Brazil ’s supreme court has sentenced Eduardo Bolsonaro to four years and two months in prison after finding him guilty of courting US interference in his father’s coup plot trial last year.
The office of Brazil’s prosecutor general had charged Eduardo Bolsonaro – who lives in the US – with courting interference from the Trump administration to help Jair Bolsonaro ’s case by imposing sanctions on the court’s justices and tariffs on Brazilian goods.
His father, the former right-wing president, is serving 27 years in prison for plotting a coup in 2022 after losing the elections to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva .
The younger Bolsonaro, a former lawmaker, moved to the US in 2025, months before the trial that convicted his father of plotting a coup against Lula.
In the US, he has been active in building support, especially from the Trump administration, for his father. Eduardo Bolsonaro said in a statement after Tuesday’s conviction that he had not been properly notified about the court’s legal process.
He had previously told Reuters that his work in the US was not aimed at getting his father acquitted by Brazilian courts, but at forcing the Brazilian supreme court to punish officials who, according to the son, were not complying with Brazil’s constitution.
In July last year, a Brazilian supreme court judge ordered that the bank accounts and assets of Eduardo Bolsonaro be frozen over allegations that money being sent to him by his father was bankrolling his efforts to lobby the Trump administration to help Bolsonaro avoid punishment for the alleged coup attempt after the 2022 election.
Bolsonaro served one term as president from 2019 to 2022.
In March, he was allowed to temporarily be placed under house arrest for three months due to ill health after being diagnosed with pneumonia and treated in an intensive care unit.
[ Lula’s last lap: Brazil enters a fraught election year Opens in new window ]
Bolsonaro’s lawyers argued that his health problems, many of which stem from a knife attack in 2018, warranted him being granted house arrest for humanitarian reasons.
Brazil’s current president Lula has meanwhile extended an advantage over senator Flavio Bolsonaro – son of Jair and brother of Eduardo – in a potential runoff in the October general elections, a CNT/MDA poll showed on Tuesday.
Lula would receive 49.3 per cent of the votes in a runoff, compared with 36.8 per cent for Flavio Bolsonaro, according to the poll.
In an April survey, Lula was seen with 44.9 per cent of the vote, and Flavio Bolsonaro with 40.2 per cent.
CNT/MDA interviewed 2,002 people from June 10th-14th in 143 Brazilian municipalities. The survey’s margin of error is of 2.2 percentage points in either direction. – Guardian
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