Weekly Q&A with Glenn Greenwald: August 20th, 2026

I will have...

I actually finished a, a news article today that pertains both to United States and Brazil.

I actually think it probably, at the end of the day, has more impact and more importance to the United States than it does to Brazil.

I actually reported on this case before.

It's about a top-level former national security advisor in Brazil to President Bolsonaro, who was imprisoned after he was charged with a crime but before he was convicted based on this claim that he had fled Brazil and entered the United States.

And during the Biden administration, there appeared in the immigration records a entry record reflecting that he entered the United States on December 30th.

The record was completely fraudulent and false.

He never left Brazil.

He never entered the United States.

And so, as a result, there was no return entry back into Brazil because he was in Brazil the whole time, so there couldn't be an entry back into Brazil.

So the Brazilian government found this immigration entry, one of the reporters most loyal to them did, and published a bunch of articles saying, "Hey, this guy, he went to Brazil.

He went to the United States knowing that he was facing charges," and he d- the word they used was he evaporated.

But I was able to do reporting on this, and there was a mountain of evidence proving he was in Brazil the whole time, that he never left.

They claimed that he left with Bolsonaro on the presidential plane, who his own government produced documents saying that he had never left, that he wasn't on the presidential plane.

That was when Bolsonaro lost the election in 2022, went to Orlando, spent three months there knowing he was likely to be in prison.

Now he is.

And there were all these, this, this, this mountain of evidence, including, uh, flight records showing that he was flying domestically inside Brazil, his name is Filipe Martins, during the exact time that they said he had left Brazil, including, like, the day after he supposedly left on the presidential plane, and the large Brazilian airlines company confirmed that he had actually flown domestically.

Lots of credit card receipts and, uh, uh, uh, deliveries.

A, a ton of evidence to the point where after six months, the court finally released him from prison.

But it left the question, how did this false entry end up in United States immigration system? Who put it there and why? And how did this Brazilian reporter extremely close to the authoritarian judge on the Supreme Court who imprisoned this former Bolsonaro national security advisor find out about it, which he then seized on and used [clears throat] to order him imprisoned, preventatively imprisoned.

And even though the evidence was clear after a couple weeks to the point where even the prosecutor said, "Hey, we, there's no evidence.

This is wrong.

We should let him out," he kept him in prison for six months.

And there's some big developments that I was able to report on exclusively today.

I wrote the article.