Trump Media Group Sues Brazilian Judge Weighing Arrest of Jair Bolsonaro
The lawsuit came hours after the justice received an indictment of Brazil’s former president, who is an ally of President Trump.
Reporting from Rio de Janeiro The New York Times
President Trump’s media company sued a Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Wednesday, accusing him of illegally censoring right-wing voices on social media.
The unusual move was made all the more extraordinary by its timing: Just hours earlier, the Brazilian justice had received an indictment that would force him to decide whether to order the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president and an ally of Mr. Trump. The justice is overseeing multiple criminal investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro.
The Trump Media & Technology Group — which is majority owned by Mr. Trump and runs his Truth Social site — sued the Brazilian justice, Alexandre de Moraes, in U.S. federal court in Tampa, Fla., on Wednesday morning. Joining as a plaintiff was Rumble, a Florida-based video platform that, like Truth Social, pitches itself as a home for free speech.
The lawsuit appeared to represent an astonishing effort by Mr. Trump to pressure a foreign judge as he weighed the fate of a fellow right-wing leader who, like him, was indicted on charges that he tried to overturn his election loss.
Mr. Bolsonaro had explicitly called on Mr. Trump to take action against Justice Moraes in an interview with The New York Times last month. At the time, it was not clear how Mr. Trump might be able to influence Brazil’s domestic politics.
Mr. Bolsonaro was indicted on charges Tuesday that he plotted to hold on to power after he lost Brazil’s 2022 election, including by participating in plans to assassinate Justice Moraes. The indictment said that Mr. Bolsonaro effectively approved the plot and that military agents had begun tracking the movements of the judge.
Mr. Bolsonaro has denied the accusations, saying that he peacefully transferred power and had no knowledge of any assassination plot.
Trump Media and Rumble accused Justice Moraes of censoring political discourse in the United States by ordering Rumble last week to remove the account of a prominent supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro. That person is a Brazilian who has sought political asylum in Florida after Justice Moraes ordered his arrest on accusations that he spread misinformation and threatened judges.
The companies argued that the order against Rumble is “extraterritorial censorship” that illegally restricts their “ability to deliver First-Amendment protected content” in the United States. Mr. Trump’s company has not been subject to Justice Moraes’s orders, but it argued in the lawsuit that it relied on Rumble’s technology and therefore could be harmed if Rumble’s operations were affected.
Justice Moraes has argued that his actions are necessary to protect Brazil from the anti-democratic acts of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters. His spokeswoman said that Justice Moraes did not have immediate comment.
It was unclear how or whether the lawsuit would affect the proceedings against Mr. Bolsonaro in Brazil. The civil suit has no legal standing on the justice’s actions in Brazil. It seeks an injunction against Justice Moraes’s recent order against Rumble. The suit also seeks to prevent Justice Moraes from ordering Apple and Google to remove the Rumble app from their app stores.
“This case is about holding Alexandre de Moraes accountable in an American courtroom,” said Martin De Luca, the lead lawyer on the case, a former U.S. attorney who now works at the New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner. “He has used the judiciary not as a neutral arbiter of justice, but as a weapon to silence political opponents — whether it’s Jair Bolsonaro or a political dissident in the United States.”
Mr. De Luca is both a lawyer for Trump Media Group and an adviser to Mr. Bolsonaro. He is helping Mr. Bolsonaro spread his complaints about Justice Moraes internationally, including by helping to organize The Times’s interview with Mr. Bolsonaro last month.
Justice Moraes has largely proved immune to years of intense criticism and pressure from the Brazilian right as he aggressively investigated Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters.
As part of investigations into attacks against Brazil’s democracy, Justice Moraes has ordered arrests of Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies and the confiscation of the former president’s passport, as well as the suspension of hundreds of social media accounts belonging to his supporters.
Last year, Justice Moraes faced off against Elon Musk — and won — blocking Mr. Musk’s social network, X, in Brazil until the billionaire backed down in his refusal to comply with the judge’s orders to suspend accounts.
Those actions have raised questions, even among moderate Brazilians, about whether Justice Moraes was posing his own threat to democracy.
The moves have also arguably made the judge Mr. Bolsonaro’s political archrival — and a target. In 2023, a mob of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters raided Brazil’s Supreme Court. Late last year, a Bolsonaro supporter tried to bomb the Supreme Court but instead killed only himself. And on Tuesday, new details emerged in the indictment of Mr. Bolsonaro showing that, according to Brazilian investigators, the former president had met with military agents about a detailed plot to fatally shoot Justice Moraes as part of their bid to hold on to power.
As the head of the federal investigation into the former president, Justice Moraes will now decide how the case against Mr. Bolsonaro proceeds. One of his next major decisions will be weighing whether Mr. Bolsonaro represents a flight risk and thus should be jailed until his trial. Justice Moraes has already used such measures against Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies, including his former running mate, who has been jailed since December. Justice Moraes could also order the former president to wear an ankle monitor.
The charges against Mr. Trump that he sought to overturn the 2020 U.S. election have been dropped since he returned to power.
Mr. Trump owns 53 percent of Trump Media, a stake worth more than $3 billion. That stake is in a trust overseen by his son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a Trump Media board member.
Devin Nunes, the former Republican congressman who is now Trump Media’s chief executive, said in a statement that the company is “proud to join our partner Rumble in standing against unjust demands for political censorship regardless of who makes them.”
The lawsuit reflects the close relationship between Trump Media and Rumble, which cater to the same right-wing audience and are headquartered within a few miles of each other on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The case at the center of the lawsuit does not name the Brazilian whose Rumble account Justice Moraes has sought to block, but the details are identical to those of Allan dos Santos, a right-wing Brazilian provocateur who has been living in the United States since 2021.
Justice Moraes has sought to block Mr. Santos’ accounts across the social-media landscape for what the judge said were threats against the Supreme Court and efforts to spread misinformation. Mr. Santos is a prominent supporter of Mr. Bolsonaro and much of his online content is standard political fare, though he has spread conspiracy theories, such as claims that the 2022 Brazilian election was rigged.
He has also faced criminal complaints in Brazil for threatening judges. One complaint focused on a case in 2020 when he said that a Supreme Court justice who called him a “digital terrorist” would “see what would be done with him.”
Justice Moraes sought Mr. Santos’ extradition from the United States, but was denied by the U.S. government last year.
Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting from New York.
Jack Nicas is the Brazil bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of much of South America. More about Jack Nicas