Fachin and his hot potato: keeping the audios secret will be the worst thing that can happen.

The decision by the Supreme Court Justice Luiz Fachin, the rapporteur for the Lava Jato case, regarding whether to keep the audio recordings confidential or release them, in which JBS whistleblowers Joesley Batista and Ricardo Saud reveal conduct that could lead to the annulment of their plea bargain agreement, should be known this Tuesday. This will be the big decision of the day. Choosing confidentiality will bring the worst possible outcome. Since four Supreme Court justices were mentioned, the entire Supreme Court will be under suspicion. Temer and his supporters will have a field day, discrediting the entire plea bargain process and escalating the attacks against Janot, accused by the Presidential Palace of persecuting its occupant. The first action will be to request the annulment of the first indictment, that of passive corruption, which, although rejected by the Chamber of Deputies, will proceed when Temer leaves office.

Even if Attorney General Rodrigo Janot presents, in the remaining days of his term, the second indictment against Temer – and he made a point of saying yesterday that he will continue to perform the "official acts" inherent to his position – he knows that it will already come into the world with reduced force and impact due to the turnaround in the JBS case.

Another strategy of Temer's group will be to petition the Supreme Court, where a second request for Janot's recusal is already underway, now directed to the full court (the first was rejected by Fachin), to block any second indictment he may present, leaving the case to be examined by his successor Raquel Dodge, who takes office on the 18th. With the audios under seal, all the rhetoric of the government supporters will gain more resonance and reverberation.

If Fachin chooses to release the Joesley-Saud dialogues, the true gravity of what they said can be assessed and understood, preventing manipulation. Janot will be applauded for the rigor with which he handled a slip-up by the highly rewarded informants, and Temer will not be able to trumpet so much. Society has the right to know what they said about their relationships with former prosecutor Marcello Miller, even before the agreement was finalized, about Supreme Court justices, and perhaps even about the Attorney General himself. This could be an argument Fachin could use. But he could also, as sources in the legal field say, opt for secrecy, claiming that these were conversations between client and lawyer.

The unbelievable thing about this turn of events is that it was produced by the JBS whistleblowers themselves, by recording themselves in preliminary conversations about the plea bargain, allegedly with a strong alcoholic component, and then inadvertently sending the recording to the Attorney General's Office as if it were a file about their relationship with Senator Ciro Nogueira, of the PP-PI party.  

Janot could have done as he did in Curitiba. He could have moved forward, ignoring a fact that has already been under investigation: the relationship between former prosecutor Miller and JBS. He preferred to honor his position and provide complete transparency regarding the incidental finding that could ruin all his efforts to demonstrate the crimes of Temer and his group in collusion with the JBS group. Honor and victory do not always go hand in hand. Temer, for example, has specialized in winning without honor. That's how he won the Presidency, buried the first accusation, and now may escape the second.