Steve Bannon's Connection to Brazil Insurrection by Bolsonaro Supporters

For the second time in three years, Steve Bannon has been linked to an incident of right-wing supporters of a president storming a congressional building while supporting false claims of voter fraud.

In scenes reminiscent of when followers of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, supporters of far-right former Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro stormed Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in the federal capital Brasilia on Sunday.

During the attempted coup, which took place a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters draped in green and yellow—the colors of the national flag, adopted by the right-wing movement—ransacked the buildings while demanding the defeated former president be restored to power.

The incident was the culmination of months of rallies and protests in Brazil as Bolsonaro and his supporters pushed the false claim that the October 2022 election was rigged due to widespread voter fraud.

Just as he did with the 2020 U.S. presidential election which Trump lost, former White House advisor Bannon has repeatedly sowed doubt about the integrity of the Brazilian presidential election.

Similar to right-wing conspiracy theories about the 2020 elections in the U.S., Bannon has long claimed that voting machines would be used in Brazil to steal the election from Bolsonaro.

Bannon continued to push these false claims after Bolsonaro supporters attacked the government buildings on Sunday.

On his Gettr account, Bannon repeatedly posted "Lula stole the Election...Brazilians know this," while sharing links about the attack by Bolsonaro supporters and calling them "Freedom Fighters."

"The Criminal Atheistic Marxist Lula stole the Election and the Brazilians know this... now see Lula crackdown like all Communist dictators," Bannon wrote.

Separately, Bannon posted on Gettr in October that the Brazil election "was stolen in broad daylight," soon after Bolsonaro's defeat.

Bannon has been linked to Bolsonaro and his attempts to cast doubts on the integrity of the Brazilian presidential election.

In November, The Washington Post reported that Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies and the former president's son, had spoken with Bannon who was advising Bolsonaro's team in the wake of his election defeat.

Bannon is said to have spoken with Eduardo Bolsonaro whilst he was in Arizona assisting the campaign of GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, another Trump loyalist who has alleged she lost her election due to voter fraud.

The Post reported that Bannon called on Bolsonaro to contest the Brazil election results as it would help bolster his support and encourage protesters.

"What's happening in Brazil is a world event," Bannon told The Post. "The people are saying they've been grossly disenfranchised. [The movement] has moved beyond the Bolsonaros in the way that in the U.S. it has moved beyond Trump."

In November, Eduardo Bolsonaro posted a video of Bannon speaking on his War Room podcast, in which Bannon suggests Brazilians should be angry about the use of electronic voting machines in their elections. Referring to the protests by Bolsonaro supporters, Bannon said "it's gonna be very interesting to see how that plays out," and praised the "great fight that you guys have in front of you."

Bannon added: "Once they start taking and digitizing the elections, once they start going to machines where you can't get paper ballots—you don't have proof of ID, they're taken away from the precincts, they start to centralize it in collection centers—that's all done for one reason. That's to consistently steal elections because they know they don't have the backing of the people."

A clip of Bannon's remarks was reshared on social media in the wake of the attack in Brasilia.

Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, tweeted while sharing the clip: "Bannon played a central role in helping Trump plot his coup/insurrection trajectory here as well. All the more important for Special Counsel [Jack] Smith to include Bannon in his investigatory sights—along with Trump, Giuliani, Stone, Eastman, and Chesebro."

A day before the U.S. Capitol attack, Bannon told listeners on his War Room podcast, "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow."

Bannon was later sentenced to four months in jail for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena issued to him by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.