Emerson Ribeiro

@elonmusk my name is Deltan Dallagnol and I was the chief federal prosecutor in the Car Wash case (the Lava Jato investigation), which sent Lula to jail for corruption and money laundering charges, alongside many other powerful politicians and businessmen in Brazil. Since you've taken an interest in Brazil, I thought I would share my story with you so you can have a deper insight on the scale of abuse, authoritarianism and revenge we are currently living under in our country. In October 2022, I was elected to Brazil’s Congress with the biggest vote count in the state of Paraná and the 7th biggest vote count in Brazil: 344.917 voters chose to elect me as their representative in Congress. I've decided to run for office to uphold the legacy of Car Wash and to oppose, in Congress, any legislation that would rollback the results achieved by Lava Jato or undermine Brazil’s legal anticorruption framework. I've also wanted to have a public platform to denounce any decisions by Brazil’s Supreme Court that would put Brazil’s ability to punish white collar crimes at risk. That electoral platform resonated deeply with voters who saw with revolt the successive blows against Car Wash and the return of known corrupt politicians to public office due to impunity. During my time in Congress, I carried out a strong opposition to Lula’s government and to the increasingly authoritarian decisions by the Supreme Court, which was and still is punishing dissent, criminalizing conservative views and censoring critics, as you know very well, since it's happening against you right now. I was particularly and strongly opposed to legislation that Lula’s government, the Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral or TSE, led by Alexandre de Moraes) tried to pass that would create regulations on social media, which many, including myself, understood would create an official censorship regime in Brazil. During the campaign, Lula’s Workers Party impeached my candidacy on the grounds that I was ineligible to run because I had supposedly left office as a federal prosecutor with administrative procedures against me pending, which by Brazilian law would have made me unfit for electoral office for 8 years. I've proved with legal documents from the Federal Prosecution Office that I had no administrative procedures pending against me when I left office, which happened almost one year before the election. I won my case unanimously in Paraná’s state electoral court, and the Worker’s Party appealed to TSE. Both in Paraná and in Brasília, the Federal Prosecution Office argued that I was perfectly eligible to run for office and that the Worker's Party case had no legal merit. In TSE, under Moraes leadership, the judge who acted as rapporteur for my case, Benedito Gonçalves, wrote a legal opinion that, although recognizing I had no administrative process pending against me, expanded the interpretation of the law to punish me, thus concluding I could not have run for office, making me lose my seat in Congress and dismissing my 344.497 voters. Judge Benedito Gonçalves was himself quoted in the Car Wash case, since he was implicated by one of the operation’s main whistleblowers, OAS executive Léo Pinheiro, which immediately put Benedito’s ruling against me under suspicion of personal bias. In the end, Benedito’s ruling was followed by all other 6 electoral judges, including Moraes, in a lightning fast ruling that only lasted 66 seconds, which is particularly strange and unheard of in such a high profile case, in which all other opinions, from lower courts and from the Federal Prosecution Office, had been previously unanimous to the contrary. A former Supreme Court Justice, Marco Aurélio Mello, when asked by the press to comment on the decision, criticized TSE and said that the result was “clearly manipulated”. TSE’s decision to remove me from office was the object of scathing editorials and reviews by all of Brazil’s main newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Globo, Estadão, Gazeta do Povo and many others, who all called for Brazil’s Supreme Court to hear my case and reverse TSE’s decision, since it was clearly against the law. The ruling also caused uproar and disbelief in many journalists, lawyers, jurists, and civil society around the country. Even progressive and leftists jurists and lawyers who dislike Lava Jato or myself and are sympathetic to Lula were opposed to TSE’s decision to remove me from Congress. Global anticorruption NGO Transparency International also released a strong press release condemning TSE’s decision to illegally remove me from office. In the end, I declared that I would not appeal to the Supreme Court to restore my office because I do not believe that Brazil’s Supreme Court was capable of doing justice in my case, or in many others, for that matter, and the reasons for my disbelief are now more clear than ever. I now work as national ambassador for the right-wing party @partidonovo30 alongside @marcelvanhattem and many other brave people who oppose Lula's government, the abusive decisions of our Supreme Court and the mounting censorship regime in Brazil. 344.917 votes. 344.917 silenced voices.

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