BRASILIA (Reuters) -Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial for charges of plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election, did not attack democracy and has had his right to a fair defense restricted, his lawyer argued on Wednesday.
“We did not have access to the evidence, and much less had enough time to go through it,” Celso Vilardi told the Supreme Court. He asserted that the court had fast-tracked proceedings.
Local media and Bolsonaro backers have said that the court appeared to be streamlining proceedings to ensure the trial does not overlap with campaigns for the 2026 presidential elections.
Alexandre de Moraes, the justice overseeing the case, has denied those claims.
The final phase of the landmark trial, which could for the first time send a former Brazilian president to jail for threatening democracy, began on Tuesday and is expected to conclude by the end of next week.
Paulo Amador da Cunha Bueno, one of Bolsonaro’s lawyers, told Reuters that the former president will not attend any of the trial sessions.
The trial is unfolding under the glare of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has called it a “witch hunt” and retaliated by imposing 50% tariffs on many Brazilian goods and sanctions on Justice Moraes. Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo are being investigated for inviting Trump‘s interference in the case.
As he opened thecourt session on Tuesday, Moraes said a “criminal organization” had tried to coerce the high court to submit to “the scrutiny of a foreign state.”
But, he added, those efforts would not affect the court’s decision because “national sovereignty cannot, should not, and will never be vilified, negotiated or extorted.”
A PRISON SENTENCE COULD EXCEED 40 YEARS
Bolsonaro has always denied making any attempt to overthrow Brazil’s democracy, but he acknowledged at a deposition that he took part in meetings looking for ways to reverse the outcome of the 2022 election.
Prosecutors have also linked Bolsonaro to riots in Brasilia in January 2023, when thousands of his supporters invaded and vandalized the Congress building, presidential palace, and Supreme Court, in a grim echo of the U.S. Capitol invasion two years earlier by Trump supporters.
The maximum combined sentence for the crimes Bolsonaro is accused of in Brazil could exceed 40 years.
Vilardi said on Wednesday that the Supreme Court lacked evidence to convict Bolsonaro, arguing that prosecutors did not prove his connection to the rioters, and that the case’s main whistleblower, Bolsonaro’s former aide Mauro Cid, had changed his testimony several times.
Under these circumstances, he said, accusing Bolsonaro of crimes that could lead to a 30-year prison sentence “is not reasonable.”
Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, one of the former president’s sons, told Reuters on Tuesday that he believed the case was rigged because three of the five justices on the panel were “anti-Bolsonaro.” He pointed to their connections to leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who won the 2022 election.
Justice Flavio Dino previously served as Lula’s justice minister and Justice Cristiano Zanin was Lula’s lawyer. Moraes has unfairly persecuted his father, said Flavio Bolsonaro.
Past challenges by Bolsonaro’s lawyers arguing the justices were biased were denied by the court.
There are 11 Supreme Court justices, seven of whom were appointed by leftist presidents. The two justices appointed by Bolsonaro are not part of the panel ruling on his case. The five justices on the panel are chosen according to when they joined the court.
(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Luciana Magalhaes; writing by Gabriel Araujo and Manuela Andreoni; editing by Lisa Shumaker and Rosalba O’Brien)
