Trump Got Venezuela Intel from Controversial "Fixer"
Venezuelan expat with rich, dissident clients and an ex-CIA partner told Trump that Maduro's waging a covert war
When Pres. Donald Trump rejected the U.S. intelligence assessment that the Venezuelan regime is not actually waging a covert war by deploying thousands of gang soldiers here, he didn’t say how he knew better.
He still hasn’t, even as he’s escalated from illegal deportations and killing people to, reportedly, preparing for military strikes against Venezuela.
But Trump’s narrative, of a covert Venezuelan war, was handed to his team last year by two proponents of regime change: a former CIA official and his business partner, a consultant reportedly paid millions by wealthy Venezuelan dissidents.
The former CIA official, Gary Berntsen, says they had just a single source for the intel and names they first provided to Trump’s team. Their unidentified source, a Venezuelan, was said to have evidence of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “inserting people into the United States.” Berntsen says he paid several thousand dollars for that first tranche of info.
It’s not clear what other sources they’ve used since. But Berntsen’s business partner is Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan-born Israeli citizen who’s worked with the U.S. government.
Rodil has been a “fixer” for wealthy Venezuelans who want to get out without landing in a U.S. jail or losing their wealth.
U.S. officials have praised Rodil in the past for mediating a pipeline of incriminating evidence against Maduro, whose regime is rife with corruption and whose 2024 re-election was widely recognized as illegitimate. A 2016 Bloomberg Businessweek profile, however, declared some of Rodil’s claims about Venezuela “groundless.”
Berntsen’s best known for his role in the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. A retired senior operations officer, Berntsen has been linked more recently to regime change plans for Kuwait and, if you count the 2020 presidential election, the United States.
Their business now includes “asset recovery.” And helping the Trump administration. (Emails to addresses associated with Berntsen and Rodil were not returned.)
The narrative that Berntsen and Rodil gave Trump’s team prior to his inauguration — invasion by a hostile nation — is the same one that Trump wielded to claim emergency powers against Tren de Aragua.
(The idea of a coordinated invasion by Tren de Aragua at Maduro’s behest was refuted by U.S. intelligence assessments; an appeals court allowed the possibility of individual gang ties but found no outright invasion.)
The Tren de Aragua invasion is just one Venezuelan tentacle Berntsen sees around the globe — including massive election fraud. Berntsen calls himself “Patient Zero” on election theft, the man who first told Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell that the 2020 election was stolen.
The Trump administration has not acknowledged Berntsen’s aid publicly — or to me when I emailed the White House — but he reportedly began briefing Trump’s team on Venezuela before the inauguration. Berntsen remains in touch with Trump agencies, he says, most recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Tulsi Gabbard.
The Miami Herald revealed Berntsen’s involvement in March, describing his team of unnamed “Venezuelans and former U.S. officials” as “helping” the administration track Tren de Aragua. It did not name Rodil.
Rodil had built a lucrative business as a middleman between the U.S. government and expatriate Venezuelans, especially those who could incriminate the Maduro regime. Rodil also has a network of foreign-policy hard-liners who’ve supported regime change in Venezuela or elsewhere.
Years ago, Rodil’s financial investigations helped shine a spotlight on Venezuelan ties with Hezbollah and Iran. The prospect of nuclear collaboration was floated, but Bloomberg wrote that “Some of the information he passed on—that Iran was about to place missiles in Venezuela, for example—proved groundless.”
When the Herald’s Berntsen story came out in March, the administration’s focus was rounding up Venezuelan immigrants. Now Trump has sent warships to international waters off Venezuela and illegally killed 17 people at sea in unprovoked bombings.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed the U.S. knew who was in the first boat that the Defense Department (DOD) illegally destroyed, without explaining how. “We’ve got incredible assets,” he said. Hegseth didn’t give specifics, and there’s no evidence DOD got intel from Berntsen, but the two do have history.
One concern with the U.S. relying on external intel is that sources may have motive to lie, to cherry-pick or fabricate information to spur American action toward regime change. Another concern is that an administration itching to act might seek out sources willing to provide a casus belli.
