BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro did not show up to testify on Friday, after a Supreme Court Justice subpoenaed him and ordered federal police to question him in an investigation about leaked documents.
The government’s solicitor general, Bruno Bianco, went in Bolsonaro’s place and filed an injunction before the Supreme Court appealing against Justice Alexandre de Moraes’ subpoena, but the judge archived the request saying it was too late.
On Thursday night, Moraes ordered the far-right president to appear at federal police headquarters in Brasilia on Friday afternoon to be questioned because the 60-day period he had given Bolsonaro to testify had expired.
The president’s defense argued that the Supreme Court had ruled in two previous cases, in which subpoenaed people had failed to show up to testify, that coercion to obtain such testimonies was unconstitutional.
The case involves the leaking by the president of a secret police investigation into a hacking attack against the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority, a few months before the presidential election that he won in 2018.
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Lisandra Paraguassu; Writing by Peter Frontini; Editing by Richard Chang)
