ABSTRACT
The growing suspicion that a group within the political elite of Brazil was interested in removing the President Dilma Rousseff with the intention of saving their own hides was thus confirmed. So, in order to provide a firmer ground for initiating the process of impeachment, the opposition had to frame the impeachment petition around Rousseff's personal responsibility for certain fiscal delay. What was less visible at the time of the intervention was the Supreme Courts stake in securing the constitutionality of the impeachment process. In spite of the fact that the two issues were legally separate, the Lava-Jato scandal fed into the impeachment process in no small way, tangling together questions of political responsibility, hidden motives, and corruption. In a way, the greater scandal was really the skein of legitimacy and scandal, which permitted the maintenance of the facade.
