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The Biden-Era C.B.P. Fabricated a Document Used to Imprison a Top-Level Brazilian Official. A U.S. Federal Judge Just Ordered Full Disclosure.

The federal judicial case has obvious implications for Brazilian politics, but even more for U.S. national security.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-biden-era-cbp-fabricated-a-document

Excerpt:

In a case with serious repercussions for U.S. national security and for Brazil, a Clinton-appointed U.S. federal judge concluded that an immigration record entered in the Customs and Border Protection system during the Biden administration was fraudulent. The fraudulent record reflected a non-existent entry into the U.S. by the national security advisor to former President Jair Bolsonaro. The fabricated entry was then somehow obtained and used by a controversial Brazilian Supreme Court judge to imprison that national security official.

Beyond concluding that the C.B.P. document was fake, the federal judge, Gregory A. Presnell of the Middle District of Florida, berated U.S. government lawyers for their refusal to produce all documents in the government’s possession concerning who was responsible for this fraudulent record and how it ended up being used in Brazil to imprison one of Bolsonaro’s closest advisors. I obtained a copy of the transcript from that U.S. judicial hearing and first reported the developments in Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper, on Friday.

The judge’s orders were issued as part of a lawsuit brought in U.S. federal court late last year by Filipe Martins, the top Bolsonaro advisor on international relations who was preventively imprisoned for six months in 2024 based on this false C.B.P. immigration entry. At the time, Martins was awaiting trial on charges that he had participated with Bolsonaro in plotting a coup after Lula’s narrow victory over Bolsonaro in the 2022 presidential election.

The judge overseeing the cases involving the alleged coup is Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has become a political lightning rod not just in his own country but also around the world. He has overseen a censorship scheme so severe that even The New York Times cited internet freedom experts calling it “a potentially dangerous, authoritarian expansion of power.” On other occasions, the Times — obviously hostile to Bolsonaro — raised serious questions about whether Moraes has become a grave threat to Brazilian democracy in the name of saving it.

.....One of the many questions that have never been answered — beyond the key question of who fabricated this document — is how this false C.B.P. entry fell into the hands of Brazilians attempting to imprison Martins. The first time this false C.B.P. record emerged publicly was when a Brazilian reporter known to be very close to Moraes, Guilherme Amado, published a news report full of falsehoods, clearly designed to implicate Martins, starting with the highly accusatory (and false) headline: “Under investigation, former Bolsonaro aide went to Orlando in 2022 and evaporated.”

.....Not only is it now indisputable that the document on which this story was based was fraudulent, as even the C.B.P. admits, but it was so obviously fraudulent from the start. Indeed, within two days of investigating the case back in 2024, I had obtained so much definitive proof that Martins had never left Brazil that not even my meticulous editors at Folha de S.Paulo attempted in any way to dilute the strong language of my reporting — published shortly after Moraes’ original order of imprisonment — stating that Martins had been imprisoned based on clear fraud.

A mountain of evidence proved that Martins was in Brazil the whole time, including domestic flights that Martins took within Brazil on the country’s largest carrier during the period in which he had supposedly “evaporated” in the U.S. Even the federal prosecutor who had originally requested Martins’ imprisonment based on the fraudulent C.B.P. record quickly admitted that Martins had never left Brazil and urged Moraes to release him. But the judge refused, leaving him imprisoned for six more months based on a blatant lie.

.....C.B.P. lawyers offered their excuses for why they had not yet produced the illuminating documents for Martins. Martins, they claimed, had failed to specify which C.B.P. officials had participated in the fraud, and the lawyers insisted that they were thus unable to narrow down the searches. The judge, who is now 83 years old and has been on the court for decades, barely tried to hide his contempt for the obvious bad-faith deceit shaping the excuses of the government’s lawyers:.....

.....This most recent hearing and these definitive statements by the judge demonstrated why this case has become increasingly suspect and bizarre. The political implications are obvious: did Biden officials — overtly hostile to the Bolsonaro government and strongly supportive of Lula — deliberately manufacture an immigration record to permit Moraes to order this top-level Brazilian official imprisoned unjustly?

But it also has severe national security implications for the U.S. as well: if C.B.P. agents — or the political officials overseeing them — are willing and able to insert fake immigration records into the C.B.P. system regarding who entered the country, or conversely to remove and delete genuine entry records to hide who entered the U.S., then all sorts of national security dangers are manifest.

.....Brazil is scheduled to hold a national election on October 4, 2026. It will not only choose between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s son, in the presidential race, but also elect a new slate of federal senators. The Senate is already very close to having the votes needed to remove Moraes from the Court through impeachment. There is a good chance the October election will deliver the final votes needed in the Senate to remove him.

In the meantime, it seems obvious that an aggressive and serious Congressional investigation is needed to get to the bottom of how the U.S. immigration system — obviously vital to U.S. national security — could have been so easily defrauded and manipulated for political ends.