The Truth Behind Trump’s Election “Intel”
Since taking office, Trump has weaponized claims about election theft that were debunked by his own teams
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The question isn’t whether Pres. Donald Trump has intelligence proving election theft. The question is, what’s the most plausible-seeming pseudo-evidence his team can gin up into something sufficiently like real intelligence for his political allies to support it.
Trump’s 2020 election denial began almost instantly after his loss in 2020, when he began casting about first for ways to prevent his loss and, almost simultaneously, excuses for losing.
Perhaps most memorably, lawyer Sydney Powell vowed to unleash “the Kraken,” evidence, she said, of election theft.
It consisted of an initially anonymous statement from a former Venezuelan official confirming that Venezuela stole the election. What no one knew at the time, was how Powell found this person.
Then, in 2024, journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman published “Find Me the Votes,” revealing one of the people who first brought Powell and her team a tape of that Venezuelan giving a statement to lawyer Lewis Sessions, brother of Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX).
The Venezuelan was handed to Powell by Gary Berntsen, a former CIA senior operations officer, and an unnamed colleague. Berntsen was a former regular on Fox News, and got to Powell by asking Jeanine Pirro, his former Fox colleague, for help.
This was information even the congressional January 6 committee never uncovered. They knew about the Venezuelan — Leamsy Salazar — but not where Powell got him.
And it wasn’t until last year that Berntsen’s unnamed colleague was revealed, along with the fact that Berntsen’s colleague was the one who got Salazar out of Venezuela in the first place: To carry out a political agenda.
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As I reported last year, Berntsen’s partner, Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil, was working with Berntsen to get rich Venezuelans out of the country and connect them with U.S. law enforcement in the hope of avoiding jail and the seizure of any ill-gotten wealth.
Rodil helped spirit Salazar out of Venezuela specifically because a billionaire there wanted Salazar to take out one of the billionaire’s rivals by feeding info about that rival to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Last year, I found a court filing in which Rodil gave a statement about getting Salazar out, at the request of billionaire Raul Gorrin. Here’s what Rodil said:
“Gorrin had a rival also in the inner circle of Hugo Chavez—Diosdado Cabello Rondon…
“Gorrin wished to have Leamsy Salazar cooperate with the DEA to provide information regarding the narco-trafficking activities of Diosdado Cabello.”
Salazar’s information was, in fact, used to indict Cabello — who was never caught and today is the second most powerful person in the Venezuelan regime now overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
According to last year’s book “Stolen Elections” — by one of Berntsen’s team, Ralph Pezzullo — Berntsen and Rodil took Salazar’s election claims to Powell and Rudy Giuliani in the days after the 2020 election:
Giuliani and Powell were gob-smacked. They retired to an inner office, and Gary and Martin overheard them talking to President Trump. They said, “We have people here we believe are credible, and they’re saying the theft is coming from Venezuela.”
Isikoff and Klaidman wrote that after Powell got the Salazar tape, she called Trump, who called her back. Here’s Isikoff’s and Klaidman’s account of that call:
Hey, the guys came through, they got the stuff, we need to send it to you, Powell told the president about the hot new videotape, according to a source at Tomotley who monitored the conversation. Good job, said Trump, who “seemed excited,” according to the source…
A jet was chartered—and the flash drive with the Venezuelan defector’s account was flown straight to Washington for delivery to the White House.
But Salazar’s credibility lasted less than a day. At 3:38am on Nov. 14, the day after Salazar’s taping, the Trump research team issued a memo shooting down his claims about Venezuela’s ties to Dominion and Smartmatic. That didn’t stop the Kraken.
And it didn’t stop Berntsen and Rodil.
They were on a years-long quest to prove that Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro was at the top of a global cartel that ran drugs and elections in dozens of countries. Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne joined and bankrolled their adventures.
(You may remember Byrne as a key figure in the December 2020 White House meeting when Byrne, Powell, and others tried — with some appreciation from Trump — to sell Trump a range of conspiracy stories that would justify claims of election theft. Trump’s first-term legal advisors apparently talked him out of it; but they’re no longer at the White House.)
