Brazil’s Far-Right Leader Lands in U.S. After Getting Boost From Trump

Flávio Bolsonaro landed in the U.S. Wednesday after the State Department granted the far-right Brazilian senator and his family visas.

Bolsonaro and his family arrived in Miami, the Associated Press reported.

After losing Brazil’s presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil on Sunday, Bolsonaro left Guayaquil in Ecuador for Miami, according to The Guardian. Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered the police to seize Bolsonaro’s passport Monday, as he was under criminal investigation for his connection to a vast money-laundering scheme. The politician was reportedly convinced that he would be arrested following his loss.

Bolsonaro’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is already serving a 27-year prison sentence in the country after being found guilty of plotting a coup when he lost to Lula in 2022.

Lula’s upset victories both times have been definitive blows to the Trump administration, and to any president who has refused to concede the results of a democratically held election. Donald Trump, who has criticized the former Brazilian president’s incarceration, baselessly claimed that his country’s elections had been “rigged.”

“It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” Trump told reporters Monday. “Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked very bad to me.”

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson over her testimony to the House January 6 committee has hit a snag. 

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., declined to indict Hutchinson, The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening, citing two anonymous sources. Neville S. Hedley, who told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui earlier that day that he was acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, had warned in court that the jury could not agree on an indictment. Hedley didn’t mention a name, but the Post’s sources said it was Hutchinson.

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been seeking charges against Hutchinson for months, accusing her of lying to the investigative committee. In March, Representative Barry Loudermilk referred her to the Department of Justice, and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signed off on it.  

Hutchinson was one of the star witnesses in the committee’s hearings, claiming that Trump was very agitated on January 6, 2021, and fully aware of the potential for violence. She testified that he wanted to march with his supporters on the Capitol, and was furious when his aides and Secret Service detail said that it wouldn’t be safe. 

Trump even tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine known as The Beast, and when a Secret Service agent took his arm, Trump grabbed the agent’s neck, Hutchinson said. Along with then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she said that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and overheard a conversation where Trump said that Mike Pence “deserves it,” regarding chants of “hang Mike Pence” heard during the riot. 

For now, though, Hutchinson won’t face criminal charges, although MAGA Republicans may try to indict her again. Trump keeps trying to settle old scores in his second term as president. For instance, his Department of Justice just charged former FBI Director James Comey for a third time. 

A federal judge tore into Department of Justice prosecutors Tuesday for attempting to file a new criminal complaint alleging that two ex-FBI agents had lied to Congress during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop.

At a hearing, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui refused to rubber-stamp a superseding complaint, which would have added an obstruction charge against former intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, who ran the intelligence division at the Washington field office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence.

Faruqui told the prosecutors that if they wanted to file a superseding complaint, then a judge would first have to find probable cause that a crime had actually been committed. Instead, the government had transmitted the complaint in the middle of the night and expected the judge to sign it.

Faruqui said that he believed the government had broken precedent by seeking a superseding complaint without first receiving a judge’s signature.

“I’m concerned with your view as to what the law is,” he said. “Why today, on this one case, have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?”

After Floris and Benavides surrendered on arrest warrants last week, Faruqui had ordered a hearing on Tuesday in order to establish probable cause for the initial complaint. Notably, the DOJ did not obtain a grand jury indictment against the ex-officials.

On Monday night, the government submitted an unsworn affidavit it claimed would support an additional obstruction charge. Faruqui refused to sign the complaint without reviewing it or finding probable cause, and proceeded to hold the hearing on just the first complaint.

Attorney General Todd Blanche’s July 2025 interviews with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell were reportedly a calculated effort to steer public blowback from the Epstein files away from Donald Trump.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a 50-page report on Monday accusing the Trump administration of a vast cover-up of the president’s involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal sex schemes. The report cites the experiences of 11 women, FBI records, and documents released through the Epstein Files Transparency Act. But one detail in the sprawling investigation hinted at an explicit attempt by Blanche to keep Maxwell from implicating the president in Epstein’s crimes.

Blanche notably did not ask Maxwell any questions about a certain Jane Doe, despite the fact that she was on the FBI’s radar for alleging that Trump attempted to orally rape her and subsequently punched her in the head when she was 14 years old.

At one point in the interview, Blanche vaguely mentioned testimony that alleged Epstein and Trump were involved with a 14-year-old, asking if Maxwell recalled “any obviously under-18 women coming to give him a massage?”

Maxwell volunteered that she believed Blanche was “talking about Jane.” But Blanche didn’t bite, instead responding simply, “yeah”—evidence that he was aware of the victim’s accusations.

As soon as Maxwell began to address Jane’s claims, Blanche “cut her off and instructed her not to share specifics,” according to the report. At other points, Blanche interrupted Maxwell to redirect her attention away from Jane’s allegations, arguing that he didn’t want to “get into … he said, she said.”

“Absolutely, not. I’m not—I don’t want to go there either,” Maxwell responded, adding, “I’m not going to do that.”

Maxwell tried to independently mention Jane later in the interview but was again shut down by Blanche, who abruptly cut her off to say he didn’t want to “talk about individuals.”

“The whole point of the conversation was not to uncover information but to create a conspiracy of silence and strategically deter Ghislaine Maxwell from sharing information that was not public at the time regarding the relationship between Trump and Epstein,” the report alleges.

Flávio Bolsonaro has fled to the United States after losing Brazil’s presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil on Sunday, according to multiple outlets.

Bolsonaro’s allies reported his escape to CNN Brasil, and Reuters also confirmed he is headed to the United States, citing two sources.

Brazilian outlet O Globo reported that the far-right senator “was convinced he could be arrested.” While both Bolsonaro’s departure point and destination are uncertain, another Brazilian outlet, Metropoles, reported that he was on his way to Florida to seek asylum. Bolsonaro’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is currently serving out house arrest in Brazil for attempting his own version of January 6. He also fled to Florida in late 2022 briefly before his arrest.

Bolsonaro, who has still not conceded the election to Lula, had his passport canceled by the Brazilian Supreme Court due to an active money-laundering case against him. He had until 11 a.m. Tuesday to turn his passport in, but of course didn’t show—fueling questions about his whereabouts.

The Trump administration has been quite friendly to Bolsonaro’s family and antagonistic toward Lula’s left-leaning government.

Neither Bolsonaro nor the U.S. State Department have made a public statement.