eduardo bolsonaro

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SEE ANTI COMMIE SINO CCP

format fail, see bak flavio BRO

MERRI OK

bossie?! bannon

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He has been a member of the Chamber of Deputies since 2015, and is affiliated to the Social Liberal Party (PSL). In 2018, he was re-elected to a second term as Federal Deputy, being the most voted lawmaker in Brazil's history after he received 1.8 million votes.^[3]

In February 2019, it was reported that Bolsonaro was joining The Movement. The European-based organisation supports right-wing populism and was founded by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. He is the representative for the group in South America.^[4][5]

In the Chamber of Deputies, Bolsonaro chairs the International Affairs and National Defense Committee.^[6]

Having previously lived in Maine and Colorado, Bolsonaro says he learned English while "flipping burgers",^[7] which led to his father inviting him to become ambassador to the United States.^[8] In October 2019, after being confirmed as leader of the PSL in the Chamber of Deputies, Bolsonaro withdrew from his nomination and President Bolsonaro nominated the Chargé d'Affaires Nesttor Forster.^[9][10]

On 31 October 2019, Bolsonaro threatened to introduce a "new AI-5" in response to accused left-wing radicalization.^[11] AI-5 or Institutional Act Number Five was the fifth of seventeen major decrees issued by the military dictatorship of Brazil that gave them the power to override the government and constitution.^[12]

Bolsonaro, signed the Madrid Charter, a document drafted by the conservative Spanish political party Vox that describes left-wing groups as enemies of Ibero-America involved in a "criminal project" that are "under the umbrella of the Cuban regime".^[13][14] He signed the document along with Rafael López Aliaga of Peru, Javier Milei of Argentina, José Antonio Kast of Chile and Giorgia Meloni of Italy.^[13][15] Following Meloni's success in the 2022 Italian general election, Bolsonaro celebrated her victory stating "Italy’s new prime minister is God, fatherland and family".^[16]

On March 2025, Bolsonaro announced on social media that he planned to step down as Deputyman and seek asylum in the U.S., after claiming that the Brazilian Supreme Court began considering the process to revoke his passport after he allegedly tried to intervene in the case revolving his father Jair in regards to the 2022 Brazilian coup plot; Brazilian top prosecutors denied Bolsonaro's claims.^[17]

Personal life

His brothers are Flávio Bolsonaro, a member of the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro from 2003 to 2019 and currently member of the Federal Senate, and Carlos Bolsonaro, a member of the Rio de Janeiro City Council since 2001. He married psychologist Heloísa Wolf on 25 May 2019, in a small wedding at Santa Tereza, Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro's father Jair, who was then president of Brazil, and his stepmother Michelle, attended the ceremony.

The couple's daughter, Geórgia Wolf Bolsonaro, was born in October 2020.

Eduardo is a big fan of the band Forfun.^[18]

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BRO FLAVIO FB

lávio Nantes Bolsonaro (born 30 April 1981) is a Brazilian politician,^[1] lawyer and entrepreneur^[2] who is the eldest child of the 38th President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro.^[3]

He was a Member of the Legislative Assembly of the State of Rio de Janeiro from 2003 to 2019,^[4] and was affiliated with the Social Liberal Party.^[5][6]

His brothers are Carlos Bolsonaro, a member of the Rio de Janeiro City Council since 2001, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of the Chamber of Deputies since 2015.^[7]

In the 2016 elections, Flavio Bolsonaro ran for mayor of Rio de Janeiro under the Social Christian Party (PSC).^[8] He participated in the first debate between the candidates, held by Grupo Bandeirantes de Comunicação. After fainting during the debate, Bolsonaro refused professional medical assistance from then socialist deputy and candidate Jandira Feghali.^[9][10][11]

In 2018, Bolsonaro was elected to the Federal Senate representing the state of Rio de Janeiro, having received 4.38 million votes (31.36%).^[12]

Bolsonaro has been accused of having ties to Rio de Janeiro's death squads.^[13][14]

On 25 August 2020, he tested positive for COVID-19.^[15] Less than two weeks later, he announced that he had been cured of the virus.^[16]

On 28 September 2020 O Globo reported that Bolsonaro had been indicted for graft and money laundering, citing a 300-page indictment seen by the outlet; the Rio de Janeiro public prosecutor's office issued a statement denying that any charges had been filed by that point.^[17] However, on 3 November, the prosecutor's office announced that they had asked a court on 16 October to approve indictments against Bolsonaro and sixteen others for alleged involvement between 2007 and 2018 in a scheme known as rachadinha, or pay splitting, while he was a state legislator.^[18] Following the November announcement, Bolsonaro issued a statement denying wrongdoing and expressing confidence that there was no evidence that would lead a judge to approve the charges.^[18]

In March 2021, Flávio Bolsonaro was accused of corruption after having acquired a mansion valued at 6 million reais. The purchase caused controversy because the value was considered incompatible with the senator's income.^[19] He alleges that he sold other properties, but such transactions have not yet appeared in notary offices.^[20][21]

References...

musk bolso chainsaw

no lnx an

'You have been gaslit': CPAC oozes MAGA's 'male inequality' agenda

People react as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 22, 2025.

Matt Laslo February 23, 2025

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — This just might be the year American men finally overcome centuries of political, cultural and marital oppression that have ravaged the gender and kept guys locked out of key policies, like the Violence Against Women Act.

That’s what one conservative vendor peddled at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. And they’re not alone. The oft-repeated message being subtly driven into CPAC attendees – is that the era of male victimhood is over.

Culture wars are now king.

In years past, the conservative confab focused on fiscal responsibility and cutting federal spending. This year — even as Republicans in Congress and the White House debate trillions of dollars in budget cuts — leaders stoked gendered culture wars.

“Don't allow this broken culture to send you a message that you're a bad person because you're a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you're competitive," Vice President J.D. Vance told CPAC attendees Thursday.

Eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives may have merely been a stepping stone. Conservatives have rallied behind a new, if antiquated, gospel of manhood as they work to turn back time and eviscerate what they call "wokeness" in real time.

At CPAC, this is truly a man’s world, or will be soon if the resurgent right succeeds.

“Male Inequality”

Masculinity is everywhere here at CPAC. It’s tangible, making this year’s conference feel more like an all-male retreat than the policy-focused escape the annual event was before President Donald Trump remade American conservatism in his image.

In these conservative confines, there’s no gender pay gap (even as statistics show women earn roughly 75 cents for each dollar a man makes). Women’s suffrage, practically speaking, is a fairy tale of a bygone era. While Bibles abound, the Book of Ruth and its strong, central female cast, is an afterthought (if a thought at all).

The real problem is “Male Inequality,” according to the newly launched Men’s Equality Network, or MEN.

‘Areas of Male Inequality’ — a pamphlet MEN are handing out at this year’s CPAC.

At CPAC, MEN seeks to drum up support for the hashtag #genderequalityformen, while also giving away free caps emblazoned with “Watchdog: Stop the gender agenda.”

MEN's tagline succinctly sums up the mission that drives the group: “assuring due process, fairness and equal opportunities for men.” And while they may only be a few weeks old, MEN has already attracted 18 partners, ranging from United Families International to the Child Custody Coalition.

The group is so new, it hasn't held its first meeting. But MEN soon plans to start hosting monthly training sessions with partner organizations, then storm the marble halls of Washington, demanding equality for men.

And MEN has allies in powerful places in Trump’s Washington.

"Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place," Vance opined from the CPAC main stage. He, like MEN, provided no evidence to support his contention.

While the group is surely easy to single out, it's far from alone in its drive to restore manhood to its properly patriarchal perch at CPAC but also throughout society.

"Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood”

Entering this year’s hall of vendors at CPAC, it’s seemingly impossible to miss the loud magenta “Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood” banner next to a cardboard cutout of President Trump.

Defund Planned Parenthood photo (Photo credit: Matt Laslo)

A few rows away, at first blush, the booth for "Date on the Right" seems dedicated to online romance for Republicans. But the material seems more focused on connecting hardline conservatives with their policy dreams.

Instead of promising long-term love, the group’s selling point feels more politically inclined than lifemate: “Dating for conservatives: only two genders – male and female allowed. No pronouns but male or female allowed.”

Other booths are dotted with free swag seeking to uproot political correctness — “I support free speech, not political correctness,” reads one sticker — through slogans like, “God, Guns and Girly Things” or “Woman: an adult human female.”

“We have an entire generation of young men who are smoking weed, watching porn, not getting married — not even pursuing women,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told CPAC attendees. “We have this thing called incels — involuntary celibates. It's terrible. And we can't become a great nation again — we can't make America great again — until our men are great again.”

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven”

For attendees, conservatives are undeniably victims. The thousands gathered at CPAC are set on righting those past perceived wrongs.

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven every time you picked up a newspaper in the United States,” conservative anchor Megyn Kelly told the crowd. “Every time you’ve turned on CNN. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been bullied — or seen others with lesser power — bullied by the media and the leftist Democrats. You have been a victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what’s best for you and your life.”

While this may be MEN's year, conservative women aren’t going quietly.

CPAC may be a man’s world these days, despite all the powerful women in today’s GOP, like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who, at 27, is the youngest person to ever hold the prestigious role.

On the CPAC stage this week, former White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp — wife of CPAC chair Matt Schlapp who a sheriff wrote up earlier this month for allegedly groping a man — asked Leavitt about being a woman in Trump world.

"Look at the White House and look at the exceptional Cabinet President Trump has put together," Leavitt said. "While we don’t care about identity politics…the president has appointed Susie Wiles, our first female chief of staff in United States history; Brooke Rollins heading up as our secretary of agriculture — look across the entire Cabinet. There are incredible women — Linda McMahon, leading the Department of Education — the list goes on and on."

As for her advice to young women, Leavitt departed from her party’s new man-centric mantra.

"Stay strong, speak the truth and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t achieve your dream, or you can’t get to that next step. Just believe in yourself, because there will be a lot of people who don’t believe in you, who cast doubt on you, who talk bad about you," Leavitt said. "Screw ‘em. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter."

NOW READ: Whoever tries to tell you that Trump is Christian needs to look up this passage in the Bible

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in 2024, the United States enjoyed a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil, meaning the U.S. is importing a lot more goods to Brazil than Brazil is importing to the U.S. But U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening Brazil with a 50 percent tariff — not for economic reasons, but because he claims that far-right former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is being treated unfairly.

Bolsonaro is on trial for what Brazilian prosecutors are describing as a coup attempt. In 2022, Bolsonaro was voted out of office and lost to left-wing now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but he tried to stay in office nonetheless — not unlike Trump after he lost the United States' 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden and made false, repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud.

If Trump follows through with his 50 percent tariff on Brazilian goods, all the coffee that Brazil imports to the U.S. could become a lot more expensive (as Frank Sinatra famously sang, "they've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil"). But according to The Guardian's Tom Phillips, Trump's threat is only making things worse — not better — for Bolsonaro.

"Bolsonaro could face up to 43 years in prison if found guilty of masterminding a botched coup attempt after losing the 2022 presidential election," Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in an article published on July 16. "He is expected to be convicted and sentenced by the (Brazilian) Supreme Court in the coming weeks…. The U.S. president apparently expected his intervention to improve the outlook for Bolsonaro, 70, who is already banned from running in next year's election. Bolsonaro's senator son, Flávio, urged Lula's administration to immediately cave in to Trump's ultimatum by offering his father an amnesty from prosecution…. But a week after Trump's tariff announcement, the ploy seems to be backfiring badly."

IFrame Content

Phillips continues, "The move has reinvigorated Bolsonaro's left-wing rivals, given Lula a bounce in the polls and prompted a wave of public anger, largely focused on the Bolsonaro clan who have spent years portraying themselves as flag-loving nationalists."

On Tuesday, July 15, Brazil's Estado de São Paulo — a conservative publication — slammed Bolsonaro as an opportunist, saying, "Jair Bolsonaro couldn't care less about Brazil. He's a phony patriot."

Lula is standing up to Trump. The photo published with Phillips' article shows him wearing a hat that reads, in all caps, "O BRASIL E DOS BRASILEIROS" — which, in Portuguese, means "Brazil is for Brazilians."

Silvana Marques, a Brazilian teacher and activist who is vehemently critical of Trump and Bolsonaro, is urging Brazilian officials not to cave in to "crazy" Trump and considers the Bolsonaros "a family of traitors."

Marques told The Guardian, "We cannot allow this to happen…. And the Americans must be thinking: Are we really going to have to pay 50 percent more for the things we import from Brazil just to defend this worn-out old horse?"

*Read Tom Phillips' full article for The Guardian at this link.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/brazil/new-right-pretends-be-isolationist-their-rhetoric-brazil-shows-couldnt-be-further-truth

no lnx vid

The new right pretends to be isolationist. Their rhetoric on Brazil shows that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Right-wing pundits are increasingly embracing the Monroe Doctrine, one of the oldest expressions of US imperialism, and looking to manufacture a new cold war against China in the process

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 01/13/23

Right-wing media personalities are increasingly embracing a two-century-old expression of U.S. imperialism called the “Monroe Doctrine,” and exposing their own militaristic impulses in the process.

Fox News’ top star Tucker Carlson and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have both recently endorsed the Monroe Doctrine as a guiding principle, undercutting their supposedly isolationist views on U.S. military policy. In both cases, the conservative pundits invoked the doctrine as a means of opposing what they see as China’s increasing political and economic importance in South America, specifically in Brazil.

Bannon and Carlson both position themselves as antagonists towards the neocons, a faction of the conservative movement that ascended during the presidency of George W. Bush and was a driving factor in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The so-called America First ideology that Bannon, Carlson, and others in the Trump-aligned wing of the conservative movement identify with is sometimes described, incorrectly, as isolationist. Their recent invocations of the Monroe Doctrine suggest that, far from being isolationists, these conservatives are increasingly interested in dominating China militarily, especially in the Western Hemisphere.

Carlson, Bannon, and their allies have adopted a new Cold Warrior posture, with China replacing the great boogeyman of the USSR, and Brazil — for now — taking the place of Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and other countries where the U.S. waged proxy wars against the perceived communist threat. But whatever investments China has made in South America don’t, or shouldn’t, justify the recent insurrection in Brazil, which right-wing media in the United States celebrated.

A much better approach would be to support interstate partnerships following the “pink tide” that has surfaced across Latin America since 2018. Leftist leaders have been elected across the region in recent years, most recently in Colombia and Brazil. The ability of these left-of-center governments to fulfill their promises toward greater social equality remains in question, as their countries are still shackled with the conditions created and defined in many ways by the Monroe Doctrine.

“The United States deployed this doctrine [the Monroe Doctrine] to keep Latin America subordinate to U.S. interests, whether through direct interventions like coups, invasions, and assassinations or institutional arrangements like free-trade agreements and painful structural adjustment programs,” write David Adler and Guillaume Long in The American Prospect. “As a result, Latin American countries remain highly dependent on exporting raw materials to large powers like the U.S., and importing high-value products and sophisticated technology.”

The two argue that “Latin America must be free to build the independent institutions that it deems necessary to guarantee health, security, and a strong economy in an increasingly turbulent world.” The Biden administration could — but hasn’t — adopted this approach, which would likely have the added benefit of building regional resiliency against a potentially unwanted Chinese incursion. But because the Latin American leaders who could implement this policy are various stripes of socialists, they face strong headwinds from U.S liberals and overt hostility from conservatives.

Carlson, the Monroe Doctrine, and “our hemisphere”

Last year, Carlson’s team made a documentary-style film about Brazil that conspicuously avoided discussing whether then-President Jair Bolsonaro would respect the results of the upcoming election, or if he’d attempt to stay in power using extrajudicial means.

Carlson began the film by offering his definition of the Monroe Doctrine, and explicitly claiming U.S. imperial domain over the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

Video

CitationFrom the September 22, 2022, Tucker Carlson Original The China Takeover: Brazil

“In 1823, President James Monroe announced a policy that has been the center of American foreign policy for the last 200 years, called the Monroe Doctrine,” Carlson began.

“Great powers would not be allowed to control nations in the Western Hemisphere,” he continued. “That would be a direct threat to the interests of the United States. And for 200 years, we haven't allowed it.”

Carlson then accused President Joe Biden of changing that policy, saying the doctrine was “no longer enforced,” in part because the administration was overly focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility and into the void left by the United States moves a new superpower,” he concluded. “We've come to Brazil to see for ourselves the rise of China and how the government of China is replacing the United States as the dominant power in our hemisphere.”

Carlson’s use of the first-person plural, possessive phrases here — “our hemisphere” — is key. The “our” clearly refers to the United States, not a broader collective of self-governed countries in the hemisphere. In Carlson’s rendering, the fight is between the United States and China for dominance over Brazil – not for Brazilian sovereignty in itself.

The rest of the movie is a series of fearmongering accusations leveled against China, all in support of Carlson’s primary thesis: that the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to turn Brazil into a de facto colony. Carlson appears more upset that China is supposedly taking on this role (instead of the United States) than that any country is engaged in this kind of imperial project in the first place. “There is one government left in South America that is sympathetic to the United States, and it's this one here in Brazil,” Carlson said to conclude his film. “But it's being ignored by the Biden administration for ideological reasons. When the smoke clears, China may control Brazil too.”

Carlson has casually asserted the United States’ rightful domain over Latin and South America before. In February, he reported that China had “announced a partnership with Argentina, in part on currency.”

“Argentina's president also said his nation would join China's Belt and Road Project,” he continued. “Again, it's in our hemisphere. Monroe Doctrine, anyone? But it's happening, and nobody is even mentioning it.”

Bannon’s New Cold War

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is almost monomaniacally obsessed with China’s rise and the threat he believes it poses to U.S. hegemony, both globally and specifically in the Western Hemisphere. As one small but telling example, his show’s bumper music is a rap song by Chinese dissident — and Bannon-backer — Miles Guo whose hook is: “Let’s take down the CCP.”

Shortly after pro-Bolsonaro forces staged an insurrection by storming multiple Brazilian governmental buildings, Bannon invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify the rioters’ actions. Bannon falsely characterized President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, as nothing but a puppet of the Chinese government, and argued that China is attempting to seize power across the region.

The CCP aims to create “Latin America as a communist superstate backed by the Chinese Communist Party directly aimed at the United States,” Bannon said. “This is what the Monroe Doctrine is about.”

“Our founders, our framers warned us, ‘Don’t go searching for monsters to slay in Ukraine — watch what they do here in the Western Hemisphere,’” he continued.

“We’re not in a great position, and now we have it in our hemisphere,” his guest,Matthew Tyrmand,responded. “China, under Lula, will have control of the entire wealth, and power, and geopolitical strategic positioning of South America.”

South America “will be a Marxist superstate should the Brazilians accept Lula as their leader,” Tyrmand added.

Video

CitationFrom the January 9, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Bannon and Tyrmand had previously had almost the exact same discussion, including the invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, on the night of Bolsonaro’s loss in late October.

“The communists, the CCP foothold in this hemisphere has been growing already, and this would be very deleterious,” Tyrmand said. “And of course we’ve got corrupt, senile, comatose vegetable in the White House fiddling as our Rome-hemisphere burns.”

“And so, all of MAGA should understand, these are our allies in Brazil,” Bannon responded, referring to Bolsonaro and his supporters.

“Remember, this hemisphere was kept orderly because of the Monroe Doctrine,” Bannon continued. “We absolutely had a line in the sand from the beginning of this republic that there would be no foreign interference in this, in this — and by the way, for 200 years we've been adamant about that.”

He added that now “the CCP” is “deeply involved in a takeover” of “the most significant country in Latin America, South America.”

Video

CitationFrom Steve Bannon's Gettr account, streamed October 30, 2022

In the summer of 2021, Bannon spoke with conspiracy theorist and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec at least twice about China’s role in the Western Hemisphere. As protesters took to the streets in Cuba, cheered on by right-wing U.S. media, Posobiec expressed his outrage that foreign countries would warn the United States not to meddle in the demonstrations. Like Carlson, he referred to “our hemisphere” in describing U.S. dominion over sovereign countries.

“Yesterday you had China, Iran and Russia — came out and they put out a statement jointly saying the United States needs to not interfere in Cuba,” Posobiec said. “I'm sorry. No, you don't get to tell us in our homes what happens in our hemisphere. This is the Monroe Doctrine."

“That was U.S. policy, bipartisan for generations in this country,” he continued. “Who are you to say that you were going to tell us what's going on in our backyard? No, I don't think so. Are we a great power or not?”

As in the more recent case with Brazil, Posobiec invoked the Monroe Doctrine explicitly as a justification to counter hypothetical Chinese expansionism. “What's Joe Biden going to do? What's [Secretary of State Tony] Blinken going to do when you've got Chinese subs off the coast of Havana?” Posobiec asked. “Because you know that's coming next. You know, what are you going to do? Are you going to stand up and defend our hemisphere, to defend our national interest or not?"

When they returned to the topic that October, the two were even more explicit in their comparisons to the Cold War. During the segment, Bannon’s producers showed a graphic that was reminiscent of anti-communist propaganda from the 1950s, lest the point get lost on any War Room viewers.

Video

CitationFrom the October 20, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

Bannon asked Posobiec to “talk about the Chinese Communist Party, what they are doing in South America and the Caribbean, and the direct impact on the United States of America.”

“The United States has largely, you know, in the past been sort of seen as sort of the hegemon when it comes to the Western Hemisphere,” Posobiec replied. “This goes back to Monroe Doctrine.”

“This is classic U.S. policy,” he continued. “It's the idea of when the Soviet Union wanted to get a foothold in Cuba and plant their missiles.”

Posobiec then argued that “now you're seeing China come in to play that role,” before claiming that “of course they're going to Cuba; of course they're going to Venezuela, but they're doing everything they can to get into these countries like Colombia, like Brazil, like Bolivia, Argentina.”

He added that then-President Bolsonaro is “the guy that's fighting back against what China is doing” and that if China “can take over Brazil, they are going to be able to use that to control the entire South American continent.”

America First means MAGA empire

Carlson and Bannon both exert considerable influence over the shape of the Republican Party. They are not simply talk show hosts, but political operators whom Republican politicians often seek to curry favor with. Both played significant roles in the GOP’s approach to the midterms, for example. Carlson provided Republicans with messaging support, endorsed candidates in primaries, and then attempted to help those candidates win. The same is true for Bannon, who dedicated his show to pushing an unrelenting stream of election denialism prior to last November’s contests.

Both Carlson and Bannon — as well as the rest of the Republican Party — fared poorly in the midterms, but that doesn’t retroactively negate their influence. Indeed, the early days of the new House GOP majority suggest that hardliners in the Carlson and Bannon mold are as empowered within the caucus as they’ve ever been. When the two of them show their true colors as imperialist neo-Cold Warriors, they can be seen as a stand-in for a much larger element within the broader conservative movement.

For Carlson, Bannon, and their fellow travelers, America First isn’t a call for directing public policy to benefit people living in the United States, no matter their protestations. It is instead a rearticulation of a standard ideology based on U.S. dominance, both in the Western Hemisphere and in what they see as the larger geopolitical battle with China. In this way, their philosophy is not nearly as different from the neocons as they claim it is.

Where the neocon project was largely justified under a flimsy pretext of spreading democracy, America Firsters are reimagining and recreating Cold War-style global power struggles. This context is key to understanding and deciphering conservative foreign policy goals and rhetoric in the coming election cycle. The Trump wing of the movement may pay lip service to opposing U.S. foreign wars, but their chauvinistic invocation of the Monroe Doctrine shows they believe in maintaining U.S. military and political hegemony, just like their factional rivals.

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trump coup war room?!

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-had

NO LNX MANY VID?

