US journalist Glenn Greenwald co-founded the investigative online publication The Intercept in 2013 and won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for leading, earlier that same year, the reporting by British daily The Guardian of classified documents leaked by the NSA intelligence agency operative Edward Snowden revealing the intrusive global surveillance programmes led by the US and Britain.
Greenwald, 52, who was a US constitutional lawyer before becoming a journalist, first with Salon and The Guardian, later settled in Brazil, where he edits The Intercept Brasil, the Brazilian investigative offshoot of The Intercept. The publication, and Greenwald in particular, became a regular target of verbal attacks by far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018, incensed over its revelations last year of mobile phone communications illustrating secret collusion among the judiciary in the vast “Operation Car Wash” corruption probe.
Last year Bolsonaro ominously commented that Greenwald “may do jail time”, and last week Brazilian federal prosecutors accused Greenwald of cybercrime offences, alleging that he “helped, encouraged and guided” the hacking of mobile phone communications by figures involved in the “Operation Car Wash” (“Lava Jato”) investigation, and which notably directly implicated former judge, and now Bolsonaro’s justice minister, Sérgio Moro.
The prosecutors’ move on January 21st has caused outrage among press freedom activists in Brazil and around the world, and also among a part of Brazil’s political class. Greenwald has also received outspoken support from international media, including Mediapart.
In this interview with Mediapart’s US correspondent Mathieu Magnaudeix, Greenwald, speaking by phone from Rio de Janeiro, says that the move, legally unfounded and factually absurd, is not only a retaliation against him, but also an attempted intimidation of whistleblowers and the media in Brazil. Comparisons between Bolsonaro and US President Donald Trump are largely unfounded, he argues, because the Brazilian president “is far more dangerous, far more extreme”, seeking to impose a climate of “pressure and fear”. He denounces increasing moves to criminalise journalists for protecting their sources, and comments on the case against WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange – currently held in a British prison awaiting the outcome of a US extradition request on charges under the Espionage Act – which Greenwald describes as “morally despicable, and extremely dangerous” and “a human rights disgrace on every level”.
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Mediapart: It’s not the first time that the Brazilian government has singled you out, as a journalist and as a gay guy married to Brazilian leftwing congressman David Miranda. Do you feel threatened, because they are targeting you more now?
Glenn Greenwald: When you’re criminally processed by the federal government of a repressive regime, it’s not something you can take lightly, as comic or a joke. It’s obviously a serious attack and we’re taking it very seriously.
On the other hand, we’ve known from the beginning that this was a serious possibility. So we prepared for it as much as we could. We knew that part of the work we’re doing is to fight for Brazilian democracy and a free press.
Mediapart: How do you explain this. Is it personal hatred towards you – against the work you do, who you are?
G.G.: I think it’s all of that. From the beginning of the reporting we’ve been doing, the Bolsonaro government has been threatening me with prison. Bolsonaro himself on several occasions said I should go to jail. We’ve been the target of all kinds of attacks, of all kinds of death threats. I was physically attacked while on the air on a rightwing radio show by a pro-Bolsonaro journalist. So both my husband and I have become a major target of this government and movement, in part because we are a very visible gay couple and also because the reporting we’ve been doing has been very threatening to the government. Because it shows serious corruption on the part of Bolsonaro’s minister of justice and public security, and this is their retaliation.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Mediapart: The prosecutor has accused you – the legal term is the issuing of a ‘denúncia’ – of assisting, encouraging and guiding sources to leak information. You are accused of facilitating the commission of a crime and you are considered, in sum, as being a hacker. What is your answer to that?
G.G.: Well, first of all, by the time I first spoke to the source, just as is true in the case of Edward Snowden, they had already obtained all the information that he ended up giving to me, making it logically impossible for me to have participated in the hack or the obtaining of the information [...] Secondly, it is important to note that the prosecutor who brought these charges, brought similar charges against the head of the association of Brazilian lawyers claiming he committed a crime when he criticised the minister of justice Sérgio Moro, and this was rejected by a court about six weeks ago. He has proven that he’s willing to abuse his office to punish political enemies of the Bolsonaro government and of minister Moro.
And then thirdly, there was an investigation by the federal police that went on for months, and less than two months ago they issued a very long report that said very clearly that there’s no evidence that I committed any crime and that actually the opposite is true, that I always conducted myself with high levels of professionalism and caution to avoid participating in any crimes.
So this whole theory is obviously absurd. I couldn’t have participated in a crime or an act that was already completed by the time these people first spoke to me to pass on this information.
Mediapart: Other than the issue of targeting you in person, do you think there is also a question of intimidating whistleblowers and potential future whistleblowers, and perhaps other journalists in Brazil who have maybe less worldwide renown than you?
G.G.: Yes I think that is exactly correct. People in Europe and the US have not fully appreciated the extent to which President Bolsonaro and his government are full-scale fascists and authoritarians. To compare Bolsonaro and Donald Trump is a completely inaccurate comparison. Bolsonaro is far more dangerous, far more extreme than Donald Trump is, because he specifically advocates the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil until 1985 as a superior form of government. They want to bring that back. They want to recreate a climate of pressure and fear, and that is the principal goal of this ‘denúncia’ against me […] With his public platform, with media outlets behind him, with all the resources that [Jair Bolsonaro] has, he can do this to anybody. It’s to create a climate of fear, to intimidate people who might try and oppose them.
Mediapart: Does it succeed? We know about your investigations into Jair Bolsonaro and his regime, but do you think other journalists do not dare to do their work and investigate anymore because of this climate?
