Apologizing to Lula, Prosecutor Confirms Leaked Lava Jato Conversation

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – While apologizing to former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Tuesday night, August 27th, Prosecutor Jerusa Viecili, of the Lava Jato Operation task force in Curitiba, acknowledges the authenticity of messages disclosed in a UOL report in partnership with The Intercept Brasil website.

In the conversations obtained by The Intercept, analyzed and published by UOL, members of Lava Jato mocked the death of Lula’s wife, Marisa Leticia, and the former president’s requests to go to funerals of relatives who passed away.

“I made a mistake. And my conscience leads me to do the right thing: to apologize to the one directly affected, former president Lula,” reads the prosecutor’s post.

Until now, when commenting on the publications resulting from the leaked messages, the mentioned prosecutors have always claimed that they did not acknowledge the authenticity of the messages and have raised suspicions as to potential tampering of the published contents — although there is so far no evidence that the texts have been manipulated.

However, a little over an hour after apologizing, Jerusa tweeted that her acknowledgment of the authenticity of the excerpt published by UOL did not imply that she endorsed all the other publications in which she was mentioned.

“Remembering one particular message does not certify the whole set. The existence of true messages does not exclude the fact that the messages are the product of criminal activity and have been misrepresented or distorted in order to bring false charges,” she said.

She further said: “The Lava Jato prosecutors have never denied that there are real messages, precisely because they were actually hacked. However, it is not possible to know exactly how accurate they are, because it is impossible to remember the details of one million messages in five intense years.”

Sought to comment on the story published on Tuesday by UOL, the Lava Jato task force in Curitiba said it could not speak without having full access to the conversations.

In June this year, the Minister of Justice and Public Security, Sérgio Moro, apologized to the MBL (Free Brazil Movement) through an audio, after Folha de S.Paulo had disclosed that Moro had referred to its members as “fools” in a conversation in 2016.

“There’s an expression that I don’t know if I’ve really used, I don’t believe I have, it may have been tampered with. But I would like to apologize if I eventually used it because I have always respected the MBL and I always appreciated the support provided by this movement,” said Moro, who was a federal judge in 2016 working with Lava Jato.

Although prosecutor Jerusa’s profile on Twitter has not been verified by the platform, publications on her account have already been shared by Deltan Dallagnol, coordinator of the Task Force in Paraná.