By
Isaac Chotiner
newyorker.com
On Tuesday, Brazilian prosecutors charged the journalist Glenn Greenwald
with “cybercrimes” as part of what the government claims was his role
in a “criminal organization.” They allege that Greenwald—who reported
on wrongdoing in Brazil’s judicial establishment last year for the
Intercept, the Web site he co-founded—participated in the hacking of
cell phones, the content of which was later used in his stories. But the
reporting itself is the reason much of the Brazilian government is
furious with Greenwald. He has repeatedly antagonized the country’s new
far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro,
who rode into office amid a sprawling corruption investigation known as
Operation Car Wash, which brought down two former Presidents. Sérgio
Moro, who led the operation, was later made Bolsonaro’s Minister of
Justice and became the subject of much of the Intercept’s reporting. A
number of leaders across the Brazilian political spectrum have
criticized the charges against Greenwald, which were met with outrage by
civil-liberties organizations around the world.
Greenwald, who is best known for covering Edward Snowden’s disclosures, lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, David Miranda, a Brazilian congressman, and their children. We spoke by phone on Tuesday, after the charges were announced. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his life in Brazil since Bolsonaro’s election, the reasons the President has gone after him, and his different approaches to the rise of the far right in Brazil and the United States.
The case against you relies in part on the claim that you helped in “facilitating the commission of a crime.” Did you do anything to encourage the hacking of cell phones or other devices?
No. In fact, when the source first talked to me, he had already obtained all the material that he ended up providing us, making it logically impossible for me to have in any way participated in that act. And the federal police, just a few months ago, concluded that not only was there no evidence that I committed any crimes but much to the contrary, I conducted myself, in their words, with “extreme levels of professionalism and caution,” to make sure that I didn’t get ensnared in any criminal activity.
If that’s the case, how do you understand what has happened in the last couple of months, from the federal police determining that to the charges today?
I think that what a lot of people are not fully understanding about Brazil is that there are a lot of people in the government, beginning with the President himself, who explicitly want a resurrection of the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985. They are not joking about it. They are genuine authoritarians who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in basic freedoms, and don’t believe in a free press. And all they know is brute force. They want a return to that military regime. The fact that the federal police said there was no evidence I committed a crime, and the fact that the Supreme Court barred them from investigating me, because the Court said it was an infringement on a free press for them to do so, doesn’t matter to them. They just concocted a theory to try and use brute force to criminalize what I was doing, probably to intimidate other journalists as much as to attack me and punish me for the reporting.
Do the federal prosecutors who charged you today answer more to the President than other branches of law enforcement?
I would say that the best way to understand who they are is that they are kind of equivalent to the Justice Department, and the federal police is equivalent to the F.B.I. It would be like if [the former F.B.I. director] Jim Comey stood in front of the cameras and said we were closing our investigation, there is no evidence of criminal activity, and then the Justice Department months later nonetheless indicted. So yes, they are part of the executive branch but are a little more independent, just like the Justice Department is. But the big difference is that unlike the Justice Department, which can just single-handedly indict you, these prosecutors can only issue charges that then have to be approved by a judge in order for you to actually become a criminal defendant.
Is there anything about your reporting on Operation Car Wash that you regret or would have done differently?
Of course, with individual stories, there are things you wish you had done differently. There was one time in particular when we had promised a story, and we were anxious about it, and I published an excerpt, on Twitter, as a teaser, that hadn’t yet been fact-checked, and there was an error in there, and they used that against us to claim we were altering the chat. But in terms of how I dealt with my source, or the legal or criminal issues, I was incredibly meticulous, because not only did I go through this with the Snowden story, I obviously knew they were going to want to prosecute me. So before I did anything, I sat down with our huge team of lawyers and they said this is what you can do, this is what you can’t tdo. And I was incredibly careful to never cross that line.
Bolsonaro has singled you out several times. What might his dislike be about, beyond a number of possibilities, ranging from your reporting to the fact you are gay?
