Glenn Greenwald Off the Hook as Brazilian Judge Declines to Continue Prosecution — ‘For Now’

A Brazilian judge ruled that he would not allow the prosecution of journalist Glenn Greenwald to go forward “for now,” because it was not clear that the journalist’s anti-corruption reporting for The Intercept Brazil broke any of that country’s laws.

According to reporting by The Intercept, Judge Ricardo Augusto Soares Leite announced on Thursday that, because of a Brazilian Supreme Court injunction barring investigations of Greenwald’s work, he would not allow the case to go forward. Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, was charged with having committed cybercrimes last month related to hacked material and leaked chats between state officials that he used to document rampant misconduct in the country’s justice system for partisan political purposes. He also told The New Yorker that he had received numerous death threats for his dogged reporting about the corruption of Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and that he and his family now only travel with armed security and vehicles out of fear for his life.

“While I welcome the fact that this investigation will not move forward, this decision is insufficient to guarantee the rights of a free press,” Greenwald said in a statement published by The Intercept. ‘The rejection is based on the fact that the Supreme Court already issued an injunction against attempts of official persecution against me. This is not enough. We seek a decisive rejection from the Supreme Court of this abusive prosecution on the grounds that it is a clear and grave assault on core press freedoms.”

Despite the possibility of future prosecution, Greenwald pledged to continue to keep reporting on the Brazilian justice system’s Operation Car Wash, as the political sting was called. “We will continue the fight against this authoritarian escalation before the Supreme Court,” he added, “all while we will keep reporting on the archive provided by our source.”