Rio de Janeiro: As part of a wider campaign to hold accountable those responsible, a justice on the Brazilian Supreme Court approved including former president Jair Bolsonaro in its investigation into who ignited the riot in the country's capital on January 8.
The request from the prosecutor-office, general's which cited a video Bolsonaro posted on Facebook two days after the riot, was approved, according to the text of Justice Alexandre de Moraes' decision. According to the video, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was not elected to office but rather was picked by the Supreme Court and the electoral commission of Brazil.
Although Bolsonaro posted the video after the riot, prosecutors in the recently established group to combat anti-democratic acts argued earlier on Friday that its content was sufficient to support an investigation into his actions before the riot, even though he did so. The next morning after posting it, Bolsonaro removed it.
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Apart from that, Bolsonaro has stayed silent about the election since his loss on October 30. He continuously stoked scepticism about the accuracy of the electronic voting system prior to the election, filed a request to throw out millions of votes cast using the machines afterward, and never bowed out.
After leaving Brazil in late December and skipping the leftist successor's inauguration on January 1, he moved to a suburb of Orlando. Some Democratic lawmakers have urged President Joe Biden to revoke his visa. Bolsonaro and none of his three legislator sons responded on social media to the justice's ruling late on Friday.
Brazilian law enforcement is looking into who gave Bolsonaro's radical supporters permission to storm the Supreme Court, Congress, and the presidential residence in an effort to void the results of the election in October. Targets include those who paid to transport rioters to the capital or summoned them, as well as local security personnel who may have looked the other way while the chaos unfolded.
Anderson Torres, the former justice minister for Bolsonaro, who took over as the district's security chief on January 2 and was in the US on the day of the riot, has received a lot of attention so far.
This week, De Moraes issued an arrest warrant for Torres and started an inquiry into his actions, which he described as "neglect and collusion." De Moraes stated in his decision, which was made public on Friday, that Torres dismissed subordinates and left the nation prior to the riot, showing that he was consciously laying the groundwork for the unrest.
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According to Justice Minister Flávio Dino, the court also issued an arrest warrant for the former security chief, who has three days to surrender or Brazil will ask for his extradition.
We will certainly make use of mechanisms for international legal cooperation if his appearance is not confirmed by the end of next week. Next week, we'll start the processes for carrying out his extradition, said Dino.
Torres has consistently maintained his innocence and announced on January 10 via Twitter that he would interrupt his vacation to fly back to Brazil and offer his defence. That hasn't happened yet, three days later.
The minister showed a draught decree that would have taken over Brazil's electoral commission and possibly annulled the election that federal police in Brazil had discovered after searching Torres' residence. According to analysts and the Brazilian academy of electoral and political law, the unsigned document's origin and authenticity are unknown, and it is also unclear whether Bolsonaro or his deputies took any actions to carry out the measure that would have been against the law.
Dino added that Torres will have to tell police who wrote the document, but that it "will figure in the police investigation because it even more fully reveals the existence of a chain of people responsible for the criminal events."
Torres at very could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to launch an investigation into the document's author or disclose its existence, according to Mario Sérgio Lima, a political analyst at Medley Advisers.
On Twitter, Torres claimed that the document was likely discovered in a stack of other documents that were destined for destruction and that it was leaked out of context to fuel false stories intended to damage his reputation. Dino told reporters on Friday that Bolsonaro and the riot in the capital have not yet been linked.
The former military police chief and governor of the federal district are also under investigation by the Supreme Court, which was made public on Friday. After the riot, both were fired from their jobs.
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Also on Friday night, journalist Glenn Greenwald learned about and reported on the suspension of several well-known right-wing figures' popular social media accounts in Brazil in response to a court order.
Justice de Moraes also issued an order directing six social media platforms to block the accounts within two hours or face fines. Among others, the accounts are those of a digital influencer, a YouTuber who was recently elected as a federal lawmaker, a Joe Rogan-like podcast host, an evangelical pastor, and a senator-elect.