The scenes in Brasilia looked eerily similar to events at the US Capitol on 6 January two years ago - and there are deeper connections as well.
"The whole thing smells," said a guest on Steve Bannon's podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October last year.
The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud.
Across several episodes of his podcast and in social media posts, he and his guests stoked up allegations of a "stolen election" and shadowy forces. He promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring, and continued to encourage opposition even after Mr Bolsonaro himself appeared to accept the results.
The day before the Capitol riot, Mr Bannon told his podcast listeners: "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow." He has been sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to comply with an order to testify in front of a Congressional committee that investigated the attack but is free pending an appeal.
Along with other prominent Trump advisers who spread fraud rumours, Mr Bannon was unrepentant on Sunday, even as footage emerged of widespread destruction in Brazil.
"Lula stole the Election… Brazilians know this," he wrote repeatedly on the social media site Gettr. He called the people who stormed the buildings "Freedom Fighters".
Ali Alexander, a fringe activist who emerged after the 2020 election as one of the leaders of the pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" movement, encouraged the crowds, writing "Do whatever is necessary!" and claiming to have contacts inside the country.
Bolsonaro supporters railed online about an existential crisis and a supposed "communist takeover" - exactly the same type of rhetoric that drove the rioters in Washington two years ago.
In another parallel with the Capitol riot, some supporters of the former president attempted to shift the blame by pinning the storming of government offices on outside agitators or supporters of President Lula.
Rumours about anti-fascist antifa activists or left-wing agitators sparking the Capitol riot gained traction online and on right-wing news outlets after 6 January, but subsequent criminal trials have consistently shown that the main leaders and instigators of the attack were staunch supporters of former President Trump.
The links between Mr Bolsonaro and the Trump movement were highlighted by a meeting in November between the former president and Mr Bolsonaro's son at Mr Trump's Florida resort.
During that trip, Eduardo Bolsonaro also spoke to Mr Bannon and Trump adviser Jason Miller, according to reports in the Washington Post and other news outlets.
As in the US in 2020, partisan election-deniers focused their attention on the mechanisms of voting. In Brazil, they cast suspicion on electronic vote tabulation machines.
Mr Bannon posted messages urging Brazilian authorities to "release the machines", echoing calls to investigate electronic voting in Colorado, Arizona, Georgia and other states. The American authorities responsible for election security said in 2020 that there was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was compromised in any way.
A banner displayed by the Brazilian rioters on Sunday declared "We want the source code" in both English and Portuguese - a reference to rumours that electronic voting machines were somehow programmed or hacked in order to foil Mr Bolsonaro.
The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with then-President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.
The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win. Much of the evidence has never been seen before and, in some cases, adds extraordinary new elements to the case the select committee presented in public — from voluminous phone records to contemporaneous text messages and emails.
Trump lawyers strategized which federal courts would be likeliest to uphold their fringe constitutional theories; Trump White House aides battled to keep unhinged theories from reaching the president’s ears; as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded, West Wing aides sent horrified messages about Trump’s incendiary tweets and inaction; and after the attack, some Trump allies discussed continued efforts to derail the incoming Biden administration.
Here’s a look at some of the most extraordinary and important evidence in the select committee’s files. Jan. 6 investigators have pored over the circumstances of Trump’s tweet from Dec. 19, 2020, exhorting followers to come to Washington to protest the counting of electoral votes by Congress. “Will be wild,” Trump wrote, a message that experts and security officials viewed as rocket fuel for extremists.
The committee’s evidence includes a text exchange from Jan. 22, 2021, between Trump adviser Katrina Pierson and his longtime social media guru Dan Scavino in which Scavino makes clear: No one told Trump to author the tweet. Scavino rejected the notion that advocates involved in “Stop the Steal” efforts had anything to do with Trump’s decision to issue the tweet. And in what appears to be a nod to its authorship, Scavino wrote “He does do his own tweets.”
Two days after the Jan. 6 attack, Trump adviser Steve Bannon told his spokeswoman that he didn’t necessarily think the fight to prevent a Biden administration had ended.
In an interview with Bannon’s spokesperson Alexandra Preate, the select committee read from a text exchange Preate had with Bannon on Jan. 8, 2021.
“We must turn up the heat,” Bannon wrote to Preate.
When Preate asked when Trump was leaving town ahead of Biden’s inauguration, Bannon replied: “He’s not staying in the White House after the 20th. But who says we don’t have one million people the next day?”
“I’d surround the Capitol in total silence,” Bannon added.
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