Lawyer and former minister Fabio Wajngarten, a long-time ally and one of the main defenders of former President Jair Bolsonaro, announced this Thursday that he will stop participating in the numerous cases pending before Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) against the former ruler, and will continue to be handled by other professionals.
Weingarten, known for his militancy and ideological closeness to Bolsonaro, made the decision after the Federal Police (PF) indicted him in a trial in which he defended the former president against accusations of misappropriating valuable gifts given to Brazil by other countries during his mandate and selling some of them to the United States and keeping the money.
According to a report filed in July and forwarded by the Federal Police to the STF, Wajngarten was directly involved in a clumsy attempt by Bolsonaro’s allies to cover up the crimes of which the former head of state is accused, buying gifts from US stores to hand over to the Brazilian justice system when the scandal erupted in 2023.
In the document, police allege that Weingarten personally traveled to the United States to buy back the gold Rolex that Bolsonaro sold at a specialty store, and that he took it back to Brazil so the former president could claim the gem never left the country.
In announcing his withdrawal from the trials involving Jair Bolsonaro, Wajngarten, who was minister of the Secretariat of Communications of the President of the Republic in the ally’s government, said he was obliged to do so to comply with the code of ethics of the OAB, the Brazilian Bar Association, which prohibits lawyers from defending defendants in cases in which they themselves are being investigated.
According to the lawyer, all the accusations against him and Bolsonaro are false, they are just speculations of the Federal Police and part of what he called an organized policy of criminalization of politics and law.