By 2015, Brazil’s long-running anti-corruption investigations had already implicated one major arms procurement program, the Scorpène submarine contract, when yet another scandal emerged with far-reaching consequences. This controversy, however, proved to be much more politically tinged than its predecessor, as it implicated two former presidents. For decades, the Brazilian Air Force had pushed the government to fund a new generation of combat aircraft. In 2014, Saab was granted a contract to provide 36 of the still-in-development E-variant of the JAS-39 Gripen combat jet, but the competitive tender came under almost immediate suspicion. Investigators have since built an influence peddling case against former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”), his son, and two intermediaries, alleging that Saab paid for Lula to promote their plane to then-president Dilma Rousseff. Because the allegations have never suggested that bribes were paid to an institutionally empowered decision-maker, whether Rouseff or anyone else, the classification of this scandal as an instance of corruption has been much more tenuous—adding further to its politicized nature. Compounding the problem has been the partisan perception that the larger anti-corruption push has been used by the Brazilian right-wing to discredit Lula’s Worker’s Party; this perception has been fueled by the unusually open political stance of Sergio Moro, the judge overseeing the anti-corruption drive, who was recently given a ministerial post in the new far-right government of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro.