The Attorney General’s Office (PGR) clarified this Wednesday, December 3, that not all ‘Operation Influencer’ investigations have internal judicial secrecy, which allowed access for the defendants “on several occasions”, but not for journalists.
The maintenance of external judicial secrecy, that is, access prohibited to those who are not accused in the process, makes consultation by journalists impossible, which is why, taking into account this Wednesday’s news from Sábado magazine, which reports on the summary of the transcripts of the wiretaps involving former Prime Minister António Costa in this process, it will lead to the Public Ministry to make a “criminal report for the content reported today”.
In a clarification published this Wednesday on the PGR’s official page, the Central Department of Investigation and Criminal Action (DCIAP) stated that “the process where the telephone taps were carried out is subject to external, but not internal, judicial secrecy, meaning that, following a court decision, the defendants who wanted access to it have accessed it on several occasions, since July 2024”.
The DCIAP adds that in the case of “some of them” a full digital copy of the process was “requested and obtained (which includes bi-weekly reports on telephone tapping, but not the recordings themselves)”.
“No journalist has ever had access to the files at DCIAP”assured the MP, who is moving forward with a complaint against Sábado’s news based on the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code, which determines, the clarification states, that “the publication, by any means, of conversations or communications intercepted within the scope of a process is not permitted, under penalty of simple disobedience, unless they are not subject to legal secrecy and the intervening parties expressly consent to the publication”.
António Costa’s defense asked this Wednesday, once again, that the MP clarify the wiretaps carried out on the former prime minister and clarify the leak of information in a process that is under judicial secrecy.
In reaction to the wiretaps released this Wednesday by Sábado magazine, within the scope of Operation Influencer, and which show conversations between António Costa and members of his executive, the former prime minister’s defense questioned: “Why is it that the content of certain criminal cases that are still under investigation continues to be released to spaces, and to which access is not given to those who have a legitimate interest in them?”.
In the statement sent to Lusa, lawyers João Lima Cluny and Diogo Serrano considered that the MP “has an obligation to clarify what he was actually doing and publicly demonstrate that he never failed to comply with the requirements of the Law”.