That’s what happened with Iraq. A dissident Iraqi dubbed Curveball invented intel for a U.S. pretext to invade.
By Berntsen’s own account, he had been working on Venezuelan issues for years but hadn’t heard of Tren de Aragua until the latter half of 2023.
Berntsen has had a number of businesses. One of them, RH2 Global, says it’s “comprised of Former US and International National Security Officials. Each spanning full careers with numerous successes who aren't afraid to upset the status quo.”
RH2’s services include “asset recovery.” That was a topic at the Miami meeting Berntsen and his business partner, apparently Rodil, held some time around September or October 2023. Berntsen described it in an April podcast interview.
“We were meeting with, you know, one of the people that we meet with — someone who was from Venezuela — and we were debriefing them on activities that were going on in Venezuela and you know we, we do asset recovery, we’re — we look at money laundering quite a bit — and, out of the blue, this individual began sharing with us information and documents on gang activity in Venezuela.”
The first document had “a couple thousand names and faces” of gang members. The second, Berntsen says, “was specifically about Tren del Aragua1. … And they [the Venezuelan source] started explaining that the Venezuelan regime was inserting people into the United States, that this particular gang, Tren del Aragua, was the most dangerous of all the gangs.”
Berntsen, whose last CIA gig was as a chief of station in Latin America, said he passed it all on to the Dept. of Homeland Security’s investigative agency (HSI) at an unspecified HSI office in Latin America. “They had never heard of Tren del Aragua, either,” Berntsen said.
In Berntsen’s account, HSI did nothing with his intel. But a day or two after Trump’s election last year, Berntsen got a call from an HSI official: “Mr. Berntsen, we heard, we’re grateful for the information that you provided us before. Can you please introduce us to the source?”
“The” source. There was only one. The unidentified Venezuelan.
It’s not clear who Berntsen’s and Rodil’s source might have been, but the 2016 Bloomberg profile referred to Rodil’s “fixation” on removing Venezuela’s government. It also describes his clients as whistleblowers.
In effect, Rodil does intake. He then connects his clients with appropriate U.S. agencies. Bloomberg wrote:
“He delivers Venezuelans of value and is paid—modestly, he says—by [U.S.] government entities. He also has a better-paying business in which his clients are rich Venezuelans who are desperate to get out. He helps them do that and, where appropriate, works with them to develop strategies for cooperating with U.S. authorities. For these services, he commands an hourly rate or is kept on retainer. The most lucrative of his businesses is a consulting practice for companies and individuals seeking intelligence and risk assessment in Latin America.”
Berntsen didn’t say whether the Venezuelan at the 2023 Miami meeting was a client, let alone in which category. In fact, Berntsen says he paid the source for the intel.
“I paid thousands of dollars for that information in the beginning,” Berntsen said in the April podcast. “I gave several thousand dollars to the man that was collecting it and doing this work.”
But when Berntsen relayed HSI’s request to connect with the source, the source agreed. “He started, y’know, cooperating with Homeland Security immediately and they were very interested in Tren del Aragua, right away.”
As Berntsen puts it, with some understatement, “That’s how this whole thing began.”
Trump’s narrative on Venezuela varies, but at times it reflects Berntsen’s story. Namely, that Tren de Aragua is much more than gang branding with no central organization or structure.
In Berntsten’s telling, Tren de Aragua is the covert army of Venezuela’s illegitimate president; head of a regime with vast reach now incorporating the transnational criminal organization known as Cartel de los Soles, cartel of the suns (suns being insignia on high-ranking Venezuelan military uniforms). “The most well-resourced criminal syndicate in history,” Berntsen says.
Led by 300 trained paramilitaries, the secret army of 5,000 Tren de Aragua soldiers has been deployed to the United States to carry out Maduro’s mission of destabilizing the United States.
If true, that could, potentially, justify Trump claiming emergency powers under the Alien Enemies Act. Trump cited “paramilitary capabilities” to justify the first boat bombing.