I actually wrote about Bolsonaro all the way back in 2014, in an article he hated, before anyone contemplated that he might be President. I was just trying to explain to people how someone this extreme was even a member of Congress. The title was, “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” And then, in 2017, while he was setting up his Presidential run, I called him a fascist on Twitter, and he responded with an extremely crude and anti-gay epithet about anal sex that made news. And then, when my husband entered Congress as a left-wing member, in early 2019, replacing another L.G.B.T. congressman, who fled the country in fear of his life, largely due to Bolsonaro, David and he had a back-and-forth that went viral in Brazil. So he already hated me before we started this reporting.
And once we did this reporting, he said my marriage was a fraud and that we adopted Brazilian children as a fraud to avoid deportation. And then of course he has threatened I would be in prison over the reporting. So we have a long and contentious history.
What’s the state of independence of the Supreme Court currently?
It’s really interesting, because for a long time the Supreme Court was pretty much captive to the extreme popularity of Moro and Operation Car Wash. And, even when Moro did things that all legal experts agreed were highly dubious, it was very rare that they would impose limits on what he was doing, because everyone was afraid of Moro, because he was basically the national hero. His taking a position with the Bolsonaro government and our reporting have seriously diminished his stature. And as a result the Supreme Court is emboldened now, and they have issued a series of rulings against Bolsonaro, the government, and Moro and freed [former President] Lula, who was the crown jewel of Operation Car Wash. And so there is a lot of animosity. The Supreme Court has become much more independent, as evidenced by the fact that they barred Moro and these agencies from investigating me in retaliation for the reporting.
I should just add that, in the last few hours, there has been reporting from conservative journalists at large newspapers that several members of the Supreme Court have told them that they will not accept the charges against me and reject it if and when it gets to the Supreme Court.
Greenwald, who is best known for covering Edward Snowden’s disclosures, lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, David Miranda, a Brazilian congressman, and their children. We spoke by phone on Tuesday, after the charges were announced. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his life in Brazil since Bolsonaro’s election, the reasons the President has gone after him, and his different approaches to the rise of the far right in Brazil and the United States.
The case against you relies in part on the claim that you helped in “facilitating the commission of a crime.” Did you do anything to encourage the hacking of cell phones or other devices?
No. In fact, when the source first talked to me, he had already obtained all the material that he ended up providing us, making it logically impossible for me to have in any way participated in that act. And the federal police, just a few months ago, concluded that not only was there no evidence that I committed any crimes but much to the contrary, I conducted myself, in their words, with “extreme levels of professionalism and caution,” to make sure that I didn’t get ensnared in any criminal activity.
If that’s the case, how do you understand what has happened in the last couple of months, from the federal police determining that to the charges today?
I think that what a lot of people are not fully understanding about Brazil is that there are a lot of people in the government, beginning with the President himself, who explicitly want a resurrection of the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985. They are not joking about it. They are genuine authoritarians who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in basic freedoms, and don’t believe in a free press. And all they know is brute force. They want a return to that military regime. The fact that the federal police said there was no evidence I committed a crime, and the fact that the Supreme Court barred them from investigating me, because the Court said it was an infringement on a free press for them to do so, doesn’t matter to them. They just concocted a theory to try and use brute force to criminalize what I was doing, probably to intimidate other journalists as much as to attack me and punish me for the reporting.
Do the federal prosecutors who charged you today answer more to the President than other branches of law enforcement?
I would say that the best way to understand who they are is that they are kind of equivalent to the Justice Department, and the federal police is equivalent to the F.B.I. It would be like if [the former F.B.I. director] Jim Comey stood in front of the cameras and said we were closing our investigation, there is no evidence of criminal activity, and then the Justice Department months later nonetheless indicted. So yes, they are part of the executive branch but are a little more independent, just like the Justice Department is. But the big difference is that unlike the Justice Department, which can just single-handedly indict you, these prosecutors can only issue charges that then have to be approved by a judge in order for you to actually become a criminal defendant.
Is there anything about your reporting on Operation Car Wash that you regret or would have done differently?
Of course, with individual stories, there are things you wish you had done differently. There was one time in particular when we had promised a story, and we were anxious about it, and I published an excerpt, on Twitter, as a teaser, that hadn’t yet been fact-checked, and there was an error in there, and they used that against us to claim we were altering the chat. But in terms of how I dealt with my source, or the legal or criminal issues, I was incredibly meticulous, because not only did I go through this with the Snowden story, I obviously knew they were going to want to prosecute me. So before I did anything, I sat down with our huge team of lawyers and they said this is what you can do, this is what you can’t tdo. And I was incredibly careful to never cross that line.
