El País is First International News Outlet to Confirm Veracity of Vaza Jato Messages

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Sunday, July 14th, The Intercept Brasil released one more piece of the Vaza Jato series of reports. Despite the disclosure of messages between former judge Sérgio Moro and federal prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, Moro’s supporters and the minister himself argue that the messages may be false.

Also this Sunday, El País released an article in which it confirms the veracity of the messages, thus becoming the first international news outlet to verify the authenticity of the contents published by The Intercept.

According to the report, El País was assisted by an outside source who provided access to part of the message archive of one of the Telegram conversations published in the Vaza Jato reports. El País then compared the source’s messages with those published on The Intercept website: “The content is identical,” it stated.

“The information is the same in both chats and shows the day-to-day work talks between prosecutors, advisors, press, and journalists,” the story continues.

The report also confirmed the authenticity of the file received when coming across messages sent by El País to prosecutors requesting information on Operation Lava Jato.

Another factor confirming the authenticity of the message contents is the inclusion of daily topics, as reported by El País: “Most conversations only include ordinary content that certainly does not arouse public interest, so there would be no reason for them to be manipulated.”

Subsequently, the report addresses messages with texts designed to be sent to the press and their repercussion in outlets such as Folha. The full story can be read on the El País website.

El País is a Spanish-language daily newspaper, based in Madrid, Spain, and is wholly owned by Spanish media conglomerate PRISA.

El País recently fell from the first to second-most read newspaper in Spanish in Spain and is one of three Madrid dailies considered to be national newspapers of record for Spain (along with El Mundo and ABC).

In 2019, its average number of daily sales was 78.950, plummeting almost nine percent from the previous year.