The deportations, though, are typical of Trump’s incoherence on this issue. As I wrote back in April, if they’re really Maduro soldiers, they presumably would be kept here, interrogated for valuable intel, and flipped, if possible. (Berntsen has said as much, publicly asking Trump to give a plea deal to a former Venezuelan official.)
Some prisoners might also have propaganda value if they were to disavow Maduro publicly. Or confirm even a fraction of Trump’s claims.
Trump has done none of that.
The judicial ruling against Trump concluded that the administration failed to show that an invasion currently exists to justify using the Alien Enemies Act. Even El Salvador’s accommodating Pres. Nayib Bukele reportedly was skeptical that he was imprisoning actual Tren de Aragua members for Trump, let alone a covert army.
Despite Trump’s failure to keep Maduro’s supposed soldiers here, Berntsen remains a fan.
“Donald Trump and company, and Stephen Miller … these guys really are quite, quite good,” Berntsen said in the April podcast. “As soon as they get the information and they understand the threat, they are weaponizing policy against the regime, where everybody else gave in to them.”
He added, “We’ve provided this reporting directly to the White House.”
Berntsen describes himself as a conservative Republican. (He ran as a Tea Party candidate in 2013 for the Republican nomination to take on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). He campaigned on the threat of illegal immigration.)
Unlike other conservative Republicans, Berntsen was on board with Trump well before the 2016 general election. And his ties to Hegseth go back even further.
The Trump Connections
By 2012, Berntsen was something of a national-security celebrity, with a book out and hits on cable news. His work in Afghanistan and the hunt for bin Laden made for impressive bona fides.
So when Concerned Veterans for America launched in 2012, Berntsen was a founding member. He did a promotional tour as its Florida director. Before coming on board though, he had to decide whether to work under the group’s first CEO, a young guy named Pete Hegseth. Berntsen went to meet him.
“He was humble, direct, and smart. It was clear to me that he was policy-driven and capable, though only in his mid-30s. He was familiar with my published work and that of many others involved in counterterrorism and the war against Islamic radicalism.”
Berntsen and Hegseth did “dozens of events together over several years,” Berntsen wrote, encouraging senators to confirm Hegseth as the secretary of Defense. “As a concerned veteran, I was impressed.”
It wasn’t the first time Berntsen came to Trump’s aid.
In February 2016, with Trump’s team eager to bolster him on foreign policy, the campaign got Berntsen’s endorsement and flaunted it.
Still, by 2024, Berntsen apparently needed an in to reach Trump. He got it from Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK). “Of course, the guy's a UFC fighter,” Berntsen said on The Adam Carolla Show earlier this month, referring to Mullin’s mixed martial arts background2. “That guy took us to the campaign. He took the information to the president.”
After the election, Berntsen’s group got a meeting with the transition team, the Herald reported:
“The group … made a presentation to President Donald Trump’s team before he was inaugurated on Jan. 20, detailing links between the feared Tren de Aragua gang and the Nicolás Maduro regime, and provided official documents obtained from Venezuelan police agencies identifying 1,800 gang members believed to have been sent into the United States…”
It’s not clear what information, if any, Berntsen and his team offered the Trump team to substantiate those identifications. But an unidentified member of Berntsen’s team told the Herald that 800 of the people identified to the White House had been arrested.
The administration says its intel is rock-solid — despite intelligence community assessments to the contrary.
After bombing the first boat, killing 11 people, Hegseth vouched for the intel. “We knew exactly who was in that boat,” he told Fox. “We knew exactly what they were doing. And we knew exactly who they represented. And that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization.”
Some evidence has emerged of the boats transporting drugs, including some literally found in the sea afterward. But the U.S. government has not disclosed what evidence it had beforehand. Although it’s widely understood that some corrupt Venezuelan officials do have ties to drug trafficking, the first 11 people killed were said by Venezuela not to be gang members, and Maduro recently wrote to Trump denying official involvement.