Bolsonaro has singled you out several times. What might his dislike be about, beyond a number of possibilities, ranging from your reporting to the fact you are gay?
I actually wrote about Bolsonaro all the way back in 2014, in an article he hated, before anyone contemplated that he might be President. I was just trying to explain to people how someone this extreme was even a member of Congress. The title was, “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” And then, in 2017, while he was setting up his Presidential run, I called him a fascist on Twitter, and he responded with an extremely crude and anti-gay epithet about anal sex that made news. And then, when my husband entered Congress as a left-wing member, in early 2019, replacing another L.G.B.T. congressman, who fled the country in fear of his life, largely due to Bolsonaro, David and he had a back-and-forth that went viral in Brazil. So he already hated me before we started this reporting.
And once we did this reporting, he said my marriage was a fraud and that we adopted Brazilian children as a fraud to avoid deportation. And then of course he has threatened I would be in prison over the reporting. So we have a long and contentious history.
What’s the state of independence of the Supreme Court currently?
It’s really interesting, because for a long time the Supreme Court was pretty much captive to the extreme popularity of Moro and Operation Car Wash. And, even when Moro did things that all legal experts agreed were highly dubious, it was very rare that they would impose limits on what he was doing, because everyone was afraid of Moro, because he was basically the national hero. His taking a position with the Bolsonaro government and our reporting have seriously diminished his stature. And as a result the Supreme Court is emboldened now, and they have issued a series of rulings against Bolsonaro, the government, and Moro and freed [former President] Lula, who was the crown jewel of Operation Car Wash. And so there is a lot of animosity. The Supreme Court has become much more independent, as evidenced by the fact that they barred Moro and these agencies from investigating me in retaliation for the reporting.
I should just add that, in the last few hours, there has been reporting from conservative journalists at large newspapers that several members of the Supreme Court have told them that they will not accept the charges against me and reject it if and when it gets to the Supreme Court.
Have your daily life or experiences changed much since Bolsonaro’s election? Do you feel any sense of fear?
Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children have left our house in the last year without armed security, armored vehicles, teams of security. We get death threats all the time. Our private lives have been dug through in the most invasive ways. Every one of our friends has been offered money to either reveal things about our private lives or make up lies about our private lives. There is a hugely powerful fake-news machine that supports the Bolsonaro movement that has churned out lies about our family and about our children and about our marriage. Obviously, the threats of imprisonment. It has been every single kind of threat imaginable, and it really goes back to 2018, when one of our best friends, Marielle Franco, the black L.G.B.T. city councilwoman, was savagely assassinated in a crime that the Bolsonaro family has subsequently become linked to. [Last March, two police officers were charged in the murder of Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Bolsonaro has denounced reporting that he has personal connections to the officers.] So there has been political violence and intimidation in the air for a long time, and we have become the main target of a lot of it.
Has any aspect of the government been paying for your security, or are you doing it independently?
There are some really good politicians who are opposed to the Bolsonaro government, including the center-right president of the Senate and center-right Speaker of the House. And the Speaker of the House vehemently denounced the charges today, even though he is conservative. And he approved twenty-four-hour around-the-clock armored security for my husband, which most Congress members don’t have. Only a few who face particularly serious threats of violence do. And then my security is furnished by the Intercept, which has been incredibly supportive of the work all of us have been doing here.
You have been extremely critical of Bolsonaro and also supportive of some of the politicians from the Workers’ Party, the main left or center-left party in Brazil. In contrast, you have angered a lot of liberals in America for going on Tucker Carlson’s show and becoming something of an anti-anti-Trump voice. Is there a discrepancy in the way you have responded to the rise of the far right in each country, even if Trump and Bolsonaro are not exactly equivalent?
Yeah, but I think the differences are important. As I said, it is a genuine, realistic objective of the Bolsonaro movement to usher in a military regime that ruled the country until quite recently. You compare that to Donald Trump, who doesn’t really have that kind of a movement that is trying to abolish U.S. democracy, and, even if they wanted to, U.S. institutions are way stronger than Brazilian institutions are, making it much more likely that Brazil could easily slip back into a dictatorship, largely due to the fragility and age of institutions. Lots of the population actually lived in the dictatorship, and they tend to romanticize and idealize it as a superior form of government. So I think the threats are very different.
