Brazil’s Far-Right Leader Rejects Election as Results Roll In

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s decisive victory in Brazil’s presidential election Sunday was already being disputed by his far-right challenger Flávio Bolsonaro as results were coming in. Bolsonaro, the son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro, said that the results of the runoff election should be annulled because of a Brazilian Supreme Court ruling extending voting by two hours. However, both Lula and Bolsonaro’s parties had called for that extension, making his point moot. (The Supreme Court only ruled on Lula’s petition, though the requests were the same.)Lula’s left-wing Workers’ Party supported the extension because voters in urban São Paulo and Bahia, where it has a strong support base, had trouble getting to the polls due to trouble with bus services. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, meanwhile, cited heavy rains in the southern parts of Brazil, where its supporters are more numerous. Bolsonaro’s complaint is not likely to sway the Supreme Court. The high court’s president, Kassio Nunes Marques, who was appointed by the elder Bolsonaro, confirmed the election result, noting that extending times did not affect the electoral process or the vote count. Lula won 51.79 percent to Bolsonaro’s 48.21 percent, a difference of 4.4 million votes.U.S. President Donald Trump had pushed for Bolsonaro’s party to win, having supported Jair Bolsonaro during his tenure and disputed his prison sentence over attempting to overturn Brazil’s elections in an attempted coup d’état in 2022. Trump has not yet commented on the result, but his son Donald Trump Jr. did on X Sunday night.Complaining about Brazil’s Supreme Court, Trump Jr. posted that “if a conservative government in Brazil did this, everyone in the mainstream press in America would lose their minds, but I guess they’re just choosing to be silent because it’s all for the cause.” Perhaps he’s just mad that Brazilians have done what Americans failed to do: lock up a corrupt far-right leader and keep him from returning to power. Read more about the election:Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Senator Angela Paxton, invested $600,000 into a business run by a man convicted of fraud.The Texas Tribune reports that the Paxtons gave the cash to a construction materials business run by Scott Sherman, a home builder who pleaded guilty to mortgage fraud in 2014, through what was presented to the public as a blind trust. In reality, the Paxtons’ business activities were not shielded, as should be the case in a blind trust.According to the Tribune, which cited previously unreleased records from Ken Paxton’s 2023 impeachment investigation, Sherman’s companies sent the Paxtons thousands of dollars while they were facing mounting tax debts. Ken Paxton was investigated by the Texas state legislature and was eventually acquitted. Now he’s Texas’s Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in a tight race with Democratic challenger James Talarico.Paxton’s business dealings fly in the face of his public statements. He said in a news release last year that “in Texas, we fight fraud head-on and will not rest until every last corrupt actor is brought to justice.” Ethics experts told the Tribune that his activities undermine his position as Texas’s top law enforcement official.Richard Painter, a former chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush, said he thought Paxton would be smarter than this. Referring to people like Sherman, Painter said, “They’ll pay out their friends while they’re not paying their taxes, run up debt. But the question is, why is the attorney general of Texas dealing with those kinds of people?”Painter added that he thought “the attorney general of Texas would have the good sense not to be dealing with a convicted felon.”Angela Paxton filed for divorce from Ken last year on “biblical grounds,” referring to her husband’s infidelity. Ken Paxton has continued to deal with shady characters since his investment in Sherman, spending New Year’s Eve 2024 partying with his mistress and two campaign donors who both fled the U.S. from health care fraud charges. A 45-year-old Republican candidate in Iowa is being sued by his parents for $275,000 in unpaid rent. The Des Moines Register reported that the parents of lieutenant governor nominee Derek Wulf allege that he stopped paying rent two years ago on the farmland he rented out from them. A court petition filed Tuesday demands repayment and also accuses him of lying about his assets in financial documents to a lender.While Wulf has yet to comment, his Trump–endorsed running mate, gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn, denied that Wulf owes his parents any money at all—and insinuated that the conflict was spurred by the poor health of Wulf’s father. Wulf’s parents rejected that, calling the claim “categorically false.” Duane and Jackie Wulf, 83 and 82 years old respectively, join a long list of creditors demanding repayment from the Republican candidate. Eight people and companies have sued Wulf and his company, Shallow Creek Land & Livestock, since 2023 for payments owed to them. All but one of the lawsuits have been settled. That one is from the WCF Financial Bank, which claims that Wulf is over a year behind on credit payments. Wulf is a 45-year-old man with a wife and two children running for lieutenant governor. These financial issues are not only embarrassing but raise alarming questions about how he might abuse a position in office. Hopefully, Iowa will never have to find out. Polls show that he and Lahn are currently trailing Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand by about 11 points—in a state Trump won by 13 points two years ago. In other local election news:A federal appeals court on Friday stripped due process rights from hundreds of immigrants held by Immigration and Custom Enforcement. In a 10–7 en banc decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ICE detainees with pending immigration hearings are not entitled to receive a bond hearing, where a judge could assess their dangerousness and flight risk, regardless of how long they have been in detention. The decision blocks efforts by federal judges who have been ordering the release of hundreds of immigrants—many of whom have no criminal record and have deep ties to the United States—held without bond by ICE’s mass deportation policy.After the Fifth Circuit upheld ICE’s policy in February, other federal judges discovered that they were able to argue that detention violated immigrants’ constitutional due process rights. In the past year, judges have ruled against detentions without bond more than 21,150 times. The Fifth Circuit has now choked off that legal argument.The case will likely head to the Supreme Court, which is set to decide on a number of immigration reform cases in the coming term. The Justice Department charged two former FBI agents Friday with lying to Congress during the Hunter Biden laptop investigation.Former intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, who ran the intelligence division at the Washington Field Office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, surrendered on arrest warrants earlier Friday. During the following hearing in Washington, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said that the case pertained to “Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations around that.”Floris’s attorney condemned the charges in a statement. “Nikki Floris is a patriot. She served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years. Yet today, the [Justice Department] has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts. It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election,” the statement said. The charges come just 10 days before the midterms.The laptop scandal began in December 2019, when a Wilmington, Delaware–area computer repair shop owner gave an abandoned laptop purportedly belonging to Biden to Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani then handed a copy of the laptop’s hard drive to local law enforcement, which handed over the contents to the FBI.In the years that followed, Republicans leveraged the laptop’s myriad contents to escalate scrutiny and speculation surrounding the Biden family’s business dealings with Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas and energy company.Giuliani and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, insisted that the laptop contained evidence that the Biden family made millions of dollars after former President Joe Biden and a Burisma adviser held a meeting. (The New York Post, which ran the original story on its front page, later said that the contents of the laptop were mixed with fake material and that most of the data could not be verified.)The alleged meeting became central to an impeachment probe against the elder Biden. Republicans claimed at the time that Biden had engaged in corruption, and had peddled the influence of his vice presidency to rake in cash.Floris and Benavides briefed Republican lawmakers in 2020 about the contents of the laptop as part of a congressional investigation. Senator Chuck Grassley has since claimed that the pair gave the briefing in order to cast the probe as Russian disinformation.But the entire investigation fell apart in 2024 after its star witness, Alexander Smirnov, admitted the conspiracy was in fact Russian disinformation. Smirnov admitted to Justice Department prosecutors that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved” in fabricating the Hunter Biden narrative. In the ensuing fallout, Smirnov told investigators he was in contact with “four different [top] Russian officials,” two of whom were the “heads of the entities they represent.”