ATLANTA (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that the Trump administration did not facilitate defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro’s departure to the U.S. after he left Brazil following his election defeat to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro arrived in Miami on Wednesday, a day after the State Department said that Bolsonaro and his family will be granted U.S. visas after his weekend loss in a hotly contested race that bucked a trend of conservative electoral results in Latin America.
“We didn’t facilitate anything,” Rubio told reporters in Atlanta, where top diplomats from the Group of 20 largest world economies were gathered.
“We had word that he had arrived in the United States. He had previously held a visa, and the president made a decision to allow him to enter the country,” Rubio said, adding that the U.S.…