The pressure on the entourage of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro increased on Monday, with searches at the home of one of his sons as part of the investigation into suspicions of illegal spying on political adversaries during its mandate.
“New searches were carried out as a continuation” of an operation that took place on Thursday, “with the aim of investigating a criminal organization within the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin),” police said. Federal (PF) in a press release. According to the judicial ruling which authorized the searches on Monday in several Brazilian states, one of the targets of these searches was Carlos Bolsonaro, municipal councilor of Rio de Janeiro and second of the four sons of the far-right ex-president .
Investigators suspect Abin of having used Israeli spyware called FirstMile to spy on hundreds of politicians and public figures during the Bolsonaro presidency (2019-2022). The federal police explained in its press release that this “new stage” of the operation launched on Thursday targeted the “political core, to identify the main recipients and beneficiaries of information illegally produced by the Abin through clandestine acts”.
Victim of “persecution”
The judicial ruling, signed by Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes, mentions in particular a request for information from Abin on investigations “involving the president (Bolsonaro) and three of his sons”. A request made according to investigators in February 2020 by an assistant of Carlos Bolsonaro to a collaborator of Alexandre Ramagem, then head of the intelligence agency, during an exchange of messages on WhatsApp reproduced in the court document.
“One of my sons would never make such a request, and if he had done so, it would have been rejected by Alexandre Ramagem,” Jair Bolsonaro said Monday, during an interview with CNN Brasil a few hours after the searches. According to him, his son Carlos will be interviewed by the police on Tuesday.
“I never received the slightest information on the whereabouts of anyone. I never needed, nor requested, nor obtained the slightest report from the Abin,” insisted the former president, saying he was victim of “persecution”. The former head of Abin, who is now a federal deputy in Jair Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, was the target of one of the 21 searches carried out Thursday in the context of this same affair.
Jair Bolsonaro, surrounded by business
On Monday, police visited nine addresses in total, in the states of Rio de Janeiro (southeast), Goias (central-west) and Bahia (northeast), as well as in the federal district of Brasilia. Carlos Bolsonaro’s home in Rio de Janeiro and his office in the municipal assembly were searched. Police also went to a residence where Jair Bolsonaro and his first three sons were in Angra dos Reis, a seaside town located about 150 km from Rio.
The third son of the ex-president, the deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, condemned the “excesses” committed according to him during the searches, denouncing a legal action “illegal in addition to being immoral”. He also denied rumors that the Bolsonaro clan had fled by boat after learning of the searches. “As soon as they knew that the PF was in the residence, Jair and Carlos came home,” he assured. One of the Bolsonaro family’s lawyers indicated on X (formerly Twitter) that they had embarked at dawn for a fishing trip.
Images from GloboNews television showed police officers leaving the Angra dos Reis house as Jair Bolsonaro and his son Carlos looked on, filmed outside the front door. The court document that gave the green light to the first searches named Judge Moraes among those who had been spied on, as did former President of the Chamber of Deputies Rodrigo Maia and Camilo Santana, governor of the northeastern state of Ceara. ) at the time and now Minister of Education under leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Sentenced to eight years of ineligibility last year for disseminating false information on the electronic voting system, Jair Bolsonaro, 68, has been surrounded by business, notably for corruption, since he lost the presidential election at the end of 2022 against to Lula.