Bolsonaro presented plan to reverse election after 2022 loss: Court records

Top military leaders in Brazil have alleged that former President Jair Bolsonaro presented them with a plan to reverse the results of the 2022 presidential election, according to court documents.

The filings, released on Friday, offer some of the first evidence that Bolsonaro was directly involved in an effort to subvert the vote, which he narrowly lost to left-wing candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

The documents contain testimony from the former commanders of the country’s army and air force, both of whom said they refused to accept the right-wing president’s plan.

Instead, they alleged they warned Bolsonaro that any attempt to overturn the election results could lead to his arrest.

The allegations emerge as part of several probes Bolsonaro faces before Brazil’s Supreme Court, including an investigation that seeks to determine his involvement in a 2023 attack on key government buildings, shortly after Lula’s inauguration.

Friday’s court filings contain a federal police report, in which former army commander Marco Antonio Freire Gomes described Bolsonaro holding several unscheduled meetings at the presidential palace after the second round of voting in 2022.

Gomes told federal police that, in one of the gatherings, Bolsonaro told the three commanders of his military, as well as then-Defence Secretary Paulo Sergio Nogueira, that he wanted to create a commission to “investigate the confirmation and the legality of the electoral process”.

The court order said that Bolsonaro had requested some changes to the draft decree, but his edited version continued to call for the arrest of Moraes and for a new presidential election.

Bolsonaro has already been ruled ineligible to run for office until 2030 after Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court determined in June that he had spread false claims about the election and misused public funds to do so.

Investigators are also continuing to search for links between Bolsonaro and the riots on January 8, 2023, which trashed government buildings in the capital Brasilia.

Bolsonaro refused to publicly concede defeat following his election loss, and he and his allies have suggested the result was the result of voter fraud.