Brazil’s federal police say they have charged former President Jair Bolsonaro and 36 others with an alleged coup attempt to keep him in office after losing the 2022 election.
Police said their sealed findings were delivered to Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday, which will forward them to Chief Prosecutor Paulo Gonet, who will decide whether to formally indict Bolsonaro and take him to trial or drop the investigation.
Bolsonaro told the website Metropolis that he was waiting for his lawyer to review the indictment, allegedly about 700 pages long.
But he said he would fight the case and dismissed the investigation as a result of “creativity”.
The former right-wing president rejected all claims that he tried to stay in office after narrowly losing the 2022 election to his rival, leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro has since faced a series of legal threats.
Police said in a brief statement that the Supreme Court had agreed to reveal the names of all 37 people who were charged “to avoid the spread of false news”.
Dozens of former and current Bolsonaro aides have also been charged, including General Walter Braga Netto, who was his opponent in the 2022 campaign; former Army Commander General Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; Valdemar Costa Neto, president of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party; and his veteran former advisor, Augusto Heleno.
Other investigations produced indictments for Bolsonaro’s role in smuggling diamond jewelry into Brazil without properly declaring it and in directing an underling to falsify his own and others’ COVID-19 vaccination statuses.
Bolsonaro has denied any involvement in either.
Another investigation found he abused his powers to cast doubt on the country’s voting system, and judges barred him from running again until 2030.
Still, he has insisted he will run in 2026, and many in his orbit have been encouraged by Donald Trump’s recent victory in the US election, despite his own swirling legal threats.
On Tuesday, federal police arrested four military and federal police officers, accused of plotting the assassination of Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes as a means of overthrowing the government after the 2022 elections.
And last week, a man carried out a bomb attack in the capital city of Brasilia.
He tried to enter the Supreme Court and threw explosives outside and killed himself.