On Tuesday, Brazilian prosecutors charged the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” as part of what the government claims was his role in a “criminal organization.” They allege that Greenwald—who reported on wrongdoing in Brazil’s judicial establishment last year for the Intercept, the Web site he co-founded—participated in the hacking of cell phones, the content of which was later used in his stories. But the reporting itself is the reason much of the Brazilian government is furious with Greenwald. He has repeatedly antagonized the country’s new far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro, who rode into office amid a sprawling corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash, which brought down two former Presidents. Sérgio Moro, who led the operation, was later made Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and became the subject of much of the Intercept’s reporting. A number of leaders across the Brazilian political spectrum have criticized the charges against Greenwald, which were met with outrage by civil-liberties organizations around the world.

Greenwald, who is best known for covering Edward Snowden’s disclosures, lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, David Miranda, a Brazilian congressman, and their children. We spoke by phone on Tuesday, after the charges were announced. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his life in Brazil since Bolsonaro’s election, the reasons the President has gone after him, and his different approaches to the rise of the far right in Brazil and the United States.

The case against you relies in part on the claim that you helped in “facilitating the commission of a crime.” Did you do anything to encourage the hacking of cell phones or other devices?

No. In fact, when the source first talked to me, he had already obtained all the material that he ended up providing us, making it logically impossible for me to have in any way participated in that act. And the federal police, just a few months ago, concluded that not only was there no evidence that I committed any crimes but much to the contrary, I conducted myself, in their words, with “extreme levels of professionalism and caution,” to make sure that I didn’t get ensnared in any criminal activity.

If that’s the case, how do you understand what has happened in the last couple of months, from the federal police determining that to the charges today?

I think that what a lot of people are not fully understanding about Brazil is that there are a lot of people in the government, beginning with the President himself, who explicitly want a resurrection of the military dictatorship that ruled the country until 1985. They are not joking about it. They are genuine authoritarians who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in basic freedoms, and don’t believe in a free press. And all they know is brute force. They want a return to that military regime. The fact that the federal police said there was no evidence I committed a crime, and the fact that the Supreme Court barred them from investigating me, because the Court said it was an infringement on a free press for them to do so, doesn’t matter to them. They just concocted a theory to try and use brute force to criminalize what I was doing, probably to intimidate other journalists as much as to attack me and punish me for the reporting.

Do the federal prosecutors who charged you today answer more to the President than other branches of law enforcement?

I would say that the best way to understand who they are is that they are kind of equivalent to the Justice Department, and the federal police is equivalent to the F.B.I. It would be like if [the former F.B.I. director] Jim Comey stood in front of the cameras and said we were closing our investigation, there is no evidence of criminal activity, and then the Justice Department months later nonetheless indicted. So yes, they are part of the executive branch but are a little more independent, just like the Justice Department is. But the big difference is that unlike the Justice Department, which can just single-handedly indict you, these prosecutors can only issue charges that then have to be approved by a judge in order for you to actually become a criminal defendant.

Is there anything about your reporting on Operation Car Wash that you regret or would have done differently?

Of course, with individual stories, there are things you wish you had done differently. There was one time in particular when we had promised a story, and we were anxious about it, and I published an excerpt, on Twitter, as a teaser, that hadn’t yet been fact-checked, and there was an error in there, and they used that against us to claim we were altering the chat. But in terms of how I dealt with my source, or the legal or criminal issues, I was incredibly meticulous, because not only did I go through this with the Snowden story, I obviously knew they were going to want to prosecute me. So before I did anything, I sat down with our huge team of lawyers and they said this is what you can do, this is what you can’t tdo. And I was incredibly careful to never cross that line.

Bolsonaro has singled you out several times. What might his dislike be about, beyond a number of possibilities, ranging from your reporting to the fact you are gay?

I actually wrote about Bolsonaro all the way back in 2014, in an article he hated, before anyone contemplated that he might be President. I was just trying to explain to people how someone this extreme was even a member of Congress. The title was, “The Most Misogynistic, Hateful Elected Official in the Democratic World: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.” And then, in 2017, while he was setting up his Presidential run, I called him a fascist on Twitter, and he responded with an extremely crude and anti-gay epithet about anal sex that made news. And then, when my husband entered Congress as a left-wing member, in early 2019, replacing another L.G.B.T. congressman, who fled the country in fear of his life, largely due to Bolsonaro, David and he had a back-and-forth that went viral in Brazil. So he already hated me before we started this reporting.

And once we did this reporting, he said my marriage was a fraud and that we adopted Brazilian children as a fraud to avoid deportation. And then of course he has threatened I would be in prison over the reporting. So we have a long and contentious history.

What’s the state of independence of the Supreme Court currently?

It’s really interesting, because for a long time the Supreme Court was pretty much captive to the extreme popularity of Moro and Operation Car Wash. And, even when Moro did things that all legal experts agreed were highly dubious, it was very rare that they would impose limits on what he was doing, because everyone was afraid of Moro, because he was basically the national hero. His taking a position with the Bolsonaro government and our reporting have seriously diminished his stature. And as a result the Supreme Court is emboldened now, and they have issued a series of rulings against Bolsonaro, the government, and Moro and freed [former President] Lula, who was the crown jewel of Operation Car Wash. And so there is a lot of animosity. The Supreme Court has become much more independent, as evidenced by the fact that they barred Moro and these agencies from investigating me in retaliation for the reporting.

I should just add that, in the last few hours, there has been reporting from conservative journalists at large newspapers that several members of the Supreme Court have told them that they will not accept the charges against me and reject it if and when it gets to the Supreme Court.