A majority of Brazil's Second Panel of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) moved on Tuesday (8) to uphold the precautionary removal of Federal Police director-general Andrei Rodrigues and of the police intelligence director, Leandro Almada da Costa. The extraordinary virtual session was suspended before it could close, however, after Justice Gilmar Mendes asked for the case file, a review request that pauses the ruling.
Within ten minutes of the session opening, Justices Luiz Fux and Kassio Nunes Marques voted to fully side with the rapporteur, André Mendonça, according to the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo. Since the panel has five members, those three votes already secure a majority for keeping Mendonça's individual order in place.
The review request does not change the practical effect of the ruling. Mendonça's injunction remains fully in force, and Gilmar has up to 90 days to return the file to the panel, Folha reports. The order also bars the Federal Police, Brazil's main federal investigative force, from producing or sharing intelligence reports on the work of judges, government attorneys and judicial police officers, according to news site G1.
How the crisis began
The confrontation started in early September, when Mendonça, who oversees the Banco Master and INSS inquiries, lifted a secrecy seal on a Federal Police report about the interactions between Banco Master owner Daniel Vorcaro and Justice Alexandre de Moraes. According to BBC Brasil, the exchanges show the banker demanding special attention to payments under a 131 million reais contract between the bank and the Barci de Moraes law firm, run by the justice's wife.
Pressure on Andrei Rodrigues grew on September 2, when the Novo party took the case to the STF citing messages from Vorcaro's phone that mentioned the name "Andrei", and on September 3, when the party asked for his pretrial detention, alleging signs of ties to a supposed criminal influence network, G1 reports.
Moraes answered with a filing in the Fake News inquiry, where he serves as rapporteur, presenting Federal Police intelligence reports that, in his telling, would indicate "in theory" administrative improbity, crimes of responsibility and abuse of authority by Mendonça, including a "police investigative measure for the illegal production of evidence" against Moraes himself. Court president Edson Fachin gave Moraes, Mendonça, Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet and Andrei five days to address the crisis. On Friday (4), Fachin moved the review of the accusations against Mendonça out of the Fake News inquiry.
In Tuesday's decision, Mendonça said Andrei had sent Moraes at least six "intelligence reports" produced secretly between August 3 and 31, with surveillance of a Supreme Court justice lasting more than 30 days. The material would also have covered the attorney general of the Union, Jorge Messias, according to G1, which also reports the justice's comparison of the structure to the dystopia of George Orwell's "1984". Mendonça ordered criminal and administrative proceedings against Andrei before the Federal Police's internal affairs office. The removal is precautionary, and no conviction exists at this stage.
"The superlative gravity and illegality in the production of the 'intelligence reports' demands immediate measures... This is illicit surveillance of a Justice of the country's Supreme Court, which by itself reveals the gravity of the situation", Mendonça wrote in the decision.
On Tuesday morning, Federal Police executive director William Marcel Murad, second in the force's hierarchy, publicly defended Andrei at an event and said: "We will not be shaken by attacks", according to G1.
What comes next
The panel's judgment resumes only when Gilmar Mendes returns the file, within up to 90 days. In parallel, the Attorney General's Office (AGU), the government's legal counsel, has said it will appeal the removal to the STF, according to Folha's Mônica Bergamo column. The deadline Fachin set for the parties to explain the standoff between the court and the police leadership also remains open.