Asked whether he agreed with Bolsonaro’s claim to be Brazil’s rightful president, Trump declined to endorse it. “I’m not going to make a comment about that,” Trump told reporters. “We gave him a pass to come into the country, so we’ll see, but I won’t get involved. It was a very strange election.” The US State Department granted entry visas to Bolsonaro and his family, and Folha de S.Paulo reported he entered the US on a one year humanitarian authorization. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party had already recognized Lula’s 4.4 million vote victory on Monday, and his former campaign manager, Rogério Marinho, said Wednesday that neither he nor the party could say there was fraud in the election.

Bolsonaro left Brazil in defiance of Moraes’s travel ban, crossing the Tancredo Neves International Bridge into Misiones, Argentina, on Tuesday night with his Italian passport before flying via Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Florida on a private jet. Federal police requested the passport seizure seven minutes after electoral authorities confirmed Bolsonaro’s defeat on Sunday night, citing flight risk in a money laundering investigation involving lawyer Willer Tomaz, and canceled his Brazilian passports after he missed Tuesday’s deadline. Lula called Bolsonaro’s departure “shameful,” saying he should have stayed in Brazil to prove his innocence as federal police searched an address linked to the senator in Rio de Janeiro.