G.G.: Well this ‘denúncia’ against me was only reported yesterday [Editor’s note: January 21st 2020], so it’s hard to say what the effects are. But I would say that the Brazilian media has been very aggressive about opposing Bolsonaro, investigating Bolsonaro. The largest newspaper in the country, the Folha de S.Paulo, during the [presidential election] campaign and again during his presidency, has run constant investigations. Bolsonaro is obsessed with attacking them, threatening them […] I think the Brazilian media has done a pretty good job of not being afraid and intimidated, and I think that’s part of why they escalated their attack against me, as a way of threatening the entire media that they’re not going to respect press freedom.
Mediapart: A way of criminalising journalism?
G.G.: Exactly. And I think that they think that even though I’m obviously harder to attack, in one sense, because my work is known inside Brazil and internationally, and big media journalists are behind me, for the Brazilian population I am a foreigner and gay, and married to a leftwing congressman. So all of these three things combine to make me a really good villain for their movement, easier to demonize than a heterosexual, well-known Brazilian journalist.
Mediapart: Some people have compared your situation with that of the charges brought in the US under the Espionage Act against the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, currently held in prison in the UK while awaiting court hearings over the US demand for his extradition. Do you see a mirroring of your situation in the accusation that publishing stories of public interest, that may be based on leaks, can be assimilated to espionage?
G.G.: Yeah, I think there’s a clear relationship between the two. I’ve been trying to warn journalists in the Unites States for many months that they should be much more concerned and angry about the Trump administration’s prosecution of Julian Assange because the precedent they’re trying to create is one that concerns all journalists […] The theory that the person who receives the information in some way helped the source […] then you can claim that this person wasn’t really acting as a journalist , they did more than that they actually helped the source.
If you can criminalise that, if you can use that theory to criminalise journalism then every journalist is [affected] because every journalist, every day, when they work with their source, helps their source to try and avoid getting caught, to be safe. The New York Times, The Washington Post on their websites have tips and tools for their sources to use to avoid getting caught. So the theory is that the minute you do something more than just receive information you can be charged as a conspirator with your source, which is the theory they’re using against Julian Assange. Every journalist in the world become endangered. That is part of what they’re trying to do to me as well.
Mediapart: And how do you see the situation for Julian Assange? The first extradition hearings are due in a few weeks, but we don’t know, given his reported poor physical and mental health, if he will be able to attend.
G.G.: I think what the US and UK governments have done with Julian Assange is morally despicable, and extremely dangerous. It’s an abuse of power. It’s an obvious attempt to destroy someone who has published damaging information about the US government and its allies […] They’re going to keep him in a cage for as long as they can and that’s a human rights disgrace on every level.
Mediapart: In your own case, what are you expecting to happen now? You said in an interview with The New Yorker magazine that the Brazilian supreme court is more emboldened against Jair Bolsonaro. What is to be your response, besides your journalism?
G.G.: As I said, for the criminal accusation to be valid it has to be accepted by a judge. So our lawyer is filing documents with the judge to argue why this ‘denúncia’ is an abuse of power, why there is no basis at all for it. Also, the supreme court last year issued a ruling prohibiting the police or the prosecutors from trying to investigate me in connection with the journalism I was doing, on the grounds that there was a violation of the constitutional guarantee of a free press. So, it’s clearly a violation of the order of the supreme court. So I assume there’s going to be a role at some point for the supreme court of Brazil in deciding whether [there has been] an abuse of power, although I just don’t know how it will play out.
Mediapart: What would you say to those people, from the broad public but also journalists, who consider that your case, and others similar to it, does not really concern them?
G.G.: Well, you can’t have a healthy democracy without a free press. Because those who have power will abuse that power if you don’t have people revealing the truth about what they’re doing. So the whole concept of a free press is that when you’re a journalist and you get information that the public has the right to know [about], you don’t have only the right to publish it – you have the duty to publish it, the obligation to publish it because that’s your job. And it doesn’t matter how that information was attained, it doesn’t matter what the motives of the source are. It doesn’t matter if the source broke the law to get the information.
Obviously, the journalists themselves have no right to hack people or break the law. A journalist can’t trespass or break into a government building to get information and then claim, ‘Oh, I can’t be prosecuted because I’m a journalist’. Journalists don’t have the right to commit crimes. But when a journalist receives information from a source, the only relevant question is whether the information is in the public interest. Not how do you judge morally what the source did, or who the source is.
Journalists don’t have the right to refuse to publish which the public have the right to know. […] For anybody who cares about living in a democratic and free society, you have to care about a free press because there’s no way to have that without journalism.
Mediapart: Amid the conflicting reports coming from Brazil of support and opposition to the Bolsonaro government, are you optimistic about the democratic muscle of this society or are you scared about the future of the country in the coming months and years?
G.G.: I don’t know what the outcome is going to be. There’s a battle underway for the soul of Brazil. A battle to determine what kind of country Brazil’s going to be. Is it going to be a democracy as it has been for the last 35 years, or is it going to go back to being a dictatorship as it was for 21 years prior to that? The Bolsonaro government obviously wants to return to the days of military oppression and dictatorial rule, and there are a lot of institutions – media, political and social – working against that.
I think the outcome is very much in question, and that’s part of the question why we’re doing the work we’re doing. Because we see it as part of an overall, broader battle for securing democratic freedoms and values in Brazil.
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- The French version of this interview, conducted in English, can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse