Imagine this counterfactual: In 2016, a judge presiding over the corruption trial of Hillary Clinton secretly corresponds with the prosecutorial team, strategizing to assure she is found guilty and that the judgment will hold on appeal. He then subjects her to “preventative detention” ahead of the trial verdict, nullifying her ability to run for the presidency. Or, as long as we are telling stories, imagine the same fate for 2020 nominee Bernie Sanders.

This, in rough analogue, is what happened to Workers’ Party (PT) candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2018 in Brazil. Leading the polls in the run-up to the national elections, Lula was disqualified following the acceptance of a money laundering indictment by Judge Sergio Moro. The far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, an admirer of the Brazilian dictatorship era, prevailed. One of Bolsonaro’s early acts as president was to appoint Lula’s jailer, Moro, to one of the most powerful positions in the country: minister of justice. Glenn Greenwald’s new book, Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, tells the story of Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato in Portuguese), the anti-corruption inquiry led by Moro.

That a reporter should break even one story of real consequence, one that shakes up business as usual in a country or region or across the planet, is extremely rare. Excellent journalists go their entire careers without such a story to their names. But in 2013, Greenwald, along with Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, broke whistleblower Edward Snowden’s National Security Administration (NSA) story. Among many other things, Snowden’s top-secret archive revealed that the NSA was collecting metadata on every single phone call made through Verizon. Every call, all day, every day.