in the President of the Republic to appoint and dismiss Federal Police leadership positions." All 11 Federal Police directors placed their posts at the disposal of substitute director-general William Marcel Murad and called the removal "unjustified attacks."
On Wednesday, before Fachin intervened, Dino had reinstated Rodrigues and Almada in a separate case, after a petition filed by Rodrigues's defense in an investigation under Dino's charge. According to InfoMoney, the justice said Novo had no standing to request precautionary criminal measures and that the removal could undermine investigations that depend on the police intelligence branch, including the probe into payments for "Dark Horse," a film about former president Jair Bolsonaro.
What comes next
Three steps are pending: the Second Chamber trial, halted by Mendes's review request; the 72-hour deadline Fachin set for Mendonça to respond to the AGU request; and a full-court session the court president called for Tuesday (15), when the justices are to discuss the Federal Police report on the alleged relationship between Justice Alexandre de Moraes and former banker Daniel Vorcaro, along with a request by the Prosecutor General's Office to void the inquiry. The court has yet to decide how the dispute over the police command reaches the full bench.