Former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil oversaw a broad conspiracy to hold on to power regardless of the results of the 2022 election, including personally editing a proposed order to arrest a Supreme Court justice, according to accusations unveiled on Thursday by the Brazilian federal police.
Mr. Bolsonaro and dozens of top aides, ministers and military leaders worked together to undermine the Brazilian public’s faith in the election and set the stage for a potential coup, the federal police said.
Their efforts included spreading disinformation about voter fraud, drafting legal arguments for new elections, recruiting military personnel to support a coup, surveilling judges and encouraging and guiding protesters who eventually raided government buildings, police said.
The explosive allegations were contained in a 134-page court order that authorized a sweeping federal police operation on Thursday that targeted Mr. Bolsonaro and about two dozen of his political allies, including Brazil’s former defense minister, former national security adviser, former justice minister and former head of the Navy.
The operation involved search warrants and arrest warrants for four people, including two Army officers and two of Mr. Bolsonaro’s former top aides.
Mr. Bolsonaro was ordered to hand over his passport, to remain in the country, and to have no contact with any other people under investigation.
Mr. Bolsonaro said on Thursday that he was the innocent victim of a politically motivated operation.
“I left the government more than a year ago and I continue to suffer relentless persecution,” the former president told Folha de São Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. “Forget about me. There is already someone else running the country.”
Mr. Bolsonaro has already been ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 over his attempts to undermine the voting systems. Now he could be facing arrest and criminal prosecution.
Mr. Lula said in a radio interview on Thursday that he hoped the investigation into Mr. Bolsonaro would be fair and impartial. “What I want is for Bolsonaro to have the presumption of innocence, which I didn’t have,” he said.
Mr. Lula served 580 days in prison on corruption charges that were later annulled after Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the judge in his cases had been biased.
The accusations unveiled on Thursday lay out how the former president and his allies tried to subvert Brazil’s young democracy, including alarming details for a country that was ruled by a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
In one moment in November 2022, after Mr. Bolsonaro lost the election but was still president, Filipe Martins, a top aide, brought him a draft of a legal document claiming that Brazil’s Supreme Court had illegally interfered in the executive branch’s affairs, according to federal police. The document ordered the arrest of two Supreme Court justices and the Senate president and called for new elections, the police said.
Mr. Bolsonaro ordered changes to the document so that it called for the arrest of only one of the Supreme Court justices, police said. Once the document was updated, Mr. Bolsonaro called top military leaders to the presidential residence to present them with the document and push for a coup, the police said. The result of that meeting was unclear.
The Supreme Court justice who would have been arrested under that order was Alexandre de Moraes, the same judge who has overseen investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies for years, making him one of the former president’s archrivals.
Mr. Moraes issued the court order authorizing the arrests and police actions on Thursday. The order revealed that the federal police also discovered evidence that two of Mr. Bolsonaro’s aides had monitored the travel of Mr. Moraes in case the government attempted to arrest him.
In the court order unsealed on Thursday, Mr. Moraes said that the aides’ precision in knowing his schedule suggested they may have been using technology to surveil him.
Federal police have separately accused Mr. Bolsonaro’s son and the former chief of Brazil’s intelligence agency of using Israeli spyware, among other tools, to surveil political enemies of the former president, including Mr. Moraes.
The court order unsealed on Thursday also details a meeting in July 2022, three months before the election, in which Mr. Bolsonaro ordered top government officials and military leaders to spread claims of voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence. “From now on, I want every minister to say what I’m going to say here,” Mr. Bolsonaro said at the meeting, according to a recording obtained by police.
Transcripts of the recording in court documents revealed that the former president appeared to believe, or at least continued to peddle, several conspiracy theories claiming his rivals were rigging the election.
He falsely claimed that electronic voting systems had been pre-loaded with results and that electoral judges had received tens of millions of dollars in bribes.
“I have no proof, man. But something strange is happening,” Mr. Bolsonaro said, according to the police. “Losing an election is no problem. What we can’t do is lose democracy in a rigged election.”
In another moment, he asked his ministers and military leaders to sign a public letter that Brazil’s election system could not be trusted. (Such a letter was never released.)
Several government ministers and military leaders at the meeting, however, agreed with Mr. Bolsonaro’s view of the election system.
Anderson Torres, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former justice minister, urged others at the meeting to act, saying they faced consequences if Mr. Lula became president. “I want everyone to think about what they can do beforehand because everyone will get screwed,” he said, according to the police.
Paulo Sérgio Nogueira, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former defense minister and Army commander, said that he saw Brazil’s election officials as “the enemy” and that military leaders were meeting weekly to ensure clean elections.
“May we succeed in re-electing you,” he told Mr. Bolsonaro, according to the police. “That is all our wish.”
But there were also internal signs of doubt among Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies. Two days after the first round of Brazil’s election, which sent Mr. Bolsonaro and Mr. Lula to a runoff, an Army officer sent a text message to Mr. Bolsonaro’s personal aide, Mauro Cid, saying that he hoped Mr. Bolsonaro’s team “knew what they were doing.”
“Me too,” replied Mr. Cid, who was instrumental in planning a coup, according to police. “If not, I’ll be arrested.”
Mr. Cid was arrested shortly after Mr. Lula’s election and accused of helping to falsify Mr. Bolsonaro’s vaccine records. He signed a plea deal to cooperate with authorities.
The Army officer then asked if Mr. Bolsonaro’s team had found evidence of voter fraud.
“Nothing,” Mr. Cid replied, according to the police. “No evidence of fraud.”
Paulo Motoryn contributed reporting from Brasília.