The joint congressional select committee investigating the January 8 riots — when a violent far-right mob stormed government buildings in Brasília — on Tuesday approved subpoenas to key figures of the former Jair Bolsonaro administration, including three of his former ministers.
Lawmakers subpoenaed Anderson Torres, who served as Mr. Bolsonaro’s justice minister and was Brasília’s top security official when the riots happened. They also summoned retired Army Generals Augusto Heleno, the former head of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), and Walter Braga Netto, who served as chief of staff and defense minister, and was Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mate in his failed 2022 re-election bid.
Furthermore, the committee subpoenaed Army Lieutenant-Colonel Mauro Cid, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former right-hand man. Lt.-Col. Cid was the former president’s personal aide-de-camp, mostly running errands and arranging payments for Mr. Bolsonaro and his family’s personal expenses. He was arrested by the Federal Police on May 3 on suspicion of defrauding Covid vaccine records (including for the former first family).
Audio messages found by the Federal Police in Lt.-Col. Cid’s phone show that at least two military officers close to Mr. Bolsonaro discussed a coup d’état.
Committee members independently drafted over 900 motions, with dozens repeating themselves. For example, there were 18 motions to subpoena Mr. Torres, and nine motions to subpoena Gen. Heleno. At the initiative of the government’s chief whip in Congress, the panel voted on multiple requests in bulk.
This helped the committee to reject a motion to subpoena retired Army General Gonçalves Dias, appointed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to lead the GSI but fired back in April after CNN Brasil aired surveillance footage showing him inside the presidential palace during the January 8 riots, with an apparently friendly attitude toward the vandals.
The opposition accused pro-government lawmakers of trying to cover up the Lula administration’s alleged omissions in preventing the riots.
The grouped motions voted down included requests to access video footage from inside the justice and foreign affairs ministries, Lula’s flight plan on January 8, the GSI’s security plan for the presidential palaces up to the day of the attacks, the full original footage aired by CNN Brasil, and reports by Brazil’s Intelligence Agency (Abin).
The biggest loss to the pro-Bolsonaro opposition was the failure to strike down a request for Federal Police data on the vaccine records fraud case — rooted in speculations on whether Messrs. Bolsonaro and Torres met in the U.S. days before the riots, when both men were in Florida.
The 20-11 majority against the opposition’s requests shows the government has managed to fill the committee with allied lawmakers — despite the congressional investigation having initially been pushed by the opposition.
Back in late January, Deputy Justice Minister Ricardo Cappelli blamed both the Army and Mr. Torres for their roles in facilitating the attacks. He also noted that the protest camp outside the Army’s Brasília headquarters — set up shortly after the October election — was “central” to the unrest. All the vandalism, he said, was “organized, planned, and supported at that camp.”
Opposition lawmakers have filed motions to subpoena Lula’s defense minister, José Múcio Monteiro, who publicly defended the camps six days before the riots — but these have not yet been put to a vote.
Separately, the Supreme Court has so far accepted charges against 1,175 January 8 rioters, in trials involving dozens or hundreds of people at a time. The case’s rapporteur, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, said today that he intends to conclude trials of the “most severe” criminals — some 250 people — by the end of the year.
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