Trump’s media group files lawsuit against justice weighing Bolsonaro indictment

Donald Trump’s media group and

the video platform Rumble

have jointly filed a lawsuit against a Brazilian supreme court justice, alleging that he violated the right to free speech of a far-right Brazilian influencer residing in the US.

The suit against justice Alexandre de Moraes was filed in a federal court in Tampa, Florida, on Wednesday morning, just hours after he

received the indictment of Brazil’s

ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, formally accusing the far-right leader of leading a plot to cling to power after losing the 2022 election.

Moraes is also currently weighing a range of other charges against Bolsonaro, a longtime Trump ally, including allegations he

falsified a vaccination card

and

embezzled jewellery

.

Related:

Bolsonaro indictment leaves Brazil’s tropical Trump staring at prospect of jail

If Bolsonaro is convicted on the most recent charges – including involvement in an attempted coup d’état and the violent overthrow of the rule of law – he could face a jail sentence of more than 40 years.

The New York Times, which

first broke the news of the lawsuit

, wrote that the legal action against Moraes “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”.

Last year, Moraes was involved in a months-long confrontation with another Trump supporter, the billionaire Elon Musk, after ordering Musk’s social platform Xto block accounts sharing far-right misinformation and anti-democratic content.

X was blocked in Brazil

for about six weeks until Musk

conceded and agreed to remove the accounts

.

Yasmin Curzi de Mendonça, a researcher at the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, said Wednesday’s lawsuit appeared to be a belated show of support for Musk. “I don’t think this was a direct retaliation to the charges against Bolsonaro, but rather part of a broader effort to pressure governments into not regulating tech platforms – as well as a form of retaliation against Brazil for the measures taken against X and Musk,” she said.

In

the lawsuit filed this morning

, Rumble and the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which runs the US President’s Truth Social site, claimed that Moraes violated first amendment freedom of speech protections by ordering the suspension of US-based accounts of a Brazilian user who legally resides in the country.

The lawsuit refers to him only as “Political Dissident A, a conservative Brazilian commentator and blogger” who “fled Brazil for the US in 2021 after he was charged with various crimes for the

simple act of giving voice to information

that Moraes found upsetting and labelled ‘disinformation.’”

The description matches that of Allan dos Santos, a Bolsonaro supporter and far-right influencer who was the subject of two investigations by the supreme court: one that probed threats against court justices and the spread of fake news, and another looking into the funding of anti-democratic acts.

Moraes

ordered Santos’ arrest in 2021

, but as he is legally in the US, even Joe Biden’s previous administration had refused to extradite the far-right influencer.

In the lawsuit, TMTG and Rumble claim that Moraes issued “sealed gag orders commanding Rumble to block the accounts of Political Dissident A within two hours and to ‘not … authorise the creation of any new accounts’, or otherwise face a daily penalty of R$50,000 (almost US$9,000) and a shutdown of Rumble in Brazil”. According to the companies, this would violate Dos Santos’ freedom of speech in the US.

Although Moraes’ orders do not pertain to Trump’s companies, TMTG contends that Truth Social depends on Rumble’s technology for cloud hosting, video streaming and other back-end services; therefore, it risks encountering “operational challenges” in the US due to Moraes’ orders.

Moraes has not yet commented on the case.

The companies seek a judgment “declaring Justice Moraes’s Gag Orders unenforceable in the United States”.

Mendonça, who is also a lawyer, said she could see no legal basis for the case in either Brazilian or US law. “It is truly an attempt to create confusion, apply political pressure, and weaken Moraes’s standing,” she said.