Alexandre de Moraes, Corruption personified
There is an old maxim that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.In the case of Alexandre de Moraes, Justice of Brazil‘s Supreme Federal Tribunal (STF), the phrase feels less like a cautionary adage and more like a clinical diagnosis. What began as a seemingly standard judicial appointment has curdled into something far more corrosive: an extraterritorial assault on civil liberties, waged by a man who now finds himself compelled to explain his actions before a US court.
The lawsuit filed by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and Rumble against Moraes has not only survived initial scrutiny, it has drawn the Brazilian justice into an unprecedented legal confrontation with American constitutional protections. The man who silenced critics in Brazil is now being forced to speak.
Moraes’s rise to power began with a suspicious appointment. In 2017, Brazil was in the midst of the explosive Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) corruption investigation, which implicated some of the nation’s most powerful political and business figures.
Justice Teori Zavascki, who had been overseeing the case, died suddenly in a plane crash, a death that many found too convenient given the political stakes.
With Zavascki gone, then-President Michel Temer, himself a subject of corruption investigations, quickly appointed Moraes, his former justice minister, to the STF, ensuring that someone loyal to the political establishment, rather than an impartial jurist, would have a decisive role in shaping the Court’s direction.
Moraes is accused of attempting to enforce Brazilian speech laws in the United States, using the threat of criminal and financial penalties to compel compliance.
His orders, often sealed and undisclosed to the public, demanded the removal of accounts belonging to political dissidents, many of whom had fled to the US seeking the protection of its more liberal speech regime. One such dissident, described in the lawsuit as “Political Dissident A,” remains in the US after a rejected extradition request. Moraes’s response? Pressure American companies to silence him anyway
Read about it...