Trump’s team claimed as soon as they took office that they had solid intel on Tren de Aragua. The executive order came on day one. Even though Berntsen claims the Biden administration didn’t pursue Tren de Aragua, and colluded with Venezuela, it took barely two weeks for Hegseth to claim he had all the intel he needed.
On Feb. 3, Hegseth spoke at Ft. Bliss, TX, with Fox’s Lawrence Jones III, who recounted that conversation during an interview earlier this month, after the first boat strike: “Mr. Secretary,” Jones said, “you made it very clear, when we had the opportunity to visit the southern border at Fort Bliss, that Southern Command knew exactly where these folks were and that you guys was gonna take ‘em out.”
If the Biden administration were “colluding” with Venezuela, as Berntsen claims, it would have been a remarkable feat for the incoming administration to retask human and signal intelligence collection and yield actionable results in the space of two weeks. Unless someone gave them alternative intel.
Since the inauguration, the Herald reported, Berntsen’s group “has been meeting with high-ranking members of the administration.” The Herald didn’t include official confirmation from the administration, but cited three unnamed sources. That was March 21.
During the April podcast (which was posted on the sixth but may have been taped earlier), Berntsen said he was calling in from Washington. He was meeting, he said, with “elements of the government and we’re doing additional briefings for the government right now.”
Trump’s team was receptive, Berntsen said. “This administration is making every effort. They’ve accepted us with open arms and they’re like, ‘Give us everything you’ve got,’ now. Y’know, ‘What else have you got? What do you think?’”
Everything his team had, Berntsen said, “has all been shared with the administration and they’ve stepped out on it quickly.”
Berntsen remained in communication with the administration through the end of the summer, he says. The Sept. 3 Adam Carolla Show included this exchange:
Berntsen: I've had meetings in the last couple of months at the DNI office, the Office of Director of National Intelligence. They asked me, what should you do.
Carolla: That’s Tulsi Gabbard?
Berntsen: Yes, in her office. And I've told the people there, fire 50% of the people at the CIA immediately. Create a counterintelligence service immediately, and begin cleaning this out, because we're penetrated completely at the highest levels.
Berntsen says the U.S. government has been compromised. “I mean large numbers, not just like one source,” he told Carolla. “Like three and four sources in each of these organizations.”
According to Berntsen, Venezuela recruited members of the CIA, the State Department, think thanks, and lobbying firms. How deep does it go? From George Soros to Fox News. Even Newsmax.
Drugs and gangs are just part of it. Before even hearing of Tren de Aragua, Berntsen was focused on election theft. Carolla’s other guest, sitting across from Berntsen, has a new book coming about Berntsen’s work: “Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide.”
Author Ralph Pezzullo worked with Berntsen on his book about Afghanistan, Jawbreaker. His website describes his new book as the story of a “four-year investigatiom [sic] into election fraud by two top government whistleblowers, including CIA hero Gary Berntsen.”
The book “needs to be read by all those who value freedom," according to a blurb from Berntsen.
In it, Pezzullo tells the origin story of Berntsen and his partner’s election investigation. And Pezzullo reveals the name of Berntsen’s partner. According to the book’s press release:
“In 2019, two U.S. government whistleblowers, renowned former CIA operations officer Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan transnational crime expert Martin Rodil, were investigating drug trafficking and money laundering when they uncovered something far more alarming: A global plot to influence elections in the United States and more than 70 countries worldwide.”
The narrative of a stolen 2020 election — which inspired thousands to storm the U.S. Capitol to ensure Trump’s victory and still divides the country — all began, Berntsen says, with him.
“You're looking at Patient Zero,” Berntsen told Carolla, pointing to himself. “And Patient 01 is my business partner.” Berntsen doesn’t name Rodil, but when Pezzullo does, Berntsen doesn’t correct him.
Pezzullo describes meeting Rodil in Miami:
“He said, ‘For the last four years, I've been working on election fraud.’ And I was like, whoa, okay, interesting. And he said, ‘Yeah, actually, if you're not busy tomorrow, I would like you to come to where I'm staying and show you a four-hour presentation on what me and my partner have discovered.’ Well, his partner turned out to be Gary Berntsen.”
