Last December, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva struck a sweeping deal with President Donald Trump that included lifting sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. In the spring of 2024, David Ágape, Eli Vieira, and I published “Twitter Files - Brazil” that showed that Moraes had secretly and illegally demanded Twitter’s censorship of Lula’s political enemies. Shortly after, the owner of Twitter, now-X, Elon Musk, criticized Moraes and defied Moraes’s orders. Moraes responded by temporarily blocking X in Brazil in August 2024. X fought for months but ultimately paid $5.2 million in fines, banned 223 accounts, and promised to operate “within the boundaries of the law,” after Moraes froze Musk’s Starlink assets. The Prosecutor General opened up an investigation of Ágape, Vieira, and I, and Ágape and Vieira had to flee the country.
In July 2025, President Donald Trump imposed trade tariffs on Brazil and imposed sanctions on Moraes for censorship and for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro. Trump later lifted the tariffs and sanctions on Moraes, reportedly out of concern for the impact on food prices, particularly beef. Lula later said at an event with Moraes that Trump had asked him whether lifting the financial sanctions on Moraes was good for him personally, and that Lula answered it was good for Brazilian democracy. Lula then turned to Moraes, who was standing next to him, and said, “Your victory, Alexandre, is the victory of Brazilian democracy.”
Today the evidence is overwhelming that Moraes’ victory was a defeat for Brazilian democracy. What Trump could not have known at the time was that Lula’s Federal Police held evidence that a banker jailed in a historically massive fraud had paid millions to Moraes’ wife and had spent his final free weeks texting a number attributed to Moraes himself, apparently about the justice’s protection of him from prosecution. The same people who censored Bolsonaro’s movement also used censorship to protect some of the most corrupt people in Brazil’s long history of corruption, starting with the Supreme Court justices.