The Senate floor on Wednesday confirmed, by a 58-18 majority, the nomination of attorney Cristiano Zanin for the Supreme Court. The outcome of the confirmation hearing was unsurprising — the last time the Senate turned down a president’s nominee to the highest court in the land happened in the distant year of 1894.
Mr. Zanin rose to prominence as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s personal lawyer, representing him in the many cases of Operation Car Wash, an anti-corruption taskforce, and later throughout the 2022 electoral campaign.
Electoral data shows that Mr. Zanin’s law firm billed the Lula campaign BRL 1.2 million (USD 250,000) for services during last year’s election.
Mr. Zanin will fill the vacancy left by Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, who retired in April after serving in the Court for 17 years. He was himself appointed by Lula at the end of his first presidential term.
In late January, Mr. Zanin was announced as the lawyer for Americanas, the giant retail company embroiled in Brazil’s biggest-ever fraud case. Americanas and Mr. Zanin’s law firm did not reply to The Brazilian Report on whether or not they are still a client.
During today’s public hearing, Mr. Zanin pledged to follow the law which bans judges from ruling on cases on which they previously worked in a different position (such as an attorney or prosecutor). But he didn’t commit to recusing himself in Car Wash cases which don’t fall under those limits.
Mr. Zanin is the co-author of a book on the concept of “lawfare,” a term he started using in 2016 in press conferences to portray his client Lula as an alleged victim of a “judicial hunt” by the Car Wash taskforce. At the time, the Workers’ Party was waging an international public relations campaign claiming that “partisan agents” were trying to prevent Lula from returning to power.
In 2018, the soon-to-become Supreme Court justice denounced what he saw as “abuse and ill-intended utilization of the law for political persecution.”
Mr. Zanin initially failed in defending his client’s freedom. Lula was convicted in July 2017 for corruption and money laundering, and arrested in April 2018. Over a year later, The Intercept Brasil published leaked conversations between the judge overseeing Car Wash cases and prosecutors.
The messages served as evidence in a later Supreme Court decision that ruled that Sergio Moro had been a biased judge. Lula, who had already been released after the court changed its understanding on a different procedural matter, would not return to jail.
The Supreme Court’s press office did not provide The Brazilian Report a list of senators with cases pending before the Supreme Court, but there are several. Former Senator Fernando Collor was recently convicted to eight years and ten months in prison for corruption and money laundering. The sentence was only handed down after he left office. Many senators would therefore have a vested interest in maintaining a good relationship with incoming justices, although their votes are cast by secret ballot.
Lula will nominate one more Supreme Court justice later this year, when Chief Justice Rosa Weber reaches the mandatory retirement age of 75.
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