Far-right Congresswoman Carla Zambelli, the third-highest vote-getter in the country for the House in 2022, announced on Thursday that she was taking a temporary leave of absence for undisclosed health reasons.
Ms. Zambelli, a second-term lawmaker aged 43, has taken health-related leave on other occasions, including after a Covid diagnosis. In 2023, her office said the lawmaker was not vaccinated for Covid.
The Federal Police recently presented criminal charges against Ms. Zambelli. A staunch supporter of Jair Bolsonaro in the House, she is accused of ordering a hack of the judiciary’s servers — including breaking into the cell phone of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is also Brazil’s chief electoral justice. The hacker she hired for the job, Walter Delgatti, is also facing charges.
Last February, The Brazilian Report revealed that Mr. Delgatti, an infamous hacker who gained notoriety after breaking into Telegram accounts belonging to authorities, was hired to break into Justice Moraes’s phone and find dirt on him.
Additionally, the Supreme Court has made Ms. Zambelli a defendant for chasing a man at gunpoint through the streets of São Paulo. The incident took place in late 2022, on the day before the runoff election in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro.
Her defense attorneys appealed, but the court upheld the ruling.
Ms. Zambelli had over 946,000 votes for the House in her home state of São Paulo in 2022, a tremendous increase from her 76,000 votes back in 2018 when she was first elected.
A Jair Bolsonaro loyalist, she authored a motion to impeach President Lula this year for comparing Israel’s ongoing military operations in Gaza to the Holocaust.
The text argues that the “highest point” of the crisis with Israel took place when Brazil joined other countries in asking judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare Israel’s occupation of Palestine illegal, implying thus that comparison with the Holocaust is actually not the main problem.
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