Former general prosecutor says he set up to kill minister and commit suicide in Supreme Court session
Former Attorney General Rodrigo Janot said he was armed at a Supreme Court (STF) session with the aim of killing Minister Gilmar Mendes. The statement was given in an interview with the newspaper "O Estado de S. Paulo", published in electronic version tonight.
"It wasn't going to be a threat, no. It was going to be murder. It was going to kill him [Gilmar Mendes] and then commit suicide," said Janot, who left the Prosecutor's Office two years ago.
The former prosecutor general said the case occurred in May 2017, when he - at the time, head of the Federal Public Prosecution Service - requested that the STF minister be prevented from examining a habeas corpus by tycoom Eike Batista on the grounds that the minister's wife, Guiomar Mendes, was a partner in a law firm that represented the businessman in various lawsuits .
According to Janot, right after the suspicion was filed, Gilmar reportedly spread a story that the then prosecutor's daughter had rendered legal services to OAS, a contractor involved in Operation Car Wash cases . "It got me mad," he said in the interview.
"It was shortly after I presented his suspicious session (...) in Eike's case. Then he came up with a story that my daughter advocated in the criminal part of a company investigated in the Operation Car Wash. My daughter never advocated in the criminal area... so I got serious", said the former attorney general.
Janot told the newspaper that he was armed at an STF session and that he met Gilmar Mendes in the corridors. According to him, it was "God's hand" that prevented him from attacking the minister.
"He was alone, but that was God's hand. It was God's hand," he repeated. "I even entered the Supreme [with the intention of killing him]. He was in the room at the entrance to the session. I looked, and then a 'hand'," he added.
In a book of memoirs to be released, Janot said: "In one of the moments of acute pain, of blind rage, I put a pistol loaded around my waist and came close to unloading it on the head of an authority with beastly tongue who, amidst the gibber orchestrated by the investigators, had decided to make fun of my daughter", and that "There was just no extreme gesture because, at the decisive moment, the invisible hand of common sense touched my shoulder and said no."
In a note, Mendes said: "If a disagreement with a Supreme Minister exposed you to such crazy temptations, I wonder how you conducted criminal prosecution of people that were not Supreme Court Ministers. After all, certainly not afraid of murdering reputations is a person who confesses to intending to assassinate a member of the Constitutional Court. I recommend you seek psychiatric help." He also said he laments "the fact that, for a long time, part of due process in the country has been held hostage by those who confess to having murderous impulses", and that "I have always believed that in my professional relationship with such a notorious figure I was at most exposed to poorly worded petitions in which the poverty of the language competed with the indigence of technical reasoning. Now he reveals that I was also in danger of dying."
The Supreme Federal Court is studying the possibility of removing Janot's gun bearing permission and forbidding him of entering the court.
Source (translated by the blogger, the last three paragraphs inserted from other sources, linked in their respective paragraphs, in order to update the original article).
