Brazil’s chief prosecutor overseeing its sweeping anti-corruption probe, Deltan Dallagnol, lied to the public when he vehemently denied in a 2017 interview with BBC Brasil that his prosecutorial task force leaked secret information about investigations to achieve its ends.

In fact, in the months preceding his false claim, Dallagnol was a participant in secret chats exclusively obtained by The Intercept, in which prosecutors plotted to leak information to the media with the goal of manipulating suspects by making them believe that their indictment was imminent even when it was not, in order to intimidate them into signing confessions that implicated other targets of the investigation.

Critics of the so-called Car Wash investigation — which imprisoned dozens of Brazilian elites including, most significantly, the center-left ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when he was leading all polls to win the 2018 presidential election (ultimately won by Jair Bolsonaro after Lula was barred) — long suspected that the prosecutorial team was responsible for numerous media reports that revealed sensitive details about suspects targeted by the investigations.

Dallagnol and his team always publicly, even angrily, denied this. Yet the Secret Brazil Archive obtained by The Intercept, which we began reporting on June 9, contains numerous instances of the prosecutorial team planting exactly the sorts of leaks they repeatedly denied involvement in — often with motives that rendered the outcome legally questionably, if not outright illegal.

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