Talks in Washington about a new round of United States sanctions against Brazilian officials have regained strength in recent days, according to accounts from people connected to the administration of President Donald Trump heard by the Brazilian news outlet Jovem Pan over the weekend. There has been no official announcement from the White House, the State Department or the Treasury Department, and the sources avoided pointing to dates. The main change seen in the reporting is that the conversation no longer stops at Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre de Moraes and has started to include other members of Brazil's highest court.
Into that moment stepped Eduardo Bolsonaro, a former federal deputy for São Paulo with the Liberal Party (PL) and brother of presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. On Tuesday (Sept 15), while the STF held an extraordinary session on whether to open an investigation into Moraes, Eduardo wrote on X that the proceedings are documented and ready to be shown to American authorities. "Tudo registrado e pronto para expor em DC onde, se Deus quiser, se iniciará uma nova rodada de sanções", he wrote, meaning "all recorded and ready to expose in DC where, if God wills, a new round of sanctions will begin". According to a report by the newspaper Estadão carried by Jovem Pan, Eduardo is due to hold meetings in the U.S. capital this week precisely to discuss new punishments against the justice. The agenda was confirmed to Gazeta do Povo by journalist Paulo Figueiredo, but the participants have not been disclosed.
For Brazil, the statement lands at the crossing of two crises: the worst turmoil at the STF, Brazil's top court, since the return of democracy in the 1980s, in the assessment of experts cited by the British newspaper The Guardian, and the campaign for the October 4 presidential election, in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva runs for a fourth term against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The session ended without a decision on the investigation after Justice Flávio Dino asked for vista, a procedural move that suspends a trial so a justice can study the case files. It was the first time in the court's 135-year history that its members debated investigating one of their own, as the Spanish newspaper El País noted.
The game in Washington
In the American talks, the case of Moraes remains the most advanced because much of the technical procedure was completed earlier. According to a UOL report cited by Estadão, U.S. officials speaking on condition of anonymity said new sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, a law that allows Washington to punish foreign agents for corruption and human rights violations, could come "at any moment". The Treasury Department still considers valid the process that underpinned the earlier penalties, and a new decision would depend on approval by the State Department. Moraes was sanctioned in 2025; the measures against him, his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, and the Instituto Lex were later withdrawn by the U.S. government. Reaching other justices would require the whole review process to be redone.
The Bolsonaro family's stakes in the issue are direct. Eduardo has been accused, according to Estadão, of having worked in the United States to press American officials into sanctioning Brazilian authorities and, by doing so, interfering with cases involving his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, convicted of plotting a failed coup after losing the 2022 election in a case run by Moraes, as The Guardian recalled. Eduardo's brother Flávio is under investigation for suspected money laundering, currency evasion and corruption in the financing of the film "Dark Horse", part of the fallout from fraud suspicions attributed to banker Daniel Vorcaro. In audios released by The Intercept Brasil, Flávio asked Vorcaro for 134 million reais for the project; according to the Federal Police, more than 60 million reais were paid.
External pressure and sovereignty
Inside the court, the sanctions threat became a subject of the session itself. Dino called the discussion of "enormous legal and constitutional gravity" and said the court must not submit to pressure. "Esse ambiente de pressão ilegítima deve constituir alvo de indignação não do tribunal, mas de todos os brasileiros", he told the court's president, Edson Fachin, meaning that this climate of illegitimate pressure should outrage all Brazilians, not only the court. "Essa toga pertence ao povo brasileiro, não nos pertence", he added: this robe belongs to the Brazilian people. The session Eduardo wants to take to Washington addresses only whether investigations into Moraes's ties with Vorcaro will be deepened. A verdict on the justice's guilt is not at stake at this stage. On social media, the former deputy accused Moraes of demanding rights he had denied defendants in cases he ran, criticized Gilmar Mendes over his questioning of Justice André Mendonça, and called Dino a "court jester".