The legal team for Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro argued today, in a written statement submitted to the Federal Police, that no crime of slander was committed against Brazilian President Lula da Silva through a social media post.
The senator’s attorneys claim there was no offense directed at Lula and that Flávio Bolsonaro’s post, published on January 3 on social media platform X, was simply misinterpreted.
In that post, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro linked Lula to former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who was captured by American forces in Venezuela that same day, writing that the Brazilian president would soon be exposed.
“Lula will be exposed. It’s the end of the São Paulo Forum: international drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering, support for terrorists and dictatorships, rigged elections…” Senator Flávio Bolsonaro wrote at the time.
Read more about this topic: Lula links U.S. tariffs to Flávio Bolsonaro and calls him an idiot and traitor to the homeland
According to his defense, the post under investigation by the Federal Police “does not constitute a crime,” arguing that “no false facts were attributed” to Brazil’s president. In the document, the attorneys contend that the post in question contained two independent statements directed at different people, one referring to Lula and the other to Maduro.
The lawyers also argued that the Federal Police investigation was prompted by a federal deputy from the Workers’ Party, rather than by the Brazilian president himself, who, they noted, would need to have filed the complaint personally had he felt offended.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s testimony before the Federal Police was ordered by Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, after the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) said the agency still needed to hear from the senator before concluding its inquiry.
Bolsonaro’s hearing had been scheduled for today but was canceled by the Federal Police itself, which announced that the senator had instead submitted written arguments through his defense attorneys.
Read more about this topic: Electoral blockade: Moraes cuts off Flávio Bolsonaro’s access to jailed father after campaign video violates arrest rules
The agency forwarded Flávio Bolsonaro’s defense documents to Brazil’s Supreme Court, and it will now fall to the Attorney General’s Office to decide whether to formally charge the senator or close the investigation. It was the Federal Police that had requested authorization from the Supreme Court to open an investigation into Flávio, on the understanding that the pro-Bolsonaro senator had falsely attributed crimes to the head of the federal executive branch.
In the document submitted today, Flávio Bolsonaro’s defense argued that the phrase “Lula will be exposed” merely represented a prediction about a future event and did not attribute any concrete fact to the current Brazilian president.
The attorneys state that the inquiry lacks “any evidence,” and that the statements attributed to Flávio Bolsonaro “fall within the context of political debate and relate to public positions and political affinities widely discussed on the national and international stage.”
