Today’s guest post is from Victor Rodrigues, a researcher at the FGV School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:
How openly should prosecutors investigating corruption or other high-level wrongdoing be about their activities and their views on the larger public policy questions that their investigations implicate? As has been discussed on this blog before, there is a longstanding debate on this issue, and considerable variation across countries. The United States represents one approach, in which federal prosecutors are exceedingly discreet and tight-lipped. Consider the fact that Special Counsel Robert Mueller, leading the high-profile investigation into possible wrongdoing by the Trump campaign, barely speaks in public.
Brazil seems to be going in a different direction. Not only does the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office have verified accounts on Facebook and Twitter, but many of the individual prosecutors are also active on social media. Perhaps the most prominent example in Brazil is Deltan Dallagnol, the federal prosecutor coordinating the Car Wash Investigation (Lava Jato). Mr. Dallagnol has used his verified account to tweet over seven thousand times, and many of his posts mention Lava Jato cases.
While we can’t know for sure what impact these tweets have had, it’s unlikely that an account with almost half a million followers would have no impact at all. I imagine that for many readers, for example, those from the United States or countries with similar traditions regarding prosecutorial (non-)communication with the public, Mr. Dallagnol’s Twitter presence might be disconcerting, perhaps troubling. But in the context of a country like Brazil, these tweets, and prosecutorial openness more generally, are likely to have a positive impact not only on specific corruption cases but also on the development of legal and democratic institutions. In particular, this widespread use of social media by Lava Jato prosecutors can have three beneficial effects:
