BRASILIA (Reuters) – A Supreme Court justice on Thursday subpoenaed Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and ordered police to question him in an investigation into leaked documents in which he has resisted testifying.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes had given Bolsonaro 60 days to testify that have expired, and decided that the far-right president appear at federal police headquarters in Brasilia on Friday afternoon to be questioned.
The case involves the leaking by the president of a secret police investigation into a hacking attack against the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Brazil’s top electoral authority, a few months before the presidential election that he won in 2018.
Bolsonaro used the information on his social media accounts to argue that Brazil’s electronic voting system was vulnerable to tampering and fraud, a charge dismissed by the country’s electoral authorities.
Bolsonaro’s critics at the time said he was preparing the ground to question the election outcome if he lost the second-round run-off against a leftist candidate.
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Daniel Wallis)