A couple months ago I was fortunate enough to host Deltan Dallagnol for a presentation and Q&A at Harvard Law School. Mr. Dallagnol is the lead prosecutor in Brazil’s “Car Wash” investigation into high-level corruption at Brazil’s state-owned oil company (and beyond). His remarks covered not only on the investigation itself, but also the institutional, political, and legal factors that have enabled (and sometimes hindered) that investigation. Fortunately, after a few weeks’ delay, Harvard Law School has made the video of the event available here. Mr. Dallagnol’s presentation will, I hope, be of interest to many of the blog readers.

I was particularly struck by his account of the degree of autonomy his office has, both legally and politically, as well as the importance of public opinion in safeguarding that autonomy — see our exchange at 17:53-22:05. That led into another interesting exchange about how much prosecutors involved in anticorruption investigations should speak to the media and comment more broadly on the corruption issues and engage in political advocacy (see 22:06-27:05).

(This was all very different from what would be the norm in the U.S., as you can see in my attempt to try to describe what the U.S. equivalent to what Mr. Dallagnol is doing in Brazil would look like, at 31:19-32:12.)