If the pressure to open impeachment proceedings against the supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes became unsustainable, the president of the Senate, Davi Alcolumbre, would also authorise proceedings against another justice of the same court, André Mendonça. That is not a statement; it is what g1 reports he has been putting about among colleagues in Congress. Its effect, g1 writes, was to lower the temperature in the Senate over the past few days.
What made the argument concrete arrived on Thursday night, when Moraes asked the court's president, Edson Fachin, to open an investigation into Mendonça. In that decision, taken inside the contested fake-news inquiry, Moraes cited indications of a crime of responsibility by Mendonça — and that Alcolumbre had himself been investigated. Those two points, g1 says, were read in the Senate as a licence for Alcolumbre to act.
On Friday, Fachin took Moraes's request out of the fake-news inquiry. He ordered the prosecutor-general's office and Mendonça to respond within five days, and moved the cases to the court's presidency. Both inquiries, the one touching Moraes and the one touching Mendonça, are now run by Fachin himself.
The other half of the day was the government's own law office refusing to help. The federal police had wanted the AGU to bring an action against Mendonça. The AGU called that a procedural intervention and said it found no justification for it: besides having no legal competence to act in the criminal sphere on those terms, it said, an intervention of that kind could create legal and institutional risks for the very investigations under way at the supreme court. Its head, Jorge Messias, said there was no precedent for what the police asked, and that the refusal was technical analysis rather than inaction.
The two institutions describe each other in opposite terms. Senior figures in the federal police, Folha reports, see the AGU as having stood by during the crisis that ended in Mendonça ordering a report which exposed message exchanges between Moraes and Daniel Vorcaro. The AGU, for its part, has been arguing that the police proposed measures that could end up annulling investigations into Banco Master and the INSS frauds. The quarrel began, Folha writes, when the police started demanding the AGU go before the supreme court to reduce another justice's control over inquiries he was overseeing.
Why it is on the board
Top of g1's most-read list when we collected, with the same paper carrying it again at eleventh, and second on Folha's.
확인: g1 · Folha de S.Paulo