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Going forward, the U.S. officials Bernsten and Rodil approached for help ignored them; scared, Berntsen would later say. Or part of the conspiracy.
But in the runup to the 2024 election, one man listened: The Oklahoma senator who now runs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
As I reported earlier this year, after Trump nominated him to run DHS, Markwayne Mullin was the “hero,” the “stud,” who finally agreed to help Berntsen and Rodil. Berntsen himself said so on The Adam Carolla Show last year.
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The White House never denied any of this when I asked them about it. After I reported Mullin’s involvement, Byrne told Raw Story it was true. And Byrne gave more details, confirming some that had aired previously on Lindell TV.
Mullin, Byrne said, arranged for Rodil to meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, then co-campaign manager, at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024.
Byrne confirmed to Raw Story what I had previously reported, that Byrne, Rodil, and Berntsten got their supposed intel on election theft to the Trump team. Berntsen had discussed this publicly.
Trump himself boosted Berntsen’s interview with Lara Logan on social media.
With Mullin connecting them, Berntsen and Rodil started feeding their Venezuela intel to the top ranks of Trump’s team: The transition and then the administration. (The Miami Herald was actually first to confirm Berntsen’s work with the administration just months into Trump’s second term.)
The three men claim to have spent years, and their own fortunes, traveling the world and gathering witnesses — including Venezuelan programmers — to establish the evidence. This is their narrative:
Venezuela ran the largest criminal operation in history, in conjunction with Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, and Serbia.
The Venezuelan cartel consists of drug trafficking and also election interference — attempted in 72 countries.
Under Maduro, Venezuela effectively invaded the U.S. with thousands of Tren de Aragua gang members led by hundreds of trained paramilitaries with a mission of destabilizing the United States.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has not asserted all of Berntsen’s and Rodil’s claims, but they’re the root of every relevant power grab Trump has attempted. Whatever Trump says now is likely an expansion on information, true or otherwise, that he has previously opted not to make public, presumably due to pushback in an intelligence community that he is systematically purging of non-loyalists.
On March 15, 2025, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deny suspected undocumented immigrants due process on the grounds that they’re soldiers, an invading army. Tren de Aragua, Trump’s executive order said, was on a mission of
“harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”
The order’s title referenced “the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.”
Trump’s own intelligence community refuted that fictional invasion. In fact, it was the Times report on that finding that prompted Berntsen to go public last year.
About a year ago, Berntsen has claimed, Rodil met with the office of then-National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard. Before she stepped down, she testified that her office seized Puerto Rico voting machines at the request of the U.S. attorney there.
That federal prosecutor, The Guardian revealed last year, had been fed “information, documents and witnesses” by Berntsen and Rodil.
The reason the Justice Department concluded last year, in a secret memo, that it’s legal to kill unarmed people in boats without warning or due process is that the U.S. is in a state of armed conflict with narco-terrorists not merely selling drugs, but using the proceeds to fund a military campaign to destabilize America. That’s the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne narrative.
That narrative was also echoed in the grounds given for the attack on Venezuela and capture of Maduro. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro was being charged with:
“Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy … and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.”
Again, a war, armed combat, against the United States.
Now, Trump needs a legal rationale to deploy federal forces at polling places. Federal law only allows federal troops at voting sites when “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” That’s what Trump needs, and that’s what the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne narrative gives him.
Ironically, the Maduro capture may now be complicating things, potentially for both sides. If he’s willing to say he stole the 2020 election, prosecutors will be obliged to demonstrate how. If he refuses, well, why would he if it would help his case?
And Maduro’s not the only Venezuelan in captivity.
There’s Hugo Carvajal, who fled Venezuela in 2017 after heading up military intelligence for previous Chavez. Berntsen was especially public last summer about urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to give Carvajal a deal in return for what he knows.
But what if what Carvajal knows isn’t that Venezuela stole the 2020 election? And what if Carvajal was one of those Berntsen-Rodil clients?
If Carvajal had real evidence, it would have been a slam dunk for him and prosecutors. But it could also expose considerable detail about the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne operation.
In an apparent bid for clemency, Carvajal wrote a letter last year that certainly seemed like an accusation against Venezuela. In fact, Trump’s boyhood friend Peter Ticktin cited Carvajal’s letter in his bid to win clemency for Colorado clerk Tina Peters. Despite not having the power to grant it, Trump did so days later.
But Carvajal’s letter notably doesn’t say anything about 2020. Which didn’t prevent Ticktin from citing it as causal grounds for Peters’s clemency.
Then there was the overlooked trial of former Rep. David Rivera (R-FL), convicted this spring of lobbying for Venezuela illegally and laundering his payments. Gorrin — the billionaire who got Salazar out of Venezuela — was a key middleman.
Who else worked for Gorrin? Ballard Partners, a heavy-hitting Florida lobbying firm with ties to the Trump administration. Ties that include having employed Wiles to work as a lobbyist for Gorrin’s media company.
Wiles was so involved that Rivera tried to get her to testify. His lawyers said she was Gorrin’s “principal point-of-contact” who had “extensive communications” regarding the work for Gorrin.
Wiles ended up not having to testify. Meaning we still don’t know what she knows about Gorrin.
Gabbard was seen in some quarters as not aggressive enough about putative election theft. Now she’s gone.
Trump has nominated U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to replace Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Clayton’s record includes election denial and indicting Maduro.
Other election deniers have been seeded into leadership roles at DOJ and elsewhere.
The DOJ’s new acting voting-rights chief is Eric Neff, a lawyer who represented Byrne as recently as last year and attended an election-denial summit this year along with Ticktin and Byrne.
Kurt Olsen, a past partner of election-denier Mike Lindell, is no longer a White House elections aide. He’s now a federal prosecutor in Miami, another district that’s been working the Berntsen-Rodil allegations.
When the analysis of Puerto Rican voting machines came up clean, Reuters reported, Olsen blamed the analysts in a message to Trump. They were “deep state” contractors paid by George Soros, Olsen alleged without evidence.
This week, MS NOW reported that Olsen’s latest focus has been Venezuelan election hacking. (MS NOW reported that Trump is leaning more frequently on 2020 election deniers, citing an administration official who said “It’s that network that is the real fucking problem.”)
Pirro, who helped Berntsen get an in with Powell, is now the top federal prosecutor for the District of Columbia.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Andrew “Mac” Warner reportedly has blamed the CIA for stealing the 2020 election.
Reuters reported last year that he attended a meeting in June 2025 with Olsen and an FBI agent tasked to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The meeting was for a briefing by at least three former Smartmatic employees.
Reuters didn’t say where the former workers came from, but they fit the profile of ostensible witnesses Berntsen and Rodil hunted around the globe.
According to Reuters, the Smartmatic veterans didn’t say any elections had been hacked, only that they could be. In theory.
Warner also went to that election-denial summit attended by Ticktin and Byrne. The New York Times reported this week that Warner is now investigating supposed election fraud for the DOJ. He’s known to have sought voter rolls from at least two Missouri counties.
So far, Trump has resisted repeating publicly the wildest claims from the Berntsen-Rodil-Byrne axis. But he has also already claimed extraordinary powers wielding those claims just enough to justify what he wants, without igniting public rejection of the false narrative at the base of it or the lack of hard evidence to support it.
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I’m an independent journalist whose reporting is made possible by reader support. As a former executive producer at MSNBC, I helped create Up w/ Chris Hayes and previously was a senior producer on Countdown w/ Keith Olbermann. Your paid subscription helps me keep reporting.
Great sleuthing Jonathan! Good timing for this, too
Absolutely great reporting here, but distressing nonetheless. There are just so many players in this cooked-up conspiracy. It's pure insanity. How did so many people become so untethered to reality?