Eduardo Bolsonaro with then-U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, 30 August 2019. Photo: White House.
Brazilian Liberal Party lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro and South American representative for CPAC, took a leave of absence from Congress today and announced he will remain in the United States to escape “political persecution” and pressure U.S. officials to impose sanctions against Alexandre de Moraes—one of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court Ministers—in an attempt to keep his father out of jail.
It is no secret that Eduardo Bolsonaro has been close to Steve Bannon and other key figures in Donald Trump’s circle since 2018. Similarities in billionaire-funded social media tactics used by Trump and the Bolsonaros are living testament to this, and the closeness that Eduardo has to leaders of the American far right is also demonstrated by his presence at the January 5, 2021, “war council” meeting in Washington, hosted by Mike Lindell on the eve of the U.S. Capitol invasion.
On February 18, 2025, Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office issued a formal indictment of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 32 of his cronies for the crimes of attempting a violent abolition of the Democratic Rule of Law, attempting a coup d’état, and forming an armed criminal organization.
Eduardo Bolsonaro immediately swung into action, contacting friends in the Republican Party and private sector alike. The next day, Rumble and Truth Social filed a frivolous lawsuit against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who was in charge of the investigation against his father. On February 24, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick released a public letter to President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in which he called for punitive actions against Moraes, including “Magnitsky sanctions, immediate visa bans, and economic penalties.”
On February 27, Workers’ Party Congressmen Lindbergh Farias and Rogério Correia filed a criminal complaint with the Attorney General’s Office against Eduardo Bolsonaro for conspiring against Brazil with members of a foreign government.
“The individual in question, completely disconnected from reality and acting against Brazil’s national interests, is encouraging a foreign government to impose retaliatory measures against his own country and one of the justices of the Supreme Federal Court,” reads a section of the complaint. Judging him a probable flight risk due to his network of connections in the American far right, they requested that the Federal Police confiscate his passport. Time has proven them correct, but the police did not act quickly enough.
On March 13, the net began to tighten around Jair Bolsonaro as the Attorney General’s Office officially upheld the indictment against Bolsonaro and his cronies, after a procedural period in which they were allowed to present their defense arguments. The Supreme Court then set March 25 as the date for the final review of evidence before formally setting a trial date.
This put Eduardo Bolsonaro in a quandary. With a complaint already filed against him for illegally abusing the power of his office to lobby for intervention in Brazil’s internal affairs by a foreign government—a crime so serious that, in theory, it could result in charges of treason—he had to choose between keeping his position as Congressman and complying with national security laws, or renouncing and moving to Florida, like so many right-wing Latin American politicians before him.
Bolsonaro is claiming his leave will be temporary, but going on leave of absence will not shield him from criminal prosecution for abuse of authority, crimes against the judiciary, and violation of national security laws. Like all Members of Congress, he enjoys a certain level of parliamentary immunity, but can still be investigated and tried by the same Supreme Court that he has been publicly attacking for the past five years. So if, as he announced on his social media today, his plan is to stay in the U.S. to find some way to “punish Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes,” he will probably have to stay there for a long time. The question is, how much damage can he do to Brazil’s national sovereignty while he’s up there?
This first appeared on De-Linking Brazil.