But I also think it’s ironic, because, before this reporting began, the Intercept was not really beloved universally at all on the left, including by the Workers’ Party, because we have been critical of Lula and [former President] Dilma Rousseff and the Workers’ Party for being neoliberal and abandoning the principles the Party was founded to defend and support. I don’t see myself as an anti-anti-Trump voice. I am an independent journalist. I go on right-wing news shows in Brazil, including the worst one, in which I was assaulted a few months ago by a pro-Bolsonaro journalist, who called on a judge to investigate whether David and I were properly caring for our two adopted sons. And I went to confront him about these comments suggesting our children should be taken away from us, and he physically assaulted me. My behavior in Brazil and the U.S. is very consistent journalistically.
Right, but it seems like when you are on Tucker Carlson’s show it is more friendly. You talk about the importance of norms, and the justice system in Brazil, and the fact that the government “does not believe in basic press freedoms,” as the Intercept said in a statement. You talk passionately about Brazilian democracy. With America, you often talk about people who speak about these things as too establishment.
I think people have to be very careful about casually positing similarities between two very large, complex, complicated countries with extremely different political traditions, histories, cultures, and values, when, in reality, they are very, very different. Brazil is way more vulnerable. The institutions in the U.S. are much more vibrant and energetic and robust because they have been developed over two centuries rather than decades. I personally think that U.S. democracy has never been stronger than under Trump, because so many institutions that have been dormant under George W. Bush and Obama—the media, the Congress, the courts—are way more adversarial and oppositional. Whereas, I think Brazilian democracy has never been in greater peril. I think it is very tempting to posit crass and inaccurate comparisons between the two countries when the situations are radically different.
Does your experience in Brazil make you worry about things here in different ways? You mentioned the Department of Justice, the independence of which has been challenged in certain ways. Does it give you different long-term fears about the United States?
I do have a long-term fear about the United States, and I do have a short- and mid-term fear about the United States. I just don’t attribute those fears principally to Trump. I think he is making them worse and exacerbates those dangers, but I started writing about politics in 2005 because of my deep concerns about civil liberties and constitutional freedoms being eroded by the Bush-Cheney Administration, which continued under Obama and has gotten worse under Trump. It isn’t that I don’t believe basic core freedoms are imperilled in the U.S. I just see the trajectory and the causes of that differently.
What is your biggest fear about Brazil going forward?
Sometimes it is hard to convey to Western observers just how blunt and direct of a threat is being posed by the current government of Brazil to basic democratic freedoms. Bolsonaro’s son, in the past couple of months, has threatened to revive the worst dictatorship through decree and do things like shut down media outlets. I think my case is reflective of the sentiment that they just want to put journalists in prison. Brazil is an incredibly important country, environmentally and geo-strategically, and the President and the movement that supports him are fanatical in a way that is hard to overstate. And Brazil is the most influential country by far in Latin America, and what happens politically has immense ramifications not just for the hemisphere but for the world.
Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children have left our house in the last year without armed security, armored vehicles, teams of security. We get death threats all the time. Our private lives have been dug through in the most invasive ways. Every one of our friends has been offered money to either reveal things about our private lives or make up lies about our private lives. There is a hugely powerful fake-news machine that supports the Bolsonaro movement that has churned out lies about our family and about our children and about our marriage. Obviously, the threats of imprisonment. It has been every single kind of threat imaginable, and it really goes back to 2018, when one of our best friends, Marielle Franco, the black L.G.B.T. city councilwoman, was savagely assassinated in a crime that the Bolsonaro family has subsequently become linked to. [Last March, two police officers were charged in the murder of Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes. Bolsonaro has denounced reporting that he has personal connections to the officers.] So there has been political violence and intimidation in the air for a long time, and we have become the main target of a lot of it.
Has any aspect of the government been paying for your security, or are you doing it independently?
There are some really good politicians who are opposed to the Bolsonaro government, including the center-right president of the Senate and center-right Speaker of the House. And the Speaker of the House vehemently denounced the charges today, even though he is conservative. And he approved twenty-four-hour around-the-clock armored security for my husband, which most Congress members don’t have. Only a few who face particularly serious threats of violence do. And then my security is furnished by the Intercept, which has been incredibly supportive of the work all of us have been doing here.
You have been extremely critical of Bolsonaro and also supportive of some of the politicians from the Workers’ Party, the main left or center-left party in Brazil. In contrast, you have angered a lot of liberals in America for going on Tucker Carlson’s show and becoming something of an anti-anti-Trump voice. Is there a discrepancy in the way you have responded to the rise of the far right in each country, even if Trump and Bolsonaro are not exactly equivalent?
Yeah, but I think the differences are important. As I said, it is a genuine, realistic objective of the Bolsonaro movement to usher in a military regime that ruled the country until quite recently. You compare that to Donald Trump, who doesn’t really have that kind of a movement that is trying to abolish U.S. democracy, and, even if they wanted to, U.S. institutions are way stronger than Brazilian institutions are, making it much more likely that Brazil could easily slip back into a dictatorship, largely due to the fragility and age of institutions. Lots of the population actually lived in the dictatorship, and they tend to romanticize and idealize it as a superior form of government. So I think the threats are very different.
But I also think it’s ironic, because, before this reporting began, the Intercept was not really beloved universally at all on the left, including by the Workers’ Party, because we have been critical of Lula and [former President] Dilma Rousseff and the Workers’ Party for being neoliberal and abandoning the principles the Party was founded to defend and support. I don’t see myself as an anti-anti-Trump voice. I am an independent journalist. I go on right-wing news shows in Brazil, including the worst one, in which I was assaulted a few months ago by a pro-Bolsonaro journalist, who called on a judge to investigate whether David and I were properly caring for our two adopted sons. And I went to confront him about these comments suggesting our children should be taken away from us, and he physically assaulted me. My behavior in Brazil and the U.S. is very consistent journalistically.
Right, but it seems like when you are on Tucker Carlson’s show it is more friendly. You talk about the importance of norms, and the justice system in Brazil, and the fact that the government “does not believe in basic press freedoms,” as the Intercept said in a statement. You talk passionately about Brazilian democracy. With America, you often talk about people who speak about these things as too establishment.
I think people have to be very careful about casually positing similarities between two very large, complex, complicated countries with extremely different political traditions, histories, cultures, and values, when, in reality, they are very, very different. Brazil is way more vulnerable. The institutions in the U.S. are much more vibrant and energetic and robust because they have been developed over two centuries rather than decades. I personally think that U.S. democracy has never been stronger than under Trump, because so many institutions that have been dormant under George W. Bush and Obama—the media, the Congress, the courts—are way more adversarial and oppositional. Whereas, I think Brazilian democracy has never been in greater peril. I think it is very tempting to posit crass and inaccurate comparisons between the two countries when the situations are radically different.
Does your experience in Brazil make you worry about things here in different ways? You mentioned the Department of Justice, the independence of which has been challenged in certain ways. Does it give you different long-term fears about the United States?
I do have a long-term fear about the United States, and I do have a short- and mid-term fear about the United States. I just don’t attribute those fears principally to Trump. I think he is making them worse and exacerbates those dangers, but I started writing about politics in 2005 because of my deep concerns about civil liberties and constitutional freedoms being eroded by the Bush-Cheney Administration, which continued under Obama and has gotten worse under Trump. It isn’t that I don’t believe basic core freedoms are imperilled in the U.S. I just see the trajectory and the causes of that differently.
What is your biggest fear about Brazil going forward?
Sometimes it is hard to convey to Western observers just how blunt and direct of a threat is being posed by the current government of Brazil to basic democratic freedoms. Bolsonaro’s son, in the past couple of months, has threatened to revive the worst dictatorship through decree and do things like shut down media outlets. I think my case is reflective of the sentiment that they just want to put journalists in prison. Brazil is an incredibly important country, environmentally and geo-strategically, and the President and the movement that supports him are fanatical in a way that is hard to overstate. And Brazil is the most influential country by far in Latin America, and what happens politically has immense ramifications not just for the hemisphere but for the world.
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