Crisis for Bolsonaro's justice minister Sergio Moro after leaks reveal that he targeted Lula for political prosecution

Sergio Moro was once the darling of the international press, lauded for his role as the judge in Brazil's Operation Carwash anti-corruption prosecutions, which saw public accusations against the country's most powerful people, from billionaire oligarchs to Dilma Rousseff, the successor to Luiz Incio Lula da Silva (who had been term-limited out of office after a long career as the country's most popular leader); and her successor, the far-right Michael Temer; and Lula himself, who has been locked away in a special prison, denied access to the press, a situation that paved the way for the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a fascist who has publicly regretted the decision of the military dictatorship he once served in to merely torture dissidents, rather than murdering them.

After Bolsonaro's election, Moro was appointed to serve as a kind of super-justice-minister, with broad powers that would help Bolsonaro implement his program of death squads, razing the Amazon, and prosecuting his political enemies. The inclusion of Moro in the Bolsonaro government conferred a veneer of respectability to the thuggish, kleptocratic state Bolsonaro was creating, because of Moro's impeccable credentials as a corruption fighter.

Then came last month's incredible expose by The Intercept, in which elements of a vast trove of leaked documents revealed that when Moro was the Car Wash judge, he secretly colluded with the prosecutors to ensure that they could lock up Lula and deliver the election to Bolsonaro.

Moro's response was to deny any wrongdoing -- but not by denying the authenticity of the leaks. Read the rest