Brazil’s highest judicial body has handed down a guilty verdict against Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of incarcerated former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, finding him responsible for attempting to secure foreign intervention from the United States during his father’s high-profile coup trial last year. The 41-year-old, a former Brazilian federal congressman, was first charged last year over allegations that he lobbied U.S. officials to enact punitive trade measures, including tariffs and sanctions, against Brazil in a bid to aid his embattled father.
Eduardo relocated to the United States in 2025, months before the elder Bolsonaro — who held Brazil’s presidency from 2019 through the end of 2022 — was convicted of orchestrating a wide-ranging military coup plot to overturn his 2022 election loss, and ultimately sentenced to 27 years in prison. The conviction is tied to the broader insurrectionist movement that culminated in the January 2023 storming of Brazil’s federal government buildings in Brasilia by thousands of Bolsonaro supporters.
Taking to social media on Tuesday, the younger Bolsonaro denounced the guilty ruling as “baseless and senseless”, arguing that Supreme Court justices sought only to muzzle his political voice and bar him from standing in future elections. He also claimed violations of due process, saying he never received formal notification of the charges against him and only learned of the case through media coverage. Eduardo has previously told the BBC he is living in “exile” in the U.S., claiming he would face immediate arrest if he returned to Brazilian territory.
Long a public advocate for his father, Eduardo has openly lobbied the current Trump administration for backing. The Trump administration, which views the right-wing elder Bolsonaro as a key ideological ally, has framed the legal case against the ex-president as a politically motivated “witch hunt”. In July of this year, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods, a decision that drew sharp rebuke from current Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who called the move “not only misguided but illogical”.
Tensions escalated further after Eduardo’s conviction, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged that Washington would take retaliatory action. Prior to the verdict, on July 30, the Trump administration had already imposed personal sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who led the handling of Bolsonaro-related cases, accusing him of human rights abuses in his oversight of the proceedings. Lula condemned the sanctions targeting de Moraes as “unacceptable” interference in Brazil’s independent judicial system, while noting Brazil remained open to trade negotiations with the U.S. The U.S. has since walked back those sanctions.
The close ideological alignment between Trump and the elder Bolsonaro dates back to Trump’s first presidential term, when the two leaders oversaw overlapping administrations and met for official talks at the White House in 2019. Both men went on to lose their re-election bids, and both refused to publicly concede defeat after their respective losses. Following the younger Bolsonaro’s conviction, Trump issued a statement calling the ruling “nothing more, or less, than an attack on a Political Opponent – Something I know much about!”, a comment for which the elder Bolsonaro later publicly thanked the U.S. president.