By Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Sunday, June 9th, website The Intercept published a series of breathtaking reports, dealing with the conduct of the Lava-Jato (Car-Wash) investigations that have uncovered vast corruption schemes in Brazil.
In those reports, The Intercept impugns the motives, ethics, and legalities of the federal prosecutors and the judge overseeing the investigation. The founder of The Intercept, as well as its voice and face, is Glenn Greenwald.
Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist and author, best known for a series of reports published in June 2013 by “The Guardian” newspaper, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden that detailed global surveillance programs run by the United States and the United Kingdom.
Greenwald and his team won both a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize for those reports. He has written several best-selling books, including “No Place to Hide”.
A fierce polemicist and pugnacious debater, Greenwald has long supported Julian Assange’s campaign for openness in government and criticized the criminal cases against him for founding Wikileaks.
Traditionally a left-wing activist, he broke with most Democrats after the U.S. 2016 presidential election: Greenwald decried, as without any supporting factual basis, putting the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on Putin’s interference.
It was through Snowden that Greenwald became a global figure, but he has always been an outspoken defender of freedom of the press and government transparency.
Greenwald has lived in Rio de Janeiro for more than a decade with his husband, David Miranda, their two kids, and several dogs.
Miranda, born and raised in poverty in a Rio favela, has now carved out a niche of his own as a left-wing activist.
First elected to the Rio City Council, he is now a federal Deputy for leftist party PSOL, having assumed the seat vacated by Jean Wyllis, who emigrated to Switzerland. He is well known for challenging President Bolsonaro’s position on gender.
Miranda gained international notoriety when he was arrested in London, on his way back to Brazil, allegedly bearing classified documents from the Snowden archive.
He and Greenwald precipitated a scandal for the Brazilian government, and he was soon released from custody.
Greenwald has remained in Brazil after his marriage to Miranda: he used to say it was because he could not get Miranda a spouse visa, but after U.S. law changed, he admits it’s really because he loves living in Rio and Brazil.
Both Miranda and Greenwald were close friends with Marielle Franco, the PSOL city councilor who was murdered last year, apparently by members of Rio’s powerful paramilitary “militia”.
In 2014, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept website, published in English and Portuguese. The owner and financier is Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire and the founder of eBay who seems to want to change the world.
The Intercept has grown to be perhaps the world’s best-known website favoring press freedom and government transparency, challenging governments everywhere, without regard to their ideologies.
The Intercept’s most recent challenge, of course, has been to Brazil’s Lava-Jato investigations. Based on irregularly-obtained audio and other material, the site has alleged serious ethical and legal violations by then Judge Sergio Moro and federal prosecutor Dalton Dallignol.
In essence, The Intercept reports claim the judge and investigators were not impartial, as they should have been, but instead were politically motivated, seeking to impede former President Lula’s return to power.
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