Deputy learns of ruling in PAN email blackout case

Chega MP Cristina Rodrigues will be sentenced this Tuesday in the case in which she is accused of a "computer blackout" of PAN emails when she was a parliamentarian for that party, with the Public Prosecutor's Office (MP) not having requested any specific penalty.

In the closing arguments session on July 2, the MP did not suggest any specific penalty to be applied to Cristina Rodrigues, after having expressed doubts about what would be more reprehensible in the deputy's behavior , whether from a criminal legal point of view or an ethical point of view.

Congresswoman Cristina Rodrigues is accused of the crimes of damage and illegitimate access, with the Public Prosecutor's Office considering that "it is not credible that someone would unsubscribe at 10:00 a.m. one day and be making changes to a file at 4:00 p.m. the previous day."

The MP argued that it was enough to use “some common sense” to “conclude, without great leaps of reasoning, that there was a massive change of directories and then a delete operation”.

In the first session of this trial, Cristina Rodrigues denied the facts contained in the Public Prosecutor's Office's accusation: "For now, I can only say that I reject the facts that have been attributed to me ."

In the indictment, filed in 2022, the Public Prosecutor's Office classified Cristina Rodrigues' "illegal conduct" as "very high," although it considered that a sentence of more than five years should not be applied, as she has no criminal record.

In addition to Cristina Rodrigues, this trial includes another defendant, Sara Fernandes, a former PAN employee, who is accused by the Public Prosecutor's Office of the crime of causing damage to programs or other computer data, in co-authorship with the current Chega MP.

At issue in this case is a "computer blackout" in the emails of PAN leaders in 2020, when Cristina Rodrigues was still a member of the party.

Cristina Rodrigues later became an unregistered deputy when she left the PAN party, and later ran on the Chega lists, the party for which she was elected and is currently a deputy.

The Public Prosecutor's Office found that "the defendants acted deliberately, freely and consciously, in accordance with a previously drawn up plan, with the aim of preventing PAN and its members from accessing the content of the party's email messages," the indictment states.

"The defendants removed thousands of emails from the aforementioned mailbox, which they knew they did not have authorization to do. The defendants aimed to—and succeeded in—preventing the PAN party from continuing its political activity," the ruling reads.