Last June, American journalist Glenn Greenwald presided over what appeared to be the most incendiary scoop in Brazil’s recent history, detailing a pattern of mendacity and manipulation in Operation Car Wash, the long-running corruption investigation that led to the arrest of former leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. On Tuesday, the other shoe dropped: Greenwald was formally charged, by federal prosecutors under the current right-wing Brazilian government, with cybercrimes. The criminal complaint alleges that Greenwald and six others “directly assisted, encouraged and guided” the hackers who acquired thousands of text messages and emails belonging to members of Operation Car Wash. According to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, a prosecutor in the case said Greenwald could be heard on a computer seized by the Federal Police—Greenwald himself was not under investigation, the paper reports—instructing the hackers to delete messages to avoid incriminating themselves. To the prosecutor, this makes Greenwald a co-conspirator, “advising criminals” under the guise of “protecting a journalistic source.” The Brazilian Constitution, ratified in 1988, guarantees special protections for journalists and their sources. At issue is whether Greenwald crossed the line into illicit behavior himself.

Then there’s the other issue: whether Brazil will ever confront the actual implications of Greenwald’s reporting. Polarization is nothing new in Brazilian politics. What is notable in this specific case, however, is the outright hostility to the inconvenient fact that Operation Car Wash was not as incorruptible as it seemed. The wholesale rejection of that idea is as widespread as it is unthinking, given that Greenwald and his team at The Intercept have solid, incontrovertible evidence for their damning assessments. Unfortunately, that attitude will probably persist regardless of the picture that emerges in the coming months of Greenwald’s reporting process.

Since 2016, The Intercept, which Greenwald co-founded with journalist Jeremy Scahill and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, has operated a Brazilian edition that publishes the kind of hard-hitting stories that the conservative mainstream press in that country tends to avoid. While Greenwald’s frequent appearances on Fox News and his outspoken skepticism of Russiagate theories irk many American liberals, in Brazil, where he lives with his husband and young sons, he is much more clearly associated with the left. His husband, David Miranda, is a member of Congress for the Socialism and Liberty Party.

The bombshell series of articles published by The Intercept last year placed Greenwald at odds with the right-wing forces that have gripped the nation in recent years. Working with “a massive archive of previously undisclosed materials—including private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation—provided to us by an anonymous source,” Greenwald and his partners exposed the profound partisanship of Operation Car Wash’s war on corruption, which either directly or indirectly felled numerous powerful leftists in Lula’s and his successor Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party. The fallout from The Intercept’s exposé—referred to as Vaza Jato, a play on Operation Car Wash’s Portuguese name, Lava Jato—has led to threats on Greenwald’s life and an on-air physical altercation with a conservative commentator during a popular radio program.

While the reporting was as provocative as it was illuminating, the political impact of Vaza Jato has been surprisingly muted. When the first stories were published, I was struck by their potentially explosive implications. Most notably, by publishing incriminating text messages and other communications, Vaza Jato shattered the pristine image of Judge Sérgio Moro, who garnered international acclaim between 2015 and 2018 for his work overseeing high-profile corruption trials like that of former president Lula. As The Washington Post reported in December 2015, “[W]hen Brazilians flooded the streets to protest corruption and call for [then President] Rousseff’s impeachment on four occasions this year, many wore Moro masks, waved banners with his name or carried inflatable Moro dolls.” We now know, however, on account of The Intercept’s reporting, that Moro was secretly advising the prosecution in Lula’s case, a grievous ethical breach.