Pressed The Meat, Con't

My issues with The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald are legendary, his role in helping Dudebro Defector damage the US and allowing Russia to steal the US crown intelligence jewels can't be underestimated.  Without the information Russia undoubtedly got from Snowden, would they have been able to compromise the US as much during the 2016 election cycle?  There are  lot of hard question that I think Greenwald has to answer.

However in his current home of Brazil, he has gotten under the skin of autocratic and homophobic President Jair Bolsonaro once too often, and now Greenwald faces what are certainly trumped-up criminal conspiracy charges against him for his reporting on Bolsonaro's corrupt regime.

Federal prosecutors in Brazil on Tuesday charged the American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes for his role in the spreading of cellphone messages that have embarrassed prosecutors and tarnished the image of an anti-corruption task force.

In a criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, accused Mr. Greenwald of being part of a “criminal organization” that hacked into the cellphones of several prosecutors and other public officials last year.

Mr. Greenwald could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Intercept Brasil, a news organization Mr. Greenwald co-founded, has published several articles based on a trove of leaked messages he said he received last year.

In a 95-page criminal complaint, prosecutors say Mr. Greenwald did more than merely receive the hacked messages and oversee the publication of newsworthy information.

Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”

For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in order to cover their tracks.

Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app.

Mr. Greenwald moved to Brazil in 2005 after meeting David Miranda, a Brazilian man he later married and who became a federal congressman last year.

It's a terrible situation that Greenwald discovered too late that there are far worse people in reality than the villainous version of Barack Obama that lived inside his head.  Practically everything he accused Obama of doing, Bolsanaro is doing right now, including throwing journalists like Greenwald in jail.

Greenwald also looked the other way on the kinds of abuses Russia did to journalists, including imprisonment and hey, outright murder.  But you know what? Not even Greenwald deserves this.  No journalist does.

There's a certain amount of irony here, considering Greenwald does things like "Go on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and trash the Democrats as fascists" but it's also a journalist being jailed for telling the truth.