Berntsen said he and his partner, Rodil, were the ones who got the ball rolling.
“We are the people that went initially and walked into Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and said, ‘They stole this election: We know the company; we understand the techniques.’ It was just going to take time to prove it right.”
But even before that came Venezuela and the money. That was Rodil’s specialty. Along with advocating for regime change.
Martin Rodil
Rodil’s story reads like a spy novel. In most chapters, he’s a good guy.
According to Bloomberg, Rodil came to Washington in 2000 and soon got a job processing data from South American banks for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The pace picks up in 2003.
That’s when Rodil met an Israeli security consultant named Tal Hanan. The relationship led Rodil out of the IMF and into a partnership with Hanan: financial investigations for corporations.
Rodil began consulting for Roger Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state under Pres. George W. Bush with a history of pushing regime change. As Bloomberg put it, “many involved in Latin America consider [Noriega] a far-right ideologue. That has made some mistrustful of Rodil and his activities, too.”
Rodil uncovered shady financial dealings between Iran and Venezuela, and brought them to U.S. law enforcement. That connection would prove lucrative.
It would also render Rodil non grata back home. Uncovering Venezuelan financial schemes made Rodil powerful enemies. He was called a traitor by regime allies, accused of plotting a coup d’état.
Undaunted, Rodil started a group to lobby for tougher U.S. policy against Maduro. His goal, he wrote in a 2017 op-ed, was not a coup, but peaceful regime change.
His clientele was “an elite slice of the Venezuelan diaspora,” according to Bloomberg. “They include former generals, ministers, and oil executives and a former senior judge and presidential bodyguard.”
An anonymous State Department official vouched for Rodil, telling Bloomberg, “Martín Rodil’s delivered critical assets and documents for U.S. investigators.”
In 2018, the Associated Press reported that Rodil was working with the office of then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rodil had connected them with “several Venezuelan defectors looking to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement.” (It was Rubio whose intelligence on the first boat was off; he first said it was bound for Trinidad.)
Now secretary of state, Rubio, too, is a hard-liner on Venezuela3.
By 2022, however, a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) included allegations that Rodil was extorting millions from corrupt Venezuelans.
At the time, prosecutors in Spain were accusing Rodil of extorting wealthy Venezuelans hoping to dodge U.S. criminal charges. Rodil did not respond to the ICIJ, but an online search turned up no indication that he was ever charged.
Noriega defended Rodil to the ICIJ and said Rodil was operating in cooperation with, and monitored by, U.S. officials.
The prosecution’s details, however, hinted at just how lucrative Rodil’s work had become. An allegedly corrupt former Venezuelan energy official was said to have paid Rodil roughly $6.8 million. Noriega told the ICIJ he couldn’t speak to specifics, but was confident payments were part of U.S. cases.
Prosecution records revealed Rodil as the real owner of a Scottish limited partnership registered under a so-called “decoy name” for a Ukrainian oligarch. Noriega said the allegations against Rodil came from corrupt Venezuelans hoping to discredit the investigations against them.
According to the ICIJ, Rodil “provides private consulting services to wealthy Venezuelans seeking to relocate to the United States.”
As Berntsen said, they do asset recovery, as well. But it’s not just client assets at stake. Discussing the massive financial implications of regime change with Carolla, Berntsen’s eyes seem wide open:
“When have you ever seen a country that had 300 billion barrels of oil in the ground getting ready to rebuild? It’s going to be the largest reconstruction project in the hemisphere. American companies will go in there and get a lot of business.”
That scenario could prove lucrative for both clients and associates of Rodil and Berntsen. According to The Herald, their team includes Venezuelans and former U.S. officials with “deep connections to police and intelligence” in Venezuela. But their networks go beyond the team.
The Associates
The Herald reporter who spoke to Berntsen in March also spoke with an unnamed member of Berntsen’s team. Was it Rodil? It seems possible; the same reporter has quoