Supreme Court ministers assess that the decisions made by the president of the Court, Edson Fachin, represent a "momentary defeat" for Alexandre de Moraes, but highlight that the practical impact of the transfer of the fake news inquiry from his hands is limited. The procedure, opened in 2019, was near closure but was used by Moraes to request intelligence reports from the Federal Police, which later served as a basis to point to evidence of crimes against André Mendonça.
For these ministers, Fachin's decision has symbolic weight by ending a delegation that allowed Moraes to conduct the inquiry for more than seven years, but it does not represent, in practice, a loss of power to the same proportion. Fachin kept under Moraes's rapporteurship the criminal actions derived from the inquiry in which a case has already been received for prosecution.
What returns to the presidency are the pending investigations and petitions, meaning the cases that have not yet been transformed into formal criminal actions. The transfer of the inquiry marks a change in the internal distribution of work, but does not affect the cases that are already at a more advanced stage under Moraes's responsibility.
