Valdemar Costa Neto, chairman of Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right Liberal Party, was arrested Thursday after federal marshals found an illegal firearm in his possession while carrying out a search-and-seizure warrant at his home.
The operation is part of a wide-ranging investigation into the workings of a criminal organization that police say “tried to stage a coup d’état and abolish the rule of law” in order to keep far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro in office even after he lost the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The feds have targeted several high-ranking military officials, members of Mr. Bolsonaro’s former cabinet, and the former president himself — who will have to surrender his passport and be banned from leaving the country. Four men who served as aides to Mr. Bolsonaro have been taken into police custody.
Mr. Costa Neto was targeted for his post-election behavior. In November 2022, just weeks after the election, the Liberal Party — for which Mr. Bolsonaro ran for re-election — formally challenged the runoff results based on unsubstantiated claims about voting machines.
As The Brazilian Report showed, a bogus investigation commissioned by the Liberal Party supposedly found that nearly 280,000 older electronic voting machines were not functioning properly, making it impossible for the election systems to properly identify them.
The party called for all votes cast on older models of electronic voting machines to be thrown out, representing about 60 percent of all the hardware used in the election.
The move was part of Mr. Bolsonaro’s quest to discredit the voting system and raise questions about the legitimacy of the electoral results. According to investigators, the end goal was to create the conditions for the far-right group to overthrow democracy.
Separate audits by the Federal Accounts Court and the Armed Forces found no evidence of fraud in the elections — or discrepancies between printed vote receipts with the tallies obtained from each machine and the official results posted online.
In the 2022 elections, the Liberal Party won 96 of Brazil’s 513 House seats — more than any other party. It is currently the third-largest bench in the lower chamber, trailing behind only two so-called “party blocs” — associations of several parties brought together for strategic gains.
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