CIA CHIEF ‘CAUTIONED BOLSONARO OVER POLL’
William Burns told senior Brazilian officials that president should not undermine confidence in country’s electoral system, sources in US say
The US Central Intelligence Agency director last year told senior Brazilian officials that President Jair Bolsonaro should stop casting doubt on his country’s voting system ahead of the October election, sources have told Reuters.
The previously unreported comments by CIA Director William Burns came in an intimate, closed-door meeting last July, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Burns was, and remains, the most senior US official to meet in Brasilia with Bolsonaro’s rightwing government since the election of US President Joe Biden.
A third person in Washington familiar with the matter confirmed that a delegation led by Burns had told top Bolsonaro aides the president should stop undermining confidence in Brazil’s voting system. That source was not certain whether the CIA director himself had voiced the message.
The CIA declined to comment. Brazil’s Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI), which is part of the president’s office and led by national security adviser Augusto Heleno, said in a statement that the Burns meeting had been publicly announced.
“The matters dealt with in intelligence meetings are confidential,” it said. “The GSI does not receive messages from any country in the world, nor does it transmit them.”
Later, in a weekly social media address, Bolsonaro and Heleno denied such a message had been delivered. “That conversation about elections never happened,” Heleno said.
Bolsonaro has echoed former United States president Donald Trump’s allegations of fraud in the 2020 US election. He has also cast similar doubts about Brazil’s electronic voting system, calling it liable to fraud.
That has raised fears among his opponents that Bolsonaro, who is trailing leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in opinion polls, is sowing doubts so he can reject any loss in the October 2 vote.
On multiple occasions, Bolsonaro has floated the idea of not accepting the results, and has repeatedly attacked the country’s federal electoral court.
On Thursday, Bolsonaro said that his political party would seek to audit the electronic voting system.
“As allowed by electoral law, we will hire a company to do the audit,” Bolsonaro said during a live broadcast on his social media channels. “People want transparent elections in which the vote is effectively counted for their candidate.”
Last week, in another broadside, Bolsonaro, a former army captain, suggested the military should conduct its own parallel ballot count alongside the court.
Two of the sources warned of a potential institutional crisis if Bolsonaro were to lose by a narrow margin, with scrutiny focused on the role of Brazil’s armed forces, which ruled the country during a 1964-85 military government that Bolsonaro celebrates.
During his unannounced trip, Burns, a career diplomat nominated by Biden last year, met at the presidential palace with Bolsonaro and two senior intelligence aides – Heleno and Alexandre Ramagem, then head of Brazilian intelligence agency Abin. Both were Bolsonaro appointees.
Burns also dined at the US ambassador’s residence with Heleno and Bolsonaro’s then chief of staff Luiz Eduardo Ramos, both former generals. Brazil’s military has historically enjoyed close ties with the CIA and other US intelligence services.
At the dinner, according to one of the sources, Heleno and Ramos sought to dismiss the significance of Bolsonaro’s repeated allegations of voter fraud. In response, the source said, Burns told them that the democratic process was sacred, and that Bolsonaro should not be talking in that way.
“Burns was making it clear that elections were not an issue that they should mess with,” said the source, who was not authorised to speak publicly. “It wasn’t a lecture, it was a conversation.”
Burns was making it clear that elections were not an issue that they should mess with
A SOURCE IN WASHINGTON