New exposés published last week by The Intercept and Agencia Publica of Brazil demonstrated just how tightly the FBI ran the “Lava Jato” operation which wrecked Brazil’s economy, overthrew President Dilma Rousseff, and sent former President Lula da Silva to jail, thus clearing the path for current President Jair Bolsonaro to win the election. The revelations also demonstrate how the FBI team which ran Brazil’s “Lava Jato” (“Car Wash”) operation overlapped Robert Mueller’s coup apparatus against President Donald Trump, a point President Trump would be advised to take note of, for his own security.
The revelations are rocking Brazil. “The target was Petrobras. The Pre-Salt [oil fields]. And the Brazilian companies which were winning bids from U.S. companies in the Middle East. One day this history is going to be told in all its truth,” Lula da Silva charged, in a July 1 tweet.
At least 17 FBI and DOJ agents went down to Curitiba, Brazil in October 2015 to map out with then-Judge Sergio Moro’s “Lava Jato” team the assault on Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, and the country’s leading construction and engineering multinational, Odebrecht, on the pretext of “fighting corruption.” Texts between Lava Jato prosecutors now reveal that the Lava Jato team deliberately did not inform the Brazilian Ministry of Justice of their presence, as was required by Brazilian law; then-President Dilma Rousseff was one of their targets.
Leading the delegation was George “Ren” McEachern, who then headed the FBI’s International Corruption Unit (ICU), which enforces the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the law which allows U.S. officials to prosecute foreign officials for alleged acts committed in foreign countries which do not involve the U.S. at all. McEachern brought with him Jeff Pfeiffer, a top FBI agent expert in forensic accounting. In 2017, Pfeiffer was reassigned to Robert Mueller’s team, for the investigation against Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Less than a year later, another member of that original Curitiba confab, Mark Scheers, was back on Brazilian soil several times to participate in interrogations of Petrobras officials, some lasting as long as nine hours at a time.
Under this assault, the DOJ secured “plea bargaining” agreements under which Petrobras and Odebrecht paid the United States over $4 billion, between them, to settle the cases against them. FBI agents are still in São Paulo “every week to deal with different cases involving the FCPA,” the current head of the FBI’s office in Brazil, David Brassanini bragged to an international conference in São Paulo May 2019.
Current ICU head Leslie Backshies, another participant in the Curitiba planning session who is credited with playing a “critical role for the FBI” in Lava Jato, baldly admitted to the Associated Press in a March 5, 2019 interview that the ICU has been used to overthrow non-submissive governments around the world; “in Malaysia, the President wasn’t re-elected. We saw Presidents toppled in Brazil. These are the results of cases like this,” she bragged to AP.
