The democratically elected president was impeached despite no allegations of personal corruption — by politicians who are knee-deep in bribery and kickback scandals.

Rousseff has been accused of ‘pedalling’, the illegal delay of re-payments to state banks) to mask public debt.

From the start of the campaign to impeach Brazil’s democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff,  The Associated Press reported:  “Independent auditors hired by Brazil’s Senate said in a report released Monday that suspended President Dilma Rousseff didn’t engage in the creative accounting she was charged with at her impeachment trial.” In other words, the Senate’s own objective experts gutted the primary claim as to why impeachment was something other than a coup.

The report did not fully exonerate Dilma, finding that she did open lines of credit without congressional approval, part of the impeachment case. But it was the pedaladas charge that did creative accounting that dominated the impeachment debate.

The primary pretext used to impeach her has just been debunked by the Senate’s own independent expert report. The corruption-plagued man they installed in her place — who currently has a 70 percent disapproval rating, and whom 60 percent of the country wants impeached — is now secretly meeting with the very judges whose supposed independence, credibility, and integrity were the prime argument against calling this a “coup,” all while he plots to save his bribery-enriched fellow party member. And while all this happens, they are blithely proceeding to impose an agenda of austerity and privatization that is undemocratic.

Whatever the motives were for getting rid of Dilma, illegality and corruption plainly had nothing to do with it. Just look at this week’s Senate report, or the face of the person they’ve installed, to see how true that is.