What's Happening to Glenn Greenwald?
That answer and more.
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What’s Happening to Glenn Greenwald?
On Tuesday, the Brazilian government filed charges against American journalist Glenn Greenwald for “cybercrimes,” a bogus charge that’s been universally decried by press advocates in the days since.
If you’re not familiar with Greenwald’s entire résumé you will probably know his work: He was one of a few journalists that National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden trusted with his leaks. As a result of his reporting for The Guardian, he was a co-winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Laura Poitras’ documentary Citizenfour intimately details what happened.
Later in 2014, Greenwald co-founded The Intercept, a digital news outlet focused on investigative and accountability journalism. Living in Brazil with his husband, Brazilian federal congressman David Miranda, Greenwald launched The Intercept Brazil in 2016 and has been a steadfast critic of Jair Bolsonaro’s regime long before he ascended to the presidency in 2019 (Here’s a real headline from 2014: “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.”)
In June 2019, Greenwald published leaked Telegram conversations of former judge Sérgio Moro, who was tasked with leading a longstanding domestic corruption probe.
“The articles cast doubt on the impartiality of … Moro, and of some of the prosecutors who worked on a corruption investigation that landed several powerful political and business figures in prison,” The New York Times reported. “Among those charged in connection with the corruption investigation was a former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a popular leftist whose conviction paved the way for the election of Mr. Bolsonaro. Mr. Moro was the judge who handled that case, and he is now Mr. Bolsonaro’s minister of justice.”
Prosecutors in Brazil allege that Greenwald played an active role in aiding those who hacked conversations on Telegram, a popular encrypted chat application. They said he operated on behalf of a “criminal organization.” Greenwald and his advocates maintain that he merely received the leaked messages and published newsworthy material.
“When the source first talked to me, he had already obtained all the material that he ended up providing us, making it logically impossible for me to have in any way participated in that act,” Greenwald told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner in an interview Tuesday. “And the federal police, just a few months ago, concluded that not only was there no evidence that I committed any crimes but much to the contrary, I conducted myself, in their words, with ‘extreme levels of professionalism and caution,’ to make sure that I didn’t get ensnared in any criminal activity.”
In August, The Intercept celebrated a victory. “In a crucial victory for press freedom in Brazil, Minister Gilmar Mendes, a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, has barred the Bolsonaro administration and Justice Minister Sergio Moro from investigating The Intercept Brazil and journalist Glenn Greenwald for its reporting on unethical and potentially illegal conduct involving Moro,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Trevor Timm wrote. “Mendes, in a sweeping decision, wrote that any attempt to investigate journalists for their reporting would ‘constitute an unambiguous act of censorship’ and would violate Brazil’s constitution.”
So what happened? It’s a failure of democracy by officials who don’t believe in democracy, Greenwald maintains. Here’s more on that from The New Yorker interview:
I think that what a lot of people are not fully understanding about Brazil is that there are a lot of people in the government, beginning with the President himself, who explicitly want a resurrection of the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985. They are not joking about it. They are genuine authoritarians who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in basic freedoms, and don’t believe in a free press. And all they know is brute force. They want a return to that military regime. The fact that the federal police said there was no evidence I committed a crime, and the fact that the Supreme Court barred them from investigating me, because the Court said it was an infringement on a free press for them to do so, doesn’t matter to them. They just concocted a theory to try and use brute force to criminalize what I was doing, probably to intimidate other journalists as much as to attack me and punish me for the reporting.
So what’s next? Greenwald has been charged, but has not yet been indicted. His security is precarious in Brazil. (“Neither my husband, nor I, nor our children have left our house in the last year without armed security, armored vehicles, teams of security. We get death threats all the time.”)
Who has condemned this decision? Just about every human rights and press freedom organization you can think of. And plenty of U.S. and Brazilian politicians have condemned it too. “Charging journalists with criminal activity based on interactions with sources sends a chilling message to reporters working on sensitive stories at a time when the Brazilian media is increasingly under attack from officials in its own government,” the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Natalie Southwick told The New York Times.
Have questions about the Greenwald news you want answered? Email me and I’ll try to address them in the next issue.
Thanks for reading Pressing today and always. Happy holidays! Send tips and feedback to sgnover@gmail.com.