Brazilian police formally accuse former President Bolsonaro and aides of alleged 2022 coup attempt

SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazil’s federal police on Thursday formally accused former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 other people of attempting a coup to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections.

Police said their sealed findings were being delivered Thursday to Brazil’s Supreme Court, which will refer them to Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet, who decides either to formally charge Bolsonaro and put him on trial, or toss the investigation.

Bolsonaro told the website Metropoles that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the accusation, reportedly about 700 pages long. But he said he would fight the case and dismissed the investigation as being the result of “creativity.”

The former right-wing president has denied all claims he tried to stay in office after his narrow electoral defeat in 2022 to his rival, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro has faced a series of legal threats since then.

Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were accused “to avoid the dissemination of incorrect news.”

Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides also were accused, including Gen. Walter Braga Netto, who was his running mate in the 2022 campaign; former Army commander Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, the chairman of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his veteran former adviser, Gen. Augusto Heleno.

Other investigations produced formal accusations of Bolsonaro’s roles in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring them and in directing a subordinate to falsify his and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses. Bolsonaro has denied any involvement in either.

Another probe found that he had abused his authority to cast doubt on the country’s voting system, and judges barred him from running again until 2030.

Still, he has insisted that he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit were heartened by the recent U.S. election win of Donald Trump, despite his own swirling legal threats.

But the far-reaching investigations already have weakened Bolsonaro’s status as a leader of Brazil’s right wing, said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo.

“Bolsonaro is already barred from running in the 2026 elections,” Melo told the The Associated Press. “And if he is convicted he could also be jailed by then. To avoid being behind bars, he will have to convince Supreme Court justices that he has nothing to do with a plot that involves dozens of his aides. That’s a very tall order,” Melo said.

A formal accusation of an attempted coup means the investigation has gathered indications of “a crime and its author,” said Eloísa Machado de Almeida, a law professor at Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo. She said she believed there was enough legal grounds for the prosecutor-general to file charges.

Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress have been negotiating a bill to pardon individuals who stormed the Brazilian capital and rioted on Jan. 8, 2023 in a failed attempt to keep the former president in power. Analysts have speculated that lawmakers want to extend the legislation to cover the former president himself.

However, efforts to push a broad amnesty bill may be “politically challenging” given recent attacks on the judiciary and details emerging in investigations, Machado said.

On Tuesday, Federal Police arrested four military and a Federal Police officer, accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a means to overthrow the government following the 2022 elections.

And last week, a man carried out a bomb attack in the capital Brasilia. He attempted to enter the Supreme Court and threw explosives outside, killing himself.