Team Trump Had a Second Pre-Insurrection War Room

An investigation of who was in this second Insurrection Eve war room has now begun.

Seth Abramson

Jun 6

Introduction

As this publication has exclusively and exhaustively detailed, on the eve of the January 6 insurrection Team Trump convened a 23-person war council at Trump International Hotel in D.C. to plot out—as attendees have since confessed—what would happen the following day. It is now clear that a second, contemporaneous pre-insurrection war council was held at a nearby Washington hotel and that it may well have been linked, through either phone or video conferencing, to the first.

This previously unreported news could significantly swell the size of Donald Trump’s pre-insurrection planning team, even as it remains possible (indeed, a possibility that has been extensively investigated here at Proof) that any remote conferencing that occurred the night before the January 6 insurrection also included the White House.

The Two War Rooms

The group that convened at Trump International on January 5 included, per eyewitness accounts previously compiled by Proof, the following members of Trump’s family, legal team, campaign staff, advisory corps, donor class, circle of friends, allies in Congress, and presidential administration:

Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie,Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Adam Piper, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck, Layne Bangerter, and two additional unnamed U.S. senators, one of whom prior Proof reportssuggest was Ted Cruz (R-TX). Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander“attended” by phone.

Other possible attendees—whose status is still being investigated in light of evidence they were present—include Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Guiliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. As Proof has previously noted, and as will become vital to the account below, four individuals from the two lists above now claim (or have had it claimed by legal counsel) that they weren’t, in fact, part of any meeting involving Trump International Hotel on January 5, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Those individuals are Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and David Bossie.

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dad and pr guy mar A LAGO COVID POSITIVE?

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https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-trump-brazil-scandal-did-donald

no pix twt with kush jan 8?

Introduction

When Proofpublished a major exposé on the potential involvement of the Brazilian government in the planning of the January 6 insurrection—in the form of significant evidence that the son of the Brazilian president, Eduardo Bolsonaro, as well as many Trump donors with significant ties to Brazil, attended a secretive January 5 meeting at Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel—a shrewd Proof reader asked (I here paraphrase), “How would the Brazilians have been able to aid Trump and his political team so close to the day of the insurrection?”

One possible answer is that, as we know from major-media reporting, the Brazilians had been working with Team Trump since early 2019 on weakening Venezuela, even as Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a gaggle of top Trump advisers (including now-Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas and notorious Trump national security adviser Erik Prince) were secretly negotiating with Venezuela’s government in ways they believed would benefit both themselves and Donald Trump’s political career. This possibility forms the basis of the following article, which includes, as well, a bundle of new evidence suggesting that the January 5 “war council**” involving all of Trump’s top advisers—an event lied about by a number of them—may in fact have involved not just one but two locations, and possibly the President of the United States himself.

{Note: See the national bestseller Proof of Corruption, published by Macmillan in mid-2020, for a whole chapter on the clandestine negotiations between top Trump agents and Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela.}:

Sidney Powell and Rudy Giualiani

When Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell, who for weeks had been working alongside Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani, announced nearly two months before the January 6 insurrection that she had secret sources in South America who were working with her to uncover smoking-gun evidence of voting-machine manipulation in the 2020 presidential election, the curtain suddenly rose on a large rogues’ gallery of possible Trumpist accomplices in Brazil and Venezuela. Tellingly, Giuliani began to publicly distance former president Trump from Powell the moment Powell began referring to clandestine political operations allegedly under way in South America. So why did Powell’s references to that continent necessitate a public split from the president and his family, when months and even years of QAnon conspiracy theories spilling from Sidney Powell’s lips had failed, apparently, to necessitate that critical political pivot?

According to a report in the New York Times, at a time post-election when Trump was working with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to support dissident elements in Venezuela—particularly on the question of whether Venezuela’s recent elections had been rigged to aid the nation’s current socialist president (unrecognized by the U.S.), Nicolas Maduro—members of Trump’s legal team suddenly gained access to “an affidavit…signed by a former military official from Venezuela about elections there”, as well as evidence (now widely believed to be manufactured) that “elections software company Smartmatic helped the Venezuelan government rig its [recent] elections by switching votes and leaving no trail.”How in the world would an obscure former federal prosecutor from Texas get connected to Venezuelan dissidents? What channels would a private citizen use to get in touch with elements of a hostile foreign governmentnot recognized by the United States, indeed the hostile foreign government Trump had publicly mused about invading? No one knows, and not only wouldn’t Powell say, but per the New York Times she would only show partial screenshots of the evidence in her possession—perhaps concerned that providing entire documents to the media might reveal their provenance.

It is worth repeating here that her legal partner in Trump’s scurrilous post-election lawsuits, Giuliani, presently represents and for some time has represented one of the most powerful—and corrupt—dissidents in Venezuela, Alejandro Betancourt, who is currently a wanted man in the United States, and whose Spanish castle was used by Giuliani as he was secretly trying to rig the 2020 presidential election as part of what is now known as the “Trump-Ukraine scandal.” Moreover, that Sidney Powell’s longtime client Michael Flynn is an Erik Prince associate; that Prince had in December of 2019 held secret talks with both Venezuelan dissidents and representatives of the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro; that Trump had expressed little admiration for Juan Guaidó,implying that he is resigned to a Maduro government in Venezuela;and that Trump had himself ostensibly spent 2019 working with Jair Bolsonaro to undermine Maduro—but only enough to put pressure on Maduro, not to effectuate any significant change in the governance of Venezuela, all point toward a coordinated Trump effort to acquire evidence of election fraud in Venezuela that began with Bolsonaro’s 2019 rise to power in Brazil and coincided with Trump’s own preparations to falsely announce evidence of voter fraud if he lost the 2020 presidential election.

{Note: Keep in mind that Trump and his closest associates have a long history of preparing voter fraud claims well in advance of an election. For instance, it was in mid-2016 that top Trump political adviser Roger Stone launched the so-called “Stop the Steal” movement—doing so many, many months before the 2016 presidential election to poison the well of Americans’ faith in their national elections’ integrity in the event Hillary Clinton was elected.}:

Daniel Beck and Eduardo Bolsonaro

As has just been reported by Revista Fórum in Brazil, it was shortly after Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, after having been elected at the very end of 2018, that the fortunes of certain top Trump allies started to rise in Brazil as part of—according to reports by local media—the newly elected president’s bid to strengthen his ties with Donald Trump.

According to Revista Fórum, a company run by QAnon conspiracy theorist, Txtwire CEO, and January 5 “war council” attendee Daniel Beck—the son of Doyle Beck, a powerful GOP official in the blood-red state of Idaho who may also have been at the war council—“won in December [2019] a bid of [$2,041,700 U.S. dollars] to arm vehicles of the Federal Highway Police (PRF), under the [Bolsonaro] Ministry of Justice.”

Beck’s company, Combat Armor Defense, also won, after Bolsonaro’s election but before he had assumed power, a contract from the Brazilian Ministry of Defense: a more modest $50,000 contract, one that would soon be dwarfed by the one earned after the Bolsonaro administration was in place. Just so, according to Revista Fórumthe Trump-donor-run company only “installed itself in Brazil after the election of Jair Bolsonaro, in 2019. Combat Armor’s headquarters are [now] in Vinhedo, in the interior of São Paulo.” The Brazilian media outlet notes that Beck and his company plan to soon“open a new [facility] in Indaiatuba [in Brazil]”, the clearance for which would likewise have been granted by the Bolsonaro administration prior to the January 6 insurrection in the United States.

Notably, the most powerful member of the Brazilian House from São Paulo is none other than Eduardo Bolsonaro—the son of Jair Bolsonaro and the head of the House Foreign Relations Committeein Brazil. The younger Bolsonaro is, therefore, as important to the future of Daniel Beck’s company as any government official in Brazil with the sole exception of the President of Brazil himself.

It’s under these circumstances that the FBI will undoubtedly be asking the following question: if Daniel Beck was invited, for no reason anyone can fathom, to participate in a twenty-person secret meeting about the January 6 plan-of-attack at Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel on January 5—an illicit event that we know included two members of Trump’s family, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and concerned the political, legal, financial, professional, and personal future of the then-President of the United States, their father Donald Trump—and if the Brazilian official most significant to the livelihood of the aforementioned Daniel Beck was at that very moment in D.C. meeting with the aforementioned President of the United States and Donald Trump’s other politically active adult child, Ivanka Trump, exactly what are the odds that at some point these two meetings were conjoined via video teleconference or speaker phone?

{Note: I am leaving out of this essay—as it’s a topic worthy of its own article—the longtime and highly controversial links between late Trump donor Sheldon Adelson and special treatment for his casino plans in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro was working to aid those plans when Adelson died.}:

Charles Herbster and Layne Bangerter

Before the FBI gives a final answer the question above—about the possibility that the now-infamous January 5 “war council” was held simultaneously in two locations—it will first need to wrestle with another, damnably thorny one: why did one of the self-admitted attendees at the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting, Charles W. Herbster, originally report on Facebook that the meeting was in fact taking place at the White House? For that matter, when Herbster then edited his post to change the location from the White House to Trump International Hotel, why did he delete the name “Rudy Giuliani” from his post but make no other edits? In other words, why did Herbster consider it accurate to say that Giuliani was at the meeting, but not accurate to pin Giuliani’s location during the meeting as Trump International Hotel? Or, in the alternative, why was it deemed important to keep Rudy Giuliani—he of the top-shelf South American connections related to prior Trumpist attempts to steal the 2020 election, and the only person present at the January 5 war council with a professional duty to report out its result to the President of the United States, were the president not to attend himself—out of the January 5 pre-insurrection picture altogether?

We know that there were “call-ins” to the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting during its run-time, as Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander says he spoke to top Trump political adviser and Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle at a time she was in the Trump International Hotel meeting. We also know, as previously reported by Proof, that there were others besides Daniel Beck inside Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel who would have good cause to know Eduardo Bolsonaro, including powerful GOP official Layne Bangerter, whose connections to not just Brazil generally but São Paulo specifically go back decades. And we know that Michael Lindell—and possibly, per a January 6 livestream by the MyPillow CEO and former crack addict, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn—were all with Eduardo Bolsonaro at some point on January 5. So how much sense would it make for there to be no January 5 uplink between Donald Trump’s public residence (the White House) and his private residence (Trump International Hotel), at a time when so many interconnected persons were meeting at these two locations to discuss the same topic[pix w 5 ? ppl blurred]

Note: Everything about the above January 5 social media post, made at a time when Daniel Beck couldn’t have known it would be controversial—lending it important indicia of reliability from an investigative standpoint—contradicts recent statements by Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who claimed his presence at the meeting lasted only five or ten minutes, not “the evening”, and that the topic of discussion was “2022”, not “the elections [of 2020], illegal votes [in 2020], court cases [in 2020], the republics’ [sic] status [in 2020] and what to expect on [Capitol Hill] tomorrow [January 6, 2021].” Proof has asked before and will ask again: having already been caught lying about his presence at the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting, why would Tuberville continue lying? Who that was present at that meeting—either live or via teleconference uplink—would be worth Tommy Tuberville lying to protect at a moment that he would reasonably believe himself to be under aggressive FBI investigation?}:

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro

It’s worthwhile, now, to return for a moment to the Trump-Bolsonaro relationship.

It’s not just that Trump and Jair Bolsonaro purportedly share the same goals with respect to Venezuela—I say “purportedly” because of the evidence that Trump used Giuliani, Prince, and Sessions to try to strike some sort of murky deal with Maduro that would allow him to remain in power (see Proof of Corruption), though it’s not clear what information or other assets Maduro would have had to provide Trump in return—it’s that Bolsonaro’s particular focus in his dealings with Trump has been on the matter of election integrity, and how the issue of election integrity could be cynically leveraged to undermine (in, one notes, a classic neo-fascist irony) election integrity.

Per a report by WSWS, on the evening of Insurrection Day Jair Bolsonaro declared,

“I followed everything [that was happening at the Capitol]. You know I’m connected to Trump. You know my answer [about whether I think the 2020 election was stolen]. Now, [there have been] a lot of [voter] fraud allegations, a lot of [voter] fraud allegations.”

But Bolsonaro didn’t stop there. In the shadow of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government that had only just ended, he opined about his own recent election: “Mine [my 2018 ‘first-round’ election] was defrauded. I have proof of it. I should have won in the first round.”

On January 7, the day after the insurrection, President Bolsonaro continued railing about election fraud: “What was the problem [in the United States on Insurrection Day]? Lack of trust in the vote. So there, the people voted [in November] and the mail vote was boosted because of the so-called pandemic, and some people voted three or four times. Dead people voted. If we don’t have printed ballots in 2022 [in Brazil], some means to audit the vote, we are going to have a problem worse than in the U.S.”

In view of the foregoing, the FBI must now investigate whether Trump’s legal team—present at the January 5 war council at Trump International Hotel—believed that the Bolsonaros, both father and son, were key allies in getting evidence of “voter fraud” in Venezuelan elections. Such evidence would have been critical to Trump’s publicly confirmed, twelve-part pre-inauguration plan to hold onto the American presidency.

{Note: On Wednesday, March 10, Proof will publish the details of this twelve-part plan, which prominently includes the absolute necessity that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell publicly present new and compelling evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election in the days immediately following Eduardo Bolsonaro’s visit to the United States.}:

Eduardo Bolsonaro

As much as Eduardo Bolsonaro may have billed his several-day trip to Washington as a “vacation” from his official duties, and as much as he may have attempted to double down on this thin ruse by posting a picture of himself at the White House with Ivanka Trump holding his newborn daughter Georgia Bolsonaro (with his wife, Heloísa Bolsonaro, claiming that the purpose of the trip to the White House was simply to visit “Aunt Ivanka”) all of the available evidence suggests that Bolsonaro did nottravel to Washington 48 hours before an armed insurrection against the United States Capitol and leave Washington 48 hours after an armed insurrection against the United States Capitol—meeting with Trump family members, Trump administration officials, Trump campaign officials, Trump lawyers, and Trump political advisers at various locations throughout his stay—just to take a photo of a family friend holding his baby.

Consider the following facts:

WSWS reports that Bolsonaro’s trip to the White House was “on the evening of January 5,” meaning that it coincided with the Trump International Hotel war council attended by at least one of Bolsonaro’s key foreign “constituents.”The timing of the meeting—approximately sixteen hours before the most important moment in Donald Trump’s life, given the repercussions he stood to face legally and politically and financially if he lost the White House—is not consistent with a social visit, nor is the simultaneous (and otherwise inexplicable) invitation of two men Eduardo Bolsonaro would have reason to know, Daniel Beck and Layne Bangerter, to Trump’s private residence inside Trump International Hotel.
Bolsonaro brought the outgoing Brazilian ambassador to the United States with him to the White House on January 5. By bringing Nestor Forster Jr., Brazil’s outgoing ambassador, with him to the White House, Bolsonaro ensured that Trump would spend the last few hours before a potential civil insurrection—one whose potential dangers Trump was already aware of, given the public lies he had already told about going to the Capitol the next day, when in fact he had no intention of doing so—with the two most important diplomats from the nation of Brazil, by January 5 Trump’s most staunch ally in the entire Western Hemisphere. Forster’s presence also gives the lie to Heloísa Bolsonaro’s patently silly “Aunt Ivanka” story. Moreover, given that President Bolsonaro had wanted Eduardo to be his ambassador rather than Forster, and given that Forster was on his way out of his role, and given that (say it with me) Eduardo’s dad is the President of Brazil, the delegation Jair Bolsonaro sent to the White House on January 5 not only had to be received by President Trump himself but could not possibly be seen by Trump and/or his family as having anything less than the full authority of the Bolsonaro administration behind them. Indeed, Eduardo’s social media posts from January 5, while hiding the full scope of his visit to the White House, acknowledged his visit’s significant and indeed undeniable diplomatic import.
Eduardo Bolsonaro had met with President Trump before, suggesting that it would’ve been a “snub” if Trump had refused to meet with him on January 5. Jair Bolsonaro brought his son with him, rather than his foreign minister, when he met with Trump and Trump’s home in Florida, Mar-A-Lago, in March 2019, less than 90 days after Bolsonaro’s inauguration. It is nearly impossible to conceive of Trump refusing to see Eduardo Bolsonaro when the son of one of his top foreign allies in the world was in the White House. So why didn’t Eduardo Bolsonaro’s social media postings on January 5 acknowledge a visit with the President of the United States? Why, instead, did Bolsonaro—and for that matter his wife—use social media to create the cover story that they were only at the White House to introduce their daughter to “Aunt Ivanka” in her suspiciously-close-to-the-Oval-Office personal office inside the White House? {Note: Trump has a history, documented in the Proof trilogy, of “dropping in” on meetings that aren’t on his schedule in order to meet privately with individuals without having these meetings appear in any records. In one of the most damning examples of this, Trump “dropped in” on a meeting between his lawyers, Paul Manafort, and Manafort’s lawyers by suddenly showing up on speakerphone to tamper with a federal witness—urging Manafort to “stay strong” as the FBI was trying to get him to flip. This event is detailed in the Proof trilogy.}:
Eduardo Bolsonaro didn’t go to the White House just once during his 120 hours in America—he went at leasttwice. Most don’t realize that not only did Eduardo Bolsonaro travel to the White House, the seat of the Trump administration and Ground Zero for January 6 planning, on the evening of January 5, he also returned to the White House on January 8 to meet with—perhaps among unnamed others—Jared Kushner (see photo below).
If Tuberville, attending an event at Trump International Hotel with several other senators, was indeed “asked to speak” about the future of the U.S. at an event that was ongoing at one of three times—while Eduardo Bolsonaro was at the White House; while Bolsonaro was meeting with Lindell, who attended the Trump International event; or at some other point when Bolsonaro was in D.C. blocks from where Tuberville was speaking—what would cause Bolsonaro tomisssuch an event?
It is important to remember that Eduardo Bolsonaro runs Brazil’s House Foreign Relations Committee, had been used by his father as an ambassador to the Trump administration in the past, and was with his nation’s designated ambassador to the U.S. on January 5. What could (at least) three United States senators be talking about on the eve of Joe Biden’s certification as president-elect that Bolsonaro would nothave wanted to and been intended tohear? Why would such a presentation, from at least three members of the upper house of Congress who would help determine America’s future on January 6, be of utility and interest to Txtwire CEO Daniel Beck and a couple of GOP officials from Idaho, but not top Trump ally Eduardo Bolsonaro? Why would Bolsonaro, who is friends with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and would spend at least some part of his D.C. trip with Michael Lindell (and possibly Lindell’s constant pre-insurrection companions, per Lindell, Giuliani and Powell and Flynn) but then be kept from attending a meeting all six of these people allegedly attended?

Steve Bannon

All of the above is made more troubling by the presence of Steve Bannon as the White House’s top outside political adviser in the days leading up to the insurrection. There is no evidence that Bannon was at Trump International Hotel on January 5, but we do not yet know if he was at the White House or in communication with either the White House or Trump’s private residence at Trump International Hotel on that critical date.

What we do know is that Bannon helped Donald Trump to strategize for January 6—and that Eduardo Bolsonaro is one of Bannon’s closest associates.

As WSWS notes, Eduardo, who may well have met with Trump mere hours before the insurrection, “is a close associate of American fascist ideologue Steve Bannon. As for [Brazilian ambassador Nestor] Forster [Jr., who was with Eduardo Bolsonaro at the White House on January 5], he has worked as a bridge between [Jair] Bolsonaro and Trump loyalists. The conservative dailyEstado de S. Paulorevealed that Forster has fed the Brazilian cabinet…reports from the far-right, pro-Trump media about fraud in the U.S. elections in order to support [Jair] Bolsonaro’s alignment with Trump.”

Not only does this reporting bring both Eduardo Bolsonaro and Nestor Forster deeper into Trump’s inner circle in the hours before the insurrection, it also underscores that when Bolsonaro and Forster went to the White House on January 5 they were focused on the very same thing Donald Trump was: “reports from the far-right, pro-Trump media about fraud in the U.S. elections.”As noted already at Proof, both above and in prior articles, the Bolsonaros’ association with this topic is both a domestic one (i.e., a focus on Bolsonaro’s own claims of election fraud, which would be bolstered if Trump could establish, however fraudulently, that such activity occurs at a high level even in the United States) and an international one (i.e., inasmuch as both Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro believe that the key to toppling the regime of a supposed mutual enemy in Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, was spiriting out of Venezuela evidence that Maduro won his recent elections by fraud—“evidence” that would simultaneously benefit Bolsonaro in his ongoing contestations with Brazil’s northern neighbor, and Trump in his efforts to “prove” that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him).

The Typo Heard Round the World

All of which brings us back to Charles Herbster, a Trump administration official on January 5 and yet a man who couldn’t—if we are to credit what he and other Trumpists are implicitly telling us—distinguish between the White House and a Trump hotel. Indeed, whatever the outcome of the ongoing FBI investigation into the White House’s connections to the January 6 insurrection, can anyone identify a more bizarre “typo” by a Trump administration official, or indeed anyone associated with the American government, than a top Trump adviser stating, by accident, that he was at the White House—the White House—when he really wasn’t?

To be clear, there is no evidence that Herbster was at the White House rather than Trump International Hotel on January 5. The question here is what Herbster could have seen or experienced on January 5 that would cause him to accidentally place himself, in a social media post, at the White House. What might cause confusion of this sort? David Bossie, said by Herbster to be a January 5 meeting attendee, tried to convince the Alabama Political Reporter that (in somewhat kinder terms) Herbster is senile, but the facts don’t support it: the wealthy Herbster was not only a Trump administration official on January 5 but an ambitious one, having announced plans to run for the governorship of a (technically) purple state, Nebraska. So rather than asking whether Charles Herbster has lost his memory, perhaps we should be asking a question about another man’s memory: Tommy Tuberville’s. Is the extraordinary fact of the Herbster “typo” at all related to the extraordinary nature of Senator Tuberville’s “confession” to having been at Trump International Hotel—which confession contains within it a slew of new and seemingly unnecessary lies?

{Note: Keep in mind that Herbster didn’t just edit his Facebook post: he posted it, he edited it, he deleted it, and then re-posted it, suggesting that he realized at some point in this sequence of events how explosive it was.}:

It must be emphasized that the notion that the President of the United States’ public residence in D.C. having a ready-to-roll video-conferencing hook-up to his private residence in D.C. is not only not far-fetched, it’s consistent with what we know about security protocols and Trump’s proclivities. Certainly, the president would want and in some cases need ready access to staff at the White House while relaxing at his private residence a few blocks from the Oval Office. And if such a hook-up does exist, it adds nothing to this commonsensical presumption to say that it would be state-of-the-art.

Jared Kushner and Eduardo Bolsonaro

Another unanswered question: why did Eduardo Bolsonaro have to return to the White House less than 72 hours after he left it, on January 8? What business was unfinished?

What we know for certain is that, at a minimum, Bolsonaro met with one of Trump’s top political advisers, Kushner, during his return visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: twt pix w/ kush]

This is the translation of Eduardo Bolsonaro’s captioning of his meeting with Kushner:

“I was pleased to be received at the White House, albeit quickly, by Jared Kushner, [who was] responsible for so many peace deals in the Middle East. [His] simultaneous approach, based on [a] dialogue between Arabs and Jews, invented a new paradigm [that can] be followed by other world leaders.”

Just as Eduardo Bolsonaro explained his January 5 visit to the White House to meet with a member of the Trump family as a mere friendly visit with “Aunt Ivanka,” here the Trump-liaison son of the President of Brazil, a top Trump ally—again oddly unwilling to say whether he spoke to the President of the United States while he was at the White House—uses a slightly different cover story, assuring his social media followers that his trip to the White House was “quick.” Needless to say, this was and is impossible for his followers on social media to confirm, but Bolsonaro’s seemingly unnecessary editorial remark raises more questions than it answers. If Bolsonaro had already been at the White House less than 72 hours earlier, what communication did he need to have with one of Trump’s top political advisers that couldn’t have occurred via phone? Especially if the interaction was intended to be “quick”?

Second, Bolsonaro’s lauding of Team Trump for simultaneously communicating with both sides of an entrenched divide has echoes of Trump’s apparent foreign policy in South America that cannot be ignored. Is the analagous situation Eduardo Bolsonaro is imagining Trump’s agents simultaneously speaking with the Maduro government and the Venezuelan opposition led by Juan Guaidó? Or is he referring to his father at once reaching out to the both the Trump administration and the incoming Joe Biden administration? We cannot know for certain what Bolsonaro was referring to, but we can say that on January 8 the young Bolsonaro (also known as “bananinha” or “Little Banana” in Brazil) was his country’s de facto ambassador to the United States, meeting with the Trump adviser (perhaps among others) who had acted as his own country’s de facto ambassador to basically every autocratic nation Trump had sought to do illicit business with—Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, for instance—and then declaring that “other world leaders” should use the clandestine negotiating tactics Kushner had perfected during his time in the White House. While cryptic, this message deserves consideration by federal officials investigating what Bolsonaro was doing in America during the insurrection.

Conclusion

As already noted at Proof, Eduardo Bolsonaro is considered to be one of the most corrupt men in Brazil, with his noteworthy specializations including (a) clandestine negotiations with foreign leaders, (b) working with rough-and-ready paramilitary forces to illegally seize and maintain control of civilian areas, (c) paying middlemen for illicit services, and (d) being a “Trump whisperer” to not just the former president himself but his family and whole inner circle.

It is certainly worth the FBI investigating whether Giuliani’s confidence that he could get smoking-gun evidence of voting irregularities in the ten days after a presumptively delayed joint session of Congress was prompted by his significant contacts in South America, just as the mystery of Daniel Beck’s attendance at the January 5 war council— along with others with ties to the very city represented by Eduardo Bolsonaro—could be explained by the possibility that these two men were at the same meeting on January 5 rather than different ones, and that the President of the United States was also present.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-uses-coronavirus-fears-to-advance-bannons-far-right-agenda/

When President Donald J. Trump delivered his latest market-rattling remarks on the coronavirus pandemic from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, political reporters collectively scratched their heads over the president’s announcement of a ban on travelers from Europe and cargo coming from the continent. (The cargo ban was later walked back.)

But anyone paying attention to the rise of the global right knew what Trump was up to: using well-founded fears of the virus’s spread in the U.S. to strengthen the hand of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile chief White House strategist, in the former’s quest to weaken the European Union.

In his remarks, Trump blamed European travelers for “seeding” the “foreign virus”—first identified in China—on American shores, and blamed Europe for the spread of the new coronavirus, because, he said, the E.U. had not banned travel from China as the U.S. has. “And taking early intense action, we have seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe,” Trump said, conveniently omitting the fact that Europe has a viable testing regimen, while it’s still impossible for most people in the U.S. to obtain a test for COVID-19, as the new coronavirus is formally known. Consequently, no one knows just how many people in the land of the free are freely walking around, spreading the virus. Nor do we know how many deaths from respiratory failure are due to the new virus.

While a number of claims made by Trump in the remarks he delivered from the Resolute Desk have since been walked back by various government agencies, it is notable that a clarification from the Department of Homeland Security says that the European countries affected by the executive order signed by Trump include only those in the Schengen area, which means those that are party to a multi-nation agreement to maintain open borders among them. Most of those 22 nations are members of the E.U.

In other words, this is an ideological and punitive action against those nations for daring to act in coalition—and for having demonstrated, since 1985, the value of such a compact.

Since before his ouster from the White House (for saying mean things about Trump’s son, Don Jr., daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner that were reported in the Michael Wolff book, “Fire and Fury”), Bannon has been working on growing the right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, with a foremost goal of busting up the E.U. While he served as an executive at Cambridge Analytica, Bannon helped fuel the Brexit referendum that has led to the United Kingdom’s departure from the E.U.

In his Wednesday-night remarks, Trump said that the U.K. would be exempt from his European travel ban—never mind that confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.K. leapt by more than 20 percent since Trump spoke to the American people yesterday from the Oval Office, now standing at 596, with 20 deaths reported. “However,” according to the BBC, “the actual number of people infected could be between 5,000 and 10,000, the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said.”

Politico notes that the parameters of his European travel ban functionally exempt travelers from Trump’s own properties in Scotland and Ireland.

In addition, Trump’s framing of COVID-19 as a “foreign virus” fits neatly into one of Bannon’s newer projects, a group he calls Committee on the Present Danger: China, whose major donor, Guo Wengui, appears to be Bannon’s latest sugar daddy, now that he’s said to have been abandoned by his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer.

While Trump and Bannon may have their personal differences, it is clear that they’re working in tandem. The constellation of right-wing actors that forms the alliance colloquially known as Bannon World are firmly on team Trump, as was obvious at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which has become, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the Trump campaign. (The conference is run by Matt Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes works for the Trump campaign. Matt Schlapp and his roster of speakers at the four-day conference almost all effusively praised the president, with many urging his reelection.) Bannon World speakers at CPAC included former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Brexit Party Chairman Nigel Farage, Brazilian politician Eduardo Bolsonaro and China critic Gordon Chang.

The American Conservative Union, which stages CPAC, reported last week that one this year’s CPAC attendees—revealed today to be the Republican donor Alan Berger—tested positive for the virus after attending the conference.

Tags: Donald J. Trump Donald Trump Jr.Eduardo Bolsonaro Gordon Chang Guo Wengui Ivanka Trump Jared Kushner Matt Schlapp Mercedes Schlapp Michael Wolff Miles Kwok Nigel Farage Rebekah Mercer Robert Mercer Sebastian Gorka Steve Bannon Bannon World Coronavirus European travel ban global far-right American Conservative Union BBC Committee on the Present Danger: China Department of Homeland Security European Union Politico

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https://theintercept.com/2019/03/18/jair-bolsonaro-family-militias-gangs-brazil/

no lnx pix many

BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO is in Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. While the trip officially is focused on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela, it is being billed by the Bolsonaro government as a “restart” of his presidency and image after multiple, serious scandals crippled the first three months of his presidency.

But when it comes to recreating his image, the timing of this trip could hardly be worse. Key news events of the last several weeks — including the arrests of two former Rio de Janeiro police officers for the March 2018 assassination of Rio City Council Councilor Marielle Franco — have highlighted the most damaging and, to many, most terrifying revelations about Bolsonaro and his three politician sons: their extensive, direct, multilayered, and deeply personal ties to the paramilitary gangs and militias responsible for Brazil’s most horrific violence.

Watch our video report on the growing, multilevel, personal, and highly disturbing links between Bolsonaro and his family on the one hand, and the country’s most violent, lawless, and murderous paramilitary gangs on the other:

Just consider how, even before the arrests of Franco’s killers last week, so many deep ties had already emerged between Bolsonaro and his sons, who won office principally on an anti-crime and anti-corruption platform, and the paramilitary gangs composed of current and former military police officers and military members. Bolsonaro himself is a former army captain who served during Brazil’s military dictatorship and left in the 1980s amid allegations of misconduct; yet, even now as the president, he still has his friends and aides address him as “Captain.”

In January, the Rio de Janeiro police executed a full-scale raid against the city’s most dangerous militia, the one that houses within it the terrifying murder-for-hire team known as “the Crime Office.” That assassin team is composed of highly trained police officers who use their specialized knowledge of investigations and assassin skills to carry out murders with very little possibility of detection, and they have long been the leading suspects in Franco’s assassination, given how professional and frighteningly efficient that murder was carried out.

The January raid resulted in the arrest of five of the top six commanders of the militia. The only one who escaped, and is still a fugitive, was the chief of that militia: ex-police captain Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega (pictured right, from a prior arrest). Wanted for other murders, and subject to an Interpol arrest warrant, he has presided as the leader of Rio’s most terrifying militia, the one that police concluded carried out Franco’s assassination with such chilling precision.

That raid led to a shocking revelation: Unbeknownst to the public, the mother and wife of Nóbrega — one of Brazil’s most notorious gangsters — were both receiving salaries from the state. That’s because both of them were formally employed by Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, for the entire last decade as he served as a state representative in the Rio de Janeiro state legislature. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president last November, Flávio moved up to the Federal Senate as a result of winning his election in Rio with a massive vote total.

Shortly after this highly incriminating connection was revealed, a dam collapsed in the interior of Brazil and tragically killed more than 200 people, understandably replacing news coverage of virtually all other events. That resulted in far less attention being paid to Flávio’s close connections to Nóbrega’s family than was deserved. So just reflect on that: Jair Bolsonaro’s son had on his official government payroll the mother and wife of one of the country’s most notorious and psychopathic paramilitary leaders, the fugitive chief of the militia responsible for the assassination of Marielle Franco, among countless other murders.

In February, Flávio’s direct and intimate ties to militias became even more glaring. Checks were found issued in the name of his campaign account signed by the sister of two twin-brother militia members, Alan and Alex Rodrigues de Oliveira, arrested in a large-scale police raid last August. Just months prior to the arrest of these two militia brothers, Flávio posted to his Instagram a photo of himself and his father, then a presidential candidate, at a birthday party for the two militia twins, congratulating them and heaping praise on the family.

IN RETROSPECT, that Flávio had such close personal connections to Rio’s militias that he put the mother and wife of its most notorious chief on his payroll should not have been surprising. As a state legislator, he twice bestowed on the top militia leaders, then police officers, formal awards and honors, praising them for their civil service to their communities.

Far worse, in 2011, Brazilian Judge Patricia Acioli, who, along with Brazil’s left-wing PSOL party, was overseeing a sweeping criminal investigation into militias and heroically sent numerous high-ranking police officers to prison, was brutally murdered outside her home, horrifying not just Brazil but the world. While all Brazilian politicians expressed horror and disgust at this brazen attack on the rule of law — showing that militias could just murder whoever they wanted, even judges sending their leaders to prison — Flávio posted a tweet that basically blamed her for her own murder, criticizing her for provoking the militias:

Jair Bolsonaro himself has a history of multiple ties to Brazil’s militias and several of its key leaders. He has twice, on the floor of the Congress, explicitly praised their death squads as good for the country’s security and crime problems. On one occasion, after various members of Congress from the northern region of Brazil warned of the growth of death squads and extrajudicial murders carried out by growing police-composed militias, Bolsonaro stood to explicitly praise them as crime-fighting patriots and declared them “welcome” in Rio de Janeiro.

Since then, those militias have taken over huge swaths of Brazil’s most critical cities, including Rio. A January investigation from The Intercept Brasil found that militias have virtually taken over the entire city.

In sum, the Bolsonaro movement has been fixated on Brazil’s crime epidemic, and anger over growing violence was arguably one of the two main factors in the rise of that movement (the other being anger over systemic political corruption). But when Bolsonaro and his family speak of crime, they almost always try to focus attention on the primarily black drug traffickers who live in the city’s poor favelas, and virtually never speak of the far more menacing, serious, and terrifying source of criminality carried out by the Bolsonaros’ ideological companions and heroes of the country’s sophisticated and skilled militias:

That Bolsonaro — despite how central his anti-crime posture is to his political popularity — is eager to praise, rather than condemn and combat, militias is not hard to understand. Those militias are ruled by his friends, neighbors, comrades, and closest associates.

The militia member who worked as Flávio’s driver for the last decade and whose large money movements — including one into the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife — triggered the first scandal of his presidency, ex-police Officer Fabrício Queiroz, is one of Bolsonaro’s oldest and closest friends. When police sought to question him about those money movements to the Bolsonaro family, he unsurprisingly went into hiding in the precise neighborhood, Rio das Pedras, most notorious for being commanded most thoroughly by Rio’s most violent militia.

WHEN TWO OF FRANCO’S KILLERS were finally apprehended last week, just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of her assassination, nobody was surprised that they had both been members of Brazil’s military police. The extreme professionalism with which that murder was carried out, including the still-unexplained coincidence that numerous public security cameras on the path they chose to pursue her had been turned off in the days before the assassination, left no doubt that militias were responsible.

But almost immediately after the police announced the identity of the two assassins they arrested, ties to Bolsonaro emerged. The shooter himself, police Sgt. Ronnie Lessa, lives on the same street as Bolsonaro’s Rio house, in an exclusive gated community: an extreme coincidence given how massive and sprawling of a city Rio de Janeiro is. In other words, one of Franco’s assassins — the man who pumped four bullets into her head — turned out to be Bolsonaro’s neighbor, both of whom lived in close proximity in a very rich neighborhood despite working their entire adult lives on the public payroll.

Shortly thereafter, a photo emerged of Lessa and Bolsonaro together, posted to Lessa’s social media account. Police then confirmed that Bolsonaro’s 20-year-old son and Lessa’s daughter had been dating. While none of those facts are close to dispositive in terms of linking Bolsonaro to Franco’s murder, those are a lot of coincidental connections to have between a three-decade member of Congress and the current president of the Republic, on the one hand, and the murderers who pumped four bullets into the skull of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most prominent and inspiring left-wing politicians on the other.

As part of the police search of the assassins’ properties, the police apprehended the single largest collection of armaments in the history of Brazil’s democracy: 117 M-16 automatic rifles. Notably, they were apprehended not in the favelas on which the Bolsonaros obsessively fixate when talking about crime, but in a luxury condominium owned by a former police officer who is part of the militia that assassinated Franco and which has multiple ties to the Bolsonaro family:

m16-1552922172Armaments seized from the house of one of the accused assassins of Marielle Franco, including 117 M-16 automatic rifles, from Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Rio Civil Police]

Days later, the police — despite still not having apprehended the people who ordered and paid for Franco’s assassination — insinuated a political motive to her killers. Consistent with Bolsonaro’s denunciation of the sweeping investigation of militias led by Franco’s political mentor, Marcelo Freixo of the left-wing PSOL party (the same party of Jean Wyllys, the gay congressperson who last month fled Brazil and gave up his congressional term under highly specific death threats), reports emerged that Franco’s assassins were overt Bolsonaro supporters.

The police also indicated that they had seized the computers and other electronic devices of the two killers, and discovered that, subsequent to Franco’s assassination, the murderous militia pair had searched and monitored the movements of numerous human rights activists, left-wing journalists, and politicians (one of those specified by the police was my husband, David Miranda, now a congressperson from the same left-wing party as Freixo, Franco, and Wyllys).

All of this mounting evidence — most of which has been unearthed just in the 10 weeks since Bolsonaro’s January 1 inauguration — paints a deeply disturbing and dangerous picture. Brazil — the world’s fifth-largest country, with massive oil reserves and the world’s most critical environmental region in the Amazon that the current government wants to sell off to the highest industrial bidders — is in the hands of a family with multiple, close, and growing connections to the country’s most murderous, criminal, and sociopathic death squads and paramilitary forces.

As Bolsonaro meets Trump at the White House tomorrow, that meeting should be understood first and foremost within this context. Bolsonaro has quickly elevated himself to the top echelon of the world’s most thuggish, violent, and dangerous leaders. And given the stakes raised by Brazil — geopolitically, culturally, economically, environmentally, and militarily — this is clearly one of the most profoundly disturbing developments of the last year. Whatever else is true, the media focus on Bolsonaro’s presence in the White House should feature these facts prominently and centrally if the reporting is to accurately reflect who he is and what he represents.

A makeshift memorial is pictured during a protest of Brazilian expats against the killing of Rio de Janeiro's left councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco in Berlin, Germany on March 18, 2018. Marielle Franco, who criticised openly racism and police brutality, was shot with his driver Anderson Pedro Gomes in the city center of Rio de Janeiro in the evening of March 14, 2018. (Photo by Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Who Killed Marielle Franco? An Ex-Rio de Janeiro Cop With Ties to Organized Crime, Say Six Witnesses in Police ReportTOPSHOT - Brazil's newly sworn-in President Jair Bolsonaro is pictured during his inauguration ceremony, at the Congress in Brasilia on January 1, 2019. - Bolsonaro takes office with promises to radically change the path taken by Latin America's biggest country by trashing decades of centre-left policies. (Photo by NELSON ALMEIDA / AFP) (Photo credit should read NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro’s First 53 Days as President of Brazil Have Been a Resounding, Scandalous FailureThe president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro (C), arrives for a press conference on the appointment of the ministers of Citizenship, Tourism and Regional Development at the headquarters of the transitional government in Brasilia on November 28, 2018. (Photo by Sergio LIMA / AFP) (Photo credit should read SERGIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro Promised to End Corruption in Brazil — Then He Appointed an Extremely Corrupt CabinetJair Bolsonaro, far-right lawmaker and presidential candidate for the Social Liberal Party (PSL), gives thumbs up to supporters, during the second round of the presidential elections, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on October 28, 2018. - Brazilians will choose their president today during the second round of the national elections between the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro and leftist Fernando Haddad (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP) (Photo credit should read MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words.

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/marielle-franco-assassination-conspiracy-bolsonaro

Just two days before the March 14 one-year anniversary of Marielle Franco’s assassination, civil police arrested two men alleged to be directly involved in the murder of the black, favela-born, bisexual city councilor for the Radical Left Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) and her driver Anderson Gomes. Marcelo Freixo, Franco’s fellow PSOL member, political mentor, and friend, called the one-year wait for arrests “unacceptable.”

The arrests seemed almost deliberately timed to coincide with mass mobilizations in Rio and across Brazil demanding an answer to the questions: Who killed Marielle and Anderson — and more importantly, who ordered them killed? It’s one more coincidence in a case in which everything reeks of coincidence and conspiracy.

Ronnie Lessa, the man suspected of firing into the car carrying Franco, Gomes, and Fernanda Chaves — Franco’s aide who survived the attack and just recently returned from hiding in Europe — happens to live in the same gated community in Rio’s Barra de Tijuca neighborhood (Rio’s glitzy, fake version of Miami) as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. This, despite a meager pension of 8,000 reais (slightly over $2,000 USD). The District Attorney also confirmed that Bolsonaro’s youngest son, twenty-one-year-old Renan, dated Lessa’s daughter. But, the office emphasized, those are just coincidences.

And Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, suspected of driving the car from which Lessa fired the thirteen rounds from a submachine gun rarely found outside police departments in Brazil, has at least two pictures with then-presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.

Lessa, according to District Attorney for Rio State Letícia Emile Petriz, has not been proven to be connected to any paramilitary criminal organization. He’s said to have acted out of “repulsion for [Franco’s] political activity” in defense of “causes related to minorities.”

This account helps those in power sidestep the key question: who ordered Franco’s assassination? With Lessa acting nearly alone, with just Queiroz behind the wheel, we can depoliticize a political assassination.

Police carried out thirty-four other raids and arrests related to the case, one of which led to the seizure of 117 M16 assault rifles in what police say is the largest stock of guns ever apprehended in Rio. The guns were found in the home of one of Lessa’s childhood friends. The homeowner claims he was just doing a favor for his buddy.

As Marxist theorist and Situationist Guy Debord warned about the relationship between the state and organized crime in this stage of late capitalism: “There are ever more people trained to act in secret; prepared and practiced for that alone.”

In Rio, there is a name for these people: The Office of Crime, a hit squad comprised of elite police officers (like BOPE, a unit similar to SWAT).

Coincidentally, when he was a congressman for Rio State, now-senator Flavio Bolsonaro used to employ the mother and daughter of Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, the fugitive ex-BOPE officer suspected of heading the band of hired assassins.

At this point it would be a conspiracy theory to suggest that the Bolsonaro clan, or someone very close to it, called for the assassination of Marielle Franco. Coincidences are the bread and chem trails of conspiracy theories. However, between coincidence and full-blown conspiracy lies the act of conspiring. The assassination has shed light on the open secret that Rio’s political class, including the Bolsonaro clan, does conspire with deadly militias. This conspiracy with militias secures votes through intimidation, illegal campaign funds, and the deaths of political rivals.

Given the recent threats against Marcelo Freixo and fellow PSOL congressman Jean Wyllys — leading Wyllys to go into exile abroad — another open secret is that these acts of violent conspiracy are increasingly targeting socialist politicians.

Militias in Plain Sight

For those familiar with Rio, there never seemed to be any question that Franco’s assassination was carried out by one of Rio’s infamous militias. These bands of active and former police officers, military personnel, and firefighters purport to combat drug trafficking gangs but largely operate as extortionary mafias who also dabble in arms and drug trafficking. They control large swaths of Rio’s territory inhabited by the predominantly black and brown working class. They are particularly active in Rio’s still chaotically urbanizing West Zone, of which Bolsonaro’s Barra neighborhood is a nouveau riche, shopping mall-riddled enclave.

Indeed, the evidence of militia involvement has long been apparent in the public security knowledge present in the plot itself. The thirteen bullets fired at the car came from an allotment stolen from the federal police in 2009 and associated with the 2015 massacre of seventeen people in São Paulo. The two Cobalt model cars used in the drive-by shooting bore cloned licensed plates. Security cameras near the scene of the assassination had been turned off, though cameras did record one of the cars outside of the “Black Women Changing Power Structures” event that Franco attended prior to her death. Reports indicate that Lessa had Google-searched places that Franco frequented prior to the assassination. Everything indicates that this was the work of professional hitmen with political connections and that Queiroz and Lessa, who was shot by a masked man on a motorcycle while at a beach near his home just one month after the Franco assassination, are co-conspirators.

Incidentally, the idea that Lessa and Queiroz acted alone goes against much of the earlier official announcements related to the case. In late November, the federal Minister of Public Security Raul Jungmann, who oversaw the military intervention of Rio that Franco herself denounced and that failed to prevent her assassination, stated that based on testimonies “it is clear that a powerful scheme involving public agents, milicianos, and politicians does not want the case to be solved.” In other words, the assassination and the cover up were, and continue to be, a political conspiracy.

At Tuesday’s press conference, PSOL called for a national parliamentary inquiry into militias. Such an inquiry would mirror Freixo’s 2008 state-level investigation — which Franco worked on as his then-aide. The report implicated over two hundred Rio state politicians, police officers, and other public officials, though resulted in fewer arrests.

Militia activity has actually expanded since the 2008 inquiry. For his part, Freixo has received death threats ever since its publication, most recently in December of last year. Those threats, in fact, came on nearly the same day civil police raided the addresses associated with several militia members with sensationalist paper Veja even running a headline declaring: “Police arrest first suspects in Marielle’s Case.”

The Bolsonaro Clan and the Office of Crime

During Bolsonaro’s campaign, and preceding political life, the connections between his family and militias seemed mostly rhetorical. Jair Bolsonaro had adopted his “a good thug is a dead thug” campaign slogan from a former Rio miliciano and politician. He even openly praised death squads in Bahia on the floors of Congress, stating that “as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, these extermination groups, in my understanding, are welcome.”

Yet suspected direct links have recently emerged due to an investigation into irregular deposits involving his son, Flavio Bolsonaro, former congressman for Rio State and recently elected federal senator.

At the center of the ongoing investigation is Fabricio Queiroz (not to be confused with the Élcio Vieira de Queiroz suspected of driving Lessa in the hit against Franco). Fabricio Queiroz is a longtime friend of Jair Bolsonaro’s and served as an aide and driver to Flavio when he was a state congressman. In December, the Financial Activities Control Council (COAF) released a report documenting how Queiroz moved over 1 million reais in and out of his bank account between January 2016 and January 2017. He even cut a check to Jair Bolsonaro’s wife Michelle for 24,000 reais, though the family has brushed it off as a repayment for a personal loan. Queiroz has since confessed to using the funds to hire even more staffers for Flavio ahead of his senate campaign — supposedly without his boss’s knowledge. Additionally, as a congressman, Jair Bolsonaro employed Queiroz’s daughter Nathalia as a staffer, though she was rarely if ever in his Brasilia office.

.Isn’t it ironic, or at least an interesting coincidence, for a family that propelled itself to political power vowing to combat corruption?

But that’s not the end of it. The investigation into Queiroz’s transactions revealed Flavio Bolsonaro’s connections to Nóbrega, who the reader will recall is suspected of heading the “Office of Crime” militia hit squad. This militia allegedly operates out of the West Zone favela of Rio das Pedras, where Queiroz allegedly hid out to avoid questioning about his irregular bank activity.. The Bolsonaros insist that Queiroz bears sole responsibility for contracting Nóbrega’s wife and mother to Flavio’s congressional staff. Yet Flavio used his position as a state legislator to award honors to Nóbrega for his police activity — not once, but twice. Nóbrega is currently at large.

The investigation into Franco’s assassination revealed the existence of “the Office of Crime,” and even with the apprehension of Lessa and Elcio de Queiroz, it remains one of the principle lines of investigation into the case. On August 19, O Globo first reported the existence of the hit squad — led by current and former elite police officers — via the testimony of one of its members.

The assassins for hire operate throughout Brazil for prices ranging from 200,000 to 1 million Brazilian reals depending on the target. The Globo report goes so far as to say police have unconfirmed information that the Office of Crime charged 200,000 reals for Franco’s murder, but sought more after the overwhelming public repudiation of the crime both locally and internationally.

Governance by Conspiracy Theories

The Bolsonaro family has proffered their own conspiracy theories. Throughout the investigation and even following Tuesday’s arrests, the Bolsonaro family has appropriated the rallying crying for justice for the deaths of Franco and Gomes, asking, “who ordered the death of Jair Bolsonaro,” in reference to the September 6 stabbing of the then-candidate at a campaign rally in Minas Gerais. However, Bolsonaro’s alleged attempted murderer, Adélio Bispo da Oliveira, was apprehended shortly after the incident and has since been cooperating with the investigation.

In his most bizarre retaliatory conspiracy theory, President Bolsonaro took to his Twitter account to claim that “decades of governments with a socialist bent” had turned Brazil’s iconic carnival into a scene of depravity. Incidentally, this year’s celebrations largely mocked him and paid homage to Franco. His proof — tweeted out to the world — was a video of a Carnival revelers partaking in a (consensual) golden shower. He followed this up with the now immortal tweet, “O que é golden shower?” (“What is a golden shower?”).

Bolsonaro’s presidency by pornography came amidst Fabricio Queiroz’s confession of siphoning cash to irregular staffers for Flavio, and a corruption scandal within Boslonaro’s party in which “shell” female candidates were run in order to secure public campaign money and meet federal gender quotas for parties.

To ensure that conspiracy theories overshadow Bolsonaro’s own acts of conspiring, the Sunday before the arrests, the president again took to Twitter to attack Estadão de São Paulo journalist Constança Rezende, who has reported on the links between Queiroz and Flavio. Rezende happens to be the daughter of Chico Otávio, the O Globo journalist who broke the story of Ronnie Lessa’s arrest.

A Murder on the West Zone Express

However, before the Lessa connection, the police had been pursuing other lines of investigation that converge in Rio’s West Zone and coincide with the open secret of militias.

The early stages of the investigation maintained Franco’s fellow city council member Marcello Siciliano as a person of interest in the case. As early as May, testimonies tied Siciliano and former military police officer Orlando Oliveira de Araújo, known as Orlando de Curicica, to the assassination. Oliveira has been in prison awaiting conviction since 2017 for murder and heading a militia in the West Zone neighborhood that gave him his nickname. Testimony claims that Siciliano finances the militia that de Araújo heads, and that both men called for Franco’s execution because of her political activity in the West Zone. One of Siciliano’s assistants was murdered shortly after Siciliano’s own police interrogation, raising concerns that he was attempting to cover up his role in the assassination.

Siciliano has repeatedly denied any involvement and after police searched his home and office during the December raids, he called for the Federal Police to take over the investigation. Globo then reported that money laundering and land fraud could be possible motivations for the crime, as Franco’s staff were carrying out an investigation into irregular land titling in a West Zone neighborhood dominated by militias and from which Siciliano received much of his electoral support. He and Franco both started their first city council terms in 2016, and Siciliano contends that their tenure together was too short to lead to such violent animosity. Even Freixo, at a December 14 press conference, questioned whether Franco’s land fraud investigation, which never reached parliamentary inquiry status and had not been completed prior to her death, would be sufficient motivation for her assassination. He also emphasized her minimal role in the 2008 parliamentary inquiry.

For his part, Orlando Oliveira de Araújo has also denied any involvement, and as early as May maintained in a letter that the testimony against him is an act of revenge by another military police officer-turned-militia member. In the letter, which was partially published by both Globo and O Dia newspapers, de Araújo names the officer despite not being privy to any information involving the case. In August, de Araújo then claimed to the Federal Prosecutor General that he was coerced into confessing to the murders by Giniton Lages, head of the Civil Police Homicide Division overseeing the case. According to de Araújo, Lages pressured him while he was still in state prison in Rio, threatening to send him to federal prison if he did not confess to his and Siciliano’s involvement. De Araújo was relocated to federal prison in June.

De Araújo’s testimony provided much of the substantiation for the existence of the Office of Crime, though he long asserted that the police actively refused to investigate it due to the regular payments they received from the organization.

Jungmann’s November claim that powerful actors within Rio’s security forces have been stalling the investigation stem from de Araújo’s testimony to the Prosecutor General and led to a Federal Police investigation into tampering with the investigation. A report on that investigation, also released on Tuesday to little media coverage, substantiates many of de Araújo’s claims and the unnamed, vengeful officer has admitted to the lie.

Meanwhile, Rio Governor Witzel, who infamously commemorated the destruction of a memorial street sign dedicated to Marielle Franco at a campaign rally in the city of Petropolis, has just announced that Lages will no longer head the investigation into the murder, and instead participate in a police exchange in Italy.

Those who conspire seem to know when other conspiracies have turned against them.

One additional line of inquiry has received far less media attention. In August, reports emerged that three state congressmen from the Brazilian Democratic Movement party (MBD), Edson Albertassi, Paulo Melo, and Jorge Picciani, were also being investigated. MBD dominated Rio politics for the last decade, holding the governorship from 2007–2018 and the mayor’s office from 2009–2016, before recent corruption revelations led it to suffer electoral defeats. All three legislators have been arrested in connection to the anti-corruption probe Operation Car Wash, as have former MBD governors Sergio Cabral and Luiz Pezão. Picciani served as the state assembly president five times since his first legislative term in 1990 and was presiding over his sixth when he was arrested. Investigators posit that Franco’s death may have been retaliation against PSOL for preventing Albertassi from assuming a position within the state’s Court of Auditors, which would have maintained his political immunity and thus prevented his arrest.

Militias proliferated under the tenure of multiple MDB governors and mayors, who oversaw much of the expansion into the West Zone through mega-event projects for the World Cup and Olympic Games. Militias aren’t around by accident; they are the foot soldiers of a criminal political conspiracy to control land and votes.

In an interview on Globo’s Fantastico program this Sunday, Franco’s aide Fernanda Chaves, recently returned from hiding in Europe, asserted that Franco “did not have militias as a target [of her political projects]” and was much more committed to “questions of gender and violence against women.” No specific project or problem, according to Chaves, would have “set in motion a situation that would culminate in her assassination.”

But Franco did “make other people uncomfortable.” A definitive answer to who ordered the killing would only increase that discomfort. Her presence challenged the racism and sexism of institutions like the city council where fellow lawmakers refused to take the elevator with her. Her policies, mostly geared towards combating violence against women and increasing access to nighttime day-care, centered working people rather than the monied, connected class. And her political activism in favelas and peripheries constantly shed light on the open secret of state-sanctioned police violence.

Rio’s Militia Politics at Home in the Presidential Palace

Historian and essayist Perry Anderson notes that Bolsonaro’s presidency represents a “signal shift.” This shift is not simply an ideological one from the decade of social-democratic governance under the Workers Party (PT) administrations of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. It is also geographic.

As Anderson points out, a quarter of Bolsonaro’s ministers are from Rio, and Bolsonaro himself is the first president to constitute his political base in Rio since the capital moved to Brasilia in 1960. Bolsonaro himself was born in São Paulo State and is thus not carioca — a person from Rio city proper. However, he embraces a carioca-way of doing politics — a politics of conspiring and conspiracy.

Rio’s return to political prominence began under Eduardo Cunha, the Machiavellian former MDB president of the House of Deputies and prime candidate for the title of Brazil’s most powerful gangster. Cunha stayed out of jail just long enough to oversee Rousseff’s controversial, and conspiracy-theory driven, impeachment. Cunha himself has his own murky history of connections with Rio’s militias in the Baixada Fluminense. The chickens, and the militias, are coming home to roost.

For Bolsonaro’s die-hard supporters, this is all, of course, fake news, a conspiracy theory forged at the communist São Paulo Forum to take down the man who will Make Brazil Great Again (Bolsonaro visited Trump this week). For them, Franco is not an embodiment of the meritocracy they claim to hold so dear — despite the fact that she attended a prestigious private university, obtained her Master’s, and earned her votes rather than hanging onto the coattails of her father. Instead, they see her as a nuisance at best, and a closet gang member at worst. The surge in leftist black and LGBT candidates who ran for state and federal congress as “the seeds” of Franco’s legacy, simply need to be “cleansed” or “exiled,” according to Bolsonaro’s supporters, as evident in their elation at Jean Wyllys’s decision to leave Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s inability to govern is attributed not to his sheer mediocrity or the lunacy of his cabinet. Supporters instead claim that if everyone, including members of his own party, just shut up and let The Myth reign, things would turn around. (The raining twitterstorm of golden showers was weird, they admit.)

The unfortunate truth is that governance by Twitter conspiracy theory will be tolerated by many of his diehard supporters so long as gun ownership is liberated, no matter if that leads to school shootings, and letting police — so what if they are also milicianos — kill the black and brown poor, at will. All the better if they are leftists.

Rio’s Mangueira samba school won this year’s competition with a parade showcasing the untold story of Brazil’s indigenous, black, and poor populations, culminating in a cathartic tribute to Marielle Franco.

Rio city councilman Carlos Bolsonaro then took to Twitter to remind his followers that “they say” the school’s president, Chiquinho da Mangueira, “is arrested, [for] involvement with trafficking, illegal bookies and militias.” This was a sign that “the country is truly upside down.”

He failed to mention what “they say” about his father or brother’s involvement, or that he and Chiquinho are members of the same political party.

When it comes to the politics of conspiring that defines Rio, Debord again offered prescient insights: “It is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing Mafia and state: they are never rivals. Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life have all too easily shown. The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home.” It’s the hit squad next door, with no rivals in the presidential palace.

Fortunately, Franco’s seeds grow elsewhere.

Stephanie Reist is a freelance writer and researcher based in Rio de Janeiro. She received her PhD in Latin American cultural studies from Duke University and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in education policy at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro, Multidisciplinary Institute. Her research focuses on race and public policy in urban peripheries.

Militias in Plain Sight

Incidentally, the idea that Lessa and Queiroz acted alone goes against much of the earlier official announcements related to the case. In late November, the federal Minister of Public Security Raul Jungmann, who oversaw the military intervention of Rio that Franco herself denounced and that failed to prevent her assassination, stated that based on testimonies “it is clear that a powerful scheme involving public agents, milicianos, and politicians does not want the case to be solved.” In other words, the assassination and the cover up were, and continue to be, a political conspiracy.

Militia activity has actually expanded since the 2008 inquiry. For his part, Freixo has received death threats ever since its publication, most recently in December of last year. Those threats, in fact, came on nearly the same day civil police raided the addresses associated with several militia members with sensationalist paper Vejaeven running a headline declaring: “Police arrest first suspects in Marielle’s Case.”

The Bolsonaro Clan and the Office of Crime

During Bolsonaro’s campaign, and preceding political life, the connections between his family and militias seemed mostly rhetorical. Jair Bolsonaro had adopted his “a good thug is a dead thug” campaign slogan from a former Rio miliciano and politician. He even openly praised death squads in Bahia on the floors of Congress, stating that “as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, these extermination groups, in my understanding, are welcome.”

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wapo

‘This will not stick’: Brazilian president lashes out over alleged links to left-wing politician’s killing

Terrence McCoy,

Marina Lopes and

Teo Armus

Oct. 30, 2019 at 3:43 p.m. PDT

no lnx

Opinion

The Rise of the Milícia State

Just how deep do the connections between Brazil’s paramilitary “death squads” and the government run?

Vanessa Barbara

By Vanessa Barbara

Ms. Barbara is an author and a contributing opinion writer.

April 10, 2019

"Who commissioned the murder of Marielle?" asked a banner last month, one year after the murder of the city councilwoman and human rights activist Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes.

But these could be just coincidences. More troubling is the outspoken sympathy of the president and his family for the paramilitaries.

During his 27 years as a congressman, Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly supported death squads and militias. In 2003, he said, “As long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome.” In a 2008 interview, the future president of Brazil declared that the government should support militias and potentially legalize them, since they “offer security and in this way they can maintain order and discipline in their communities.”

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Bolsonaro attacks 'putrid' media over Marielle Franco murder ...

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Oct 30, 2019 - Brazilian president seethes after investigation alleges suspects met at his ... into the most notorious political assassination in its recent history. Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case ... minutes after Queiroz's arrival, he and Lessa left the compound in the latter's car and ...

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Brazil: two ex-police officers arrested over murder of Marielle ...

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Mar 12, 2019 - She had criticised police killings in the favelas where she grew up ... Lessa, a retired military police officer, and Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, a former police officer. ... Marielle and Monica: the LGBT activists resisting Bolsonaro's Brazil - video. Investigators said Lessa fired the shots that killed Franco and Gomes ...

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Brazil's Bolsonaro rejects link to murder of gay ...

Oct 30, 2019 - Brazil's Bolsonaro rejects link to murder of gay councilwoman ... Elcio de Queiroz, nearly a year later and charged them with killing Franco in return for about $50,000. ... At a news conference, prosecutors said it was Lessa, who lived two ... killed the councilwoman and her driver in execution-style murders.

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Opinion | The Rise of the Milícia State - The New York Times

Apr 10, 2019 - Just how deep do the connections between Brazil's paramilitary “death squads” and the government run? ... Ms. Franco was a black, feminist L.G.B.T. activist, a fierce human-rights ... (Both men deny involvement in the murders.) ... There is also a picture of Mr. Bolsonaro posing alongside Mr. Queiroz.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/world/americas/jair-bolsonaro-son-ambassador.html

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Brazil’s President May Appoint Son, Friend to the Trumps, as Ambassador to U.S.

Eduardo Bolsonaro is being considered by his father, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, as the next ambassador to the United States.

Eduardo Bolsonaro is being considered by his father, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, as the next ambassador to the United States.Credit...Joshua Roberts/Reuters

By Ernesto Londoño

July 12, 2019

RIO DE JANEIRO — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is weighing appointing his third son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, as ambassador to the United States, arguing that his son’s friendship with President Trump’s sons would make him an effective envoy.

But the move immediately provoked criticism because ambassadorial appointments for noncareer diplomats in Brazil are exceptionally rare. The younger Bolsonaro is a federal lawmaker.

Diplomats are selected through a highly competitive process that has made Brazil’s foreign service one of the most respected in the world.

“We’ve never had a president who named a son as ambassador,” said Maurício Santoro, an international relations professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “That is something that sets Brazil apart from other countries in Latin America.”

The president and Eduardo Bolsonaro spoke enthusiastically on Thursday about the possibility, in separate conversations with reporters, but both said it was not yet a done deal.

Their remarks appeared to be a trial balloon to test how much opposition a formal nomination would face.

Brazilian legal experts said appointing Eduardo Bolsonaro as ambassador could run afoul of nepotism rules. The appointment would require approval from the Senate.

The president said part of the appeal of the idea is the preferential access he thinks his son would get in Washington.

“Clearly, the treatment he would receive would be different from that of another ambassador,” the president said. “He’s a friend of Trump’s sons, speaks English, speaks Spanish, and has a lot of worldly experience.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro, 35, was elected last year from São Paulo, and serves in the lower House. He is the head of the foreign affairs committee there.

The son’s effusive support of the Trump administration has endeared him to the American president, who singled him out for praise when the father visited the White House in March. The younger Mr. Bolsonaro accompanied the Brazilian leader on that visit and was invited to attend an Oval Office meeting.

During a visit to Washington earlier this year, Eduardo Bolsonaro said undocumented Brazilians living in the United States are “an embarrassment.” During a visit to the White House he wore a baseball cap with the slogan Make America Great Again — Trump 2020.

In February, during a stop at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s golf club in Palm Beach, Fla., Eduardo Bolsonaro reminisced about his days working as a federal police officer along Brazil’s border with Bolivia as he hailed the White House’s bid to build a wall along the Mexican border.

“We know how the things work,” he said. “So build that wall! We Brazilians are supporting you!”

Eduardo Bolsonaro told reporters on Thursday that by nominating a son as ambassador to the United States his father would be sending a clear signal of his “strong commitment” to strengthen relations between Brazil and the United States. He added that as ambassador he would strive to rebuild Brazil’s reputation abroad and attract investment.

Unlike several countries in the region, Brazil has built a professional foreign service in which top posts are not used to reward campaign donors and political allies.

The ambassadorship in Washington is seen as the service’s premier overseas post and it has historically been held by officials with distinguished careers in diplomacy and foreign affairs.

Mr. Santoro, from the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said Eduardo Bolsonaro lacked the experience for such a complex job. He also said Eduardo Bolsonaro’s effusive support for Mr. Trump would make him ineffective at dealing with Democrats in Washington, particularly if they win back the White House next year.

Under Brazil’s Constitution, ambassadors must be at least 35 years old. Eduardo Bolsonaro turned 35 this week.

Eduardo Bolsonaro and two of his brothers, Carlos, a Rio de Janeiro City Council member, and Flávio, a federal Senator, have become high-profile and at times controversial political figures since their father’s election last year.

Flávio Bolsonaro is under criminal investigation for a suspected money laundering scheme run out of his office when he was a state lawmaker in Rio de Janeiro. The scandal has marred the president’s image as a anti-corruption crusader.

Carlos Bolsonaro has been a driver of infighting and intrigue within his father’s senior team, picking public fights with the country’s vice president and other top officials.

Eduardo Bolsonaro has generated fewer headaches for the president.

Last year he sought the counsel of the former White House strategist Steve Bannon and after a meeting declared that the two “share the same worldview.”

He also has railed against leftist leaders in the region, saying they sought to impose a form of “cultural Marxism.”

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/cpac-to-feature-authoritarian-brazilian-politician-eduardo-bolsonaro/

Organizers of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference portray themselves as lovers of freedom, but among this year’s speakers will be Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazil’s authoritarian President Jair Bolsonaro and the leader of a right-wing party in the Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. In January, the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against American journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been a harsh critic of the Bolsonaro administration.

The American Conservative Union, the group that puts on CPAC, heralded the younger Bolsonaro. Tweeting last week about Eduardo Bolsonaro’s planned appearance, ACU chair Matt Schlapp wrote, “In 2019 ACU hosted several international CPAC events, one of which was #CPACbrazil, thanks to @BolsonaroSP. At #CPAC2020 he’ll share how our conservative movement inspires freedom-loving people across the globe & how the US & Brazil can work together to stop socialism.”

But Eduardo Bolsonaro seems keen to “stop socialism” with authoritarianism. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also the regional representative of former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s global right-wing group The Movement, warned recentlythat the government could resort to repression to deal with protests and leftists “via a new AI-5.” The Guardian’s Tom Phillips explained:

That was a reference to one of the most traumatic events in recent Brazilian history – December 1968’s Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5) – when Brazil’s military rulers moved to extinguish growing political unrest by indefinitely outlawing freedom of expression and assembly and closing congress.

“The AI-5 was an instrument intended to intimidate people … It allowed the dictatorship to repress all opposition and dissent,” the historians Lilia Schwarz and Heloisa M Starling wrote in their recent “biography” of Brazil.

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s comments reportedly shocked many Brazilians, but they aligned with previous statements made by his father, who also served in the legislature before being elected president in 2018 During his presidential campaign, the theme of which was “Brazil before everything, and God above all,” Jair Bolsonaro supported the torture carried out by the military dictatorship that ran the country from 1964 to 1985, and warned that under his regime, minorities would have to“bow to the majority … or disappear.”

Right Wing Watch noted last year, a week after Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration, that he “didn’t waste much time issuing executive orders and taking other actions going after the people he had targeted in his campaign rhetoric: the LGBTQ community; indigenous people; descendants of former slaves; civil servants deemed not on board with Bolsonaro’s ideological agenda; nonprofit organizations; and the media.”

Just this week, Eduardo Bolsonaro launched a social media attack on filmmaker Petra Costa, whose documentary “The Edge of Democracy” has been nominated for an Academy Award, The Guardian reported. Eduardo Bolsonaro tweeted that Costa was a “scumbag” and a liar. He and other government officials are angry about the movie and an interview in which Costa criticized government policies encouraging the plunder of the Amazon region, a spike in police killings, the administration’s anti-gay actions and increased government censorship.

In August 2018, months before the election that made his father president, Eduardo Bolsonaro met with Bannon and announced that Bannon would be offering suggestions on online strategy and data analysis for his father’s presidential campaign. He declared that he and Bannon would “join forces” against “cultural Marxism.”

Jair Bolsonaro’s campaign was backed by U.S. religious-right leaders, including former Rep. Michele Bachmann, who met with Eduardo Bolsonaro and recorded a video message to Brazilian Christians urging them to vote “only for a candidate for the president of Brazil who will support moving the Brazilian embassy [in Israel] to Jerusalem.” Trump-supporting “prophet” Cindy Jacobs and her husband Mike Jacobs declared that Jair Bolsonaro is establishing God’s kingdom in Brazil—turning it from a “goat nation” into a “sheep nation.” (There’s a biblical passage that refers to Jesus’s second coming when all the nations will be gathered before him and he, like a shepherd, will separate the sheep from the goats.)

The Times of Israel reported that, in a visit to Israel in December, Eduardo Bolsonaro portrayed the trip as a first step toward moving Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem this year. He refused to endorse a two-state solution to peace and said he could imagine the government closing the Palestinian embassy in Brazil. While in Israel, Eduardo “reiterated his opposition to gay marriage,” saying in a television interview “that if he wedded his dog it would still not make them a family,” the Times of Israel reported.

The Bolsonaro government has been warmly embraced by the Trump administration as an ally in promoting “family values” around the world. At Jair Balsonaro’s inauguration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave the new president a hug.

Last summer Jair Bolsonaro announced plans to make Eduardo Bolsonaro the country’s ambassador to the U.S, touting Eduardo’s friendship with President Trump’s sons, but the plan was abandoned in the face of resistance to “such a blatant act of nepotism.” President Trump had supported the plan, saying, “I know his son, and that’s probably why they did it. I don’t think it’s nepotism.”

Tags: Eduardo Bolsonaro Jair Bolsonaro CPAC 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC

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eduardo bolsonaro

Personal life

References...

Introduction

Sidney Powell and Rudy Giualiani

Daniel Beck and Eduardo Bolsonaro

Charles Herbster and Layne Bangerter

Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro

Eduardo Bolsonaro

Steve Bannon

The Typo Heard Round the World

Jared Kushner and Eduardo Bolsonaro

Conclusion

Militias in Plain Sight

The Bolsonaro Clan and the Office of Crime

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