Bolsonaro May Be Vacating His Florida Digs Soon

Like American counterpart former President Trump, Brazil's latest ex-president appeared at CPAC over the weekend, speaking to the crowd gathered at the National Harbor convention center in Oxon Hill, Maryland. And, like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro continued to deny he had any culpability in inciting the riot in his nation's capital that happened in January, after his October loss. "I was no longer president, and I was outside Brazil," he told NBC News, which notes that may have been Bolsonaro's first on-camera interview with a US outlet since the Jan. 8 attack on government buildings in Brasilia. Bolsonaro, who left Brazil in late December and has been hunkered down in Florida ever since, also claimed that his supporters had always been peaceful at previous rallies, and so they couldn't have been involved in the January attacks.

"Our people would never do what the people did on Jan. 8," he said. "So we are more and more certain that it was people from the left that planned all of that." Bolsonaro also refused to acknowledge he'd lost the election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and vowed he'd be returning to Brazil later this month, despite the threat of looming charges against him. His remarks echo what he told the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, in which he promised to return to Brazil in March to help lead political opposition to the new president. In that conversation, however, he'd somewhat walked back his take on the election.

"Losing is part of the electoral process," he said. "I'm not saying there was fraud, but the process was biased." In a new development, Lula's government says it's investigating whether Bolsonaro took part in any "illegal acts" tied to jewelry said to have been gifted to him and his wife by Saudi Arabia. Citing local media, Reuters reports that the jewels, said to be worth an estimated $3.2 million, were brought into Brazil in October 2021, in the backpack of a government aide, without being declared. "I'm being accused of a gift I neither asked for nor received," Bolsonaro told CNN Brazil. "There is no illegality on my part. I never committed illegal acts." (More Jair Bolsonaro stories.)