Brazil’s justice minister Sérgio Moro is facing renewed pressure to resign after the country’s leading conservative magazine waded into a snowballing scandal over his role in a mammoth anti-corruption investigation that helped reshape South America’s political landscape.

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his supporters have tried to portray the slew of revelations about Moro’s conduct in ‘Operation Car Wash’ as part of a leftwing assault being spearheaded by the investigative website the Intercept and its co-founder Glenn Greenwald.

In early June, the Intercept began publishing a series of exposés based on what it called “a vast trove” of leaked messages between Brazilian law enforcement officials.

But efforts to disqualify the revelations were undermined on Friday when Brazil’s most influential conservative magazine, Veja, published a front-page report featuring damaging new disclosures about Bolsonaro’s most famous minister.

Veja – long a cheerleader for Moro’s anti-corruption crusade – said its journalists had spent a fortnight poring over nearly 650,000 leaked messages between officials involved in the investigation, and concluded the former judge was guilty of serious “irregularities”.

They included claims that – despite being a supposedly impartial judge in the ‘Car Wash’ inquiry – Moro had “illegally” steered prosecutors as they worked to convict Brazilian politicians.

#EXCLUSIVO Novos diálogos revelam que Moro orientava ilegalmente ações da Lava Jato https://t.co/Ef3TJ6fAd3 pic.twitter.com/2u2MdlaLTt — VEJA (@VEJA) July 5, 2019

An image on Veja’s front page showed Moro – who controversially took his job last year after helping imprison Bolsonaro’s key election rival, former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – using his index finger to tip the scales of justice to the right.

In a damning editorial Veja said its reporting “revealed with precision how Sérgio Moro had overstepped his role as a judge”.

The magazine even drew parallels between the way it claimed Moro had taken “the law into his own hands” and the activities of death squads and vigilante killers.

“There are those who applaud and defend this kind of behaviour, but as a responsible media outlet we cannot support such attitudes,” Veja said, denying its report was intended to boost Brazil’s left or help Lula escape prison.

Reinaldo Azevedo, a prominent conservative commentator who has also collaborated with the Intercept, said Moro’s behaviour, as described by Veja, was a “scandal” and offered a roadmap “for everything a magistrate should not do”.

“The report is devastating for Moro’s reputation. Devastating for the reputation of Brazil’s legal system. And this is only just the beginning,” Azevedo wrote.

In a statement Moro – who has denied wrongdoing and resisted calls to resign – condemned “the distorted and sensationalist diffusion of supposed messages obtained by criminal means”.

Bolsonaro, who this week completes six months in power, has so far stuck by his minister, celebrating Moro as a “national treasure” and parading him at a football match in the capital, Brasília.