Ministers of Brazil's Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF) began saying on Friday (11) that they will bring accusations against colleagues into the debate of the September 15 session, if the court judges only the request to open an investigation against Alexandre de Moraes. The report comes from the column of Mônica Bergamo in Folha de S.Paulo.
According to the column, the ministers say that if the request against Moraes is judged without the same happening to André Mendonça, "not one stone will be left upon another" in the debate. They say several members of the court have already been the target of complaints, including alleged ties to former banker Daniel Vorcaro, founder of Banco Master, the bank at the center of a scandal that has shaken Brasília. In their view, if the STF is to be cleaned up, it will be fitting to discuss the "podres", or dirty laundry, of everyone else present at the session on the same day.
Pressure on Fachin's agenda
The warning from behind the scenes arrives four days before the session. On Wednesday (9), STF President Edson Fachin scheduled September 15 for the judgment of the investigation request against Moraes, which concerns messages he exchanged with Vorcaro. In the same decision, Fachin suspended the back-and-forth changes at the head of the Federal Police and took away from Moraes the rapporteurship of the fake news inquiry, reports Poder360.
Moraes fought back on Friday. In a formal letter to Fachin, he asked that the request to investigate Mendonça for "abuse of authority" be scheduled for the same date, on the grounds that the two cases involve "connected facts". In his words, Mendonça is "directly interested in the judgment" and left 180 documents out of the declassification of the case files, according to Poder360 and G1.
How the crisis began
The crisis started on September 1, when Mendonça made public a Federal Police report containing conversations between Vorcaro and Moraes. The investigation identified multimillion-dollar contracts between the Master group and the law firm of Viviane Barci de Moraes, the minister's wife. On September 3, Moraes filed a request to investigate Mendonça for "abuse of authority".
The next move belongs to Fachin. He decides whether to add the case against Mendonça to the Tuesday (15) session. The STF president also gave Mendonça a 24-hour deadline, counted from Friday, to lift the secrecy on all documents of Petition 15.556, which holds the core of Operation Compliance Zero.