Alexandre de Moraes Frees Another Criminal!

BRASILIA — A federal judge accused of leaking classified information to organized crime walked out of prison this week on Alexandre de Moraes’s order — fitted with nothing more than an ankle monitor. At the same time, the Supreme Court justice moved a second defendant in the same case, former Rio de Janeiro state lawmaker Rodrigo Bacelar, deeper into custody, according to a report by SBT News. The two rulings, issued within days of each other by the same judge in the same investigation, landed on opposite ends of the scale.

Moraes ordered the release of appellate judge Macario Ramos Judice Neto, who had been held in pretrial detention since December 2025 on suspicion of feeding confidential government information to a criminal faction operating in Rio de Janeiro. In place of prison, Judice now wears an electronic ankle monitor and had his passport seized — conditions that let a sitting federal judge accused of arming organized crime with state secrets walk free while the investigation continues. Bacelar, meanwhile, was ordered transferred from a federal penitentiary in Mossoro, Rio Grande do Norte, to a prison unit inside Rio de Janeiro state itself. The receiving facility and the transfer date have not been disclosed.

Both men are defendants in Operacao Unha e Carne, now in its ninth phase after a fresh deployment carried out just this past week. Bacelar has been in custody since March 2026, when he was first targeted in the operation’s third phase.

Why it matters

Moraes doesn’t just rule on cases anymore — he decides, almost alone, who stays locked up and who walks free, with little public explanation for the timing or the terms. For American readers, this is the same court that seized Flavio Bolsonaro’s passport without a criminal charge, and that, through Justice Dias Toffoli, keeps a former Bolsonaro aide in closed prison on terms his own lawyers call unintelligible. A judge accused of arming organized crime with state secrets gets an ankle monitor; a political opponent’s son gets his passport seized with no charge at all. Brazil and the United States are the two largest democracies in the Western Hemisphere, and how Brasilia’s courts handle due process shapes how Washington reads the reliability of Brazilian institutions on migration, investment and intelligence cooperation.

The record

Confirmed: Moraes’s two orders, the identities of both defendants, their roles in Operacao Unha e Carne, and the terms of Judice’s release — ankle monitor and passport seizure — all reported by SBT News. Undisclosed: which prison in Rio de Janeiro will receive Bacelar, when the transfer happens, and the specific evidence Moraes weighed in deciding that a judge accused of leaking state secrets to a criminal faction no longer needed to stay behind bars. The court has not published the underlying decisions in a form that answers those questions.

Operacao Unha e Carne itself isn’t in dispute — nine phases of a federal investigation into leaked government information reaching organized crime is a serious, documented case. What the record does show is a court that hands out custody case by case, not rule by rule, and that keeps deciding those cases without explaining the gap between who gets an ankle monitor and who gets a passport seized with no charge filed at all. Under a government whose own 2022 victory remains disputed by millions of Brazilians who allege electronic ballot fraud, every discretionary call made by the court that installed and protects that government deserves exactly this kind of scrutiny — not less.

The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sourcing: SBT News.

Featured image: Alexandre de Moraes by Chega – Partido Portugal, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.