On Sunday evening, The Intercept published a series of incendiary articles and documents purporting to expose massive problems of unethical behavior and political motives in Brazil’s Operation Car Wash—a five-year investigation into corruption at state oil company Petrobras, which resulted in the conviction of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Based on “a massive archive of previously undisclosed materials,” The Intercept is reporting that judge Sérgio Moro, hailed in Brazil, on the Time 100 list, and in a fawning 60 Minutes segment in 2017 as a paragon of courageous civic virtue, secretly aided the prosecution in Lula’s case, an egregious ethical violation in a justice system that depends upon the impartiality of the presiding magistrate. Moro has since been appointed Justice Minister in the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, a radical right-winger who won the presidential election in 2018 after Lula was barred from running.

Internal communications involving Operation Car Wash’s chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol also reveal that decisions about Lula’s case last year were made with explicitly partisan motives in mind: Lula was barred from being interviewed by Brazil’s leading newspaper out of fears that it might help Fernando Haddad, Bolsonaro’s main opponent, whom Lula picked to run in his stead when he was jailed early last year and barred from standing in the election. These findings offer fresh evidence for a charge progressives in Brazil and around the world have been making for several years: Namely, that the prosecution against Lula, the most popular president in the country’s history, was motivated by political animus and sustained by flimsy evidence.

In addition to the political dimension of these revelations, it is worth reflecting on the broader significance of The Intercept’s findings. After all, it’s not every day that a reading of the facts dismissed as conspiracy theory by so many sensible establishment voices is ratified by extensive documentation. In publishing this series of articles, The Intercept is injecting itself directly into ongoing debates around fake news, the role of the press, and the use of hacked or anonymously leaked information in investigative journalism. “The sheer volume of materials in this archive, as well as the fact that many documents include private conversations among public officials, requires us to make journalistic decisions about which documents should be reported on and published, and which documents should be withheld,” the Intercept authors wrote by way of preface. “When making these judgments, we employ the standard used by journalists in democracies around the world: namely, that material revealing wrongdoing or deceit by powerful actors should be reported, but information that is purely private in nature and whose disclosure may infringe upon legitimate privacy interests or other social values should be withheld.” It remains to be seen whether these revelations will sway the millions who embraced Moro as a national hero in recent years. Even those who reluctantly accept that Moro, Dallagnol, and others may have acted improperly will almost certainly reject the notion that Lula is innocent, despite the serious problems in the way his case was investigated and prosecuted. As the world grapples with a crisis of confidence in journalistic and political institutions alike, Brazil may very well offer one of the clearest, most heavily substantiated cases of one side bending the rules to defeat its opponents. Whether it will matter is unclear.

It’s not every day that a reading of the facts dismissed as conspiracy theory by so many sensible establishment voices is ratified by extensive documentation.

The Intercept was launched in 2014 by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, who in 2016 added a dedicated edition for Brazil, where Greenwald lives with his husband and two children. In the United States, as a vociferous skeptic of charges that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 election, Greenwald has earned the ire of many American leftists—exacerbated by his frequent appearances on Fox News and his willingness to publish pilfered documents deeply damaging to the Obama administration. “His instinct,” Ian Parker wrote of Greenwald in a 2018 New Yorker profile, “is to identify, in any conflict, the side that is claiming authority or incumbency, and then to throw his weight against that claim, in favor of the unauthorized or the unlicensed—the intruder.” In Brazil, however, Greenwald is much more discernibly identified with the political left. His husband, David Miranda, serves in Congress as a member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) and he has been an outspoken critic of the current president’s rank homophobia and authoritarian inclinations.

As a result, many of those who defend Moro and Bolsonaro, or who simply abhor Lula and progressive politics, are already trying to discount The Intercept’s reporting as the work of unscrupulous ideologues. Such arguments should not convince a global audience, however, given Greenwald’s history as an equal opportunity anti-establishment gadfly. And whatever one thinks of his idiosyncratic personal politics, Greenwald’s numerous investigative victories should keep readers from dismissing his findings out of hand—particularly given that several of the Operation Car Wash prosecutors cited in the documents have effectively confirmed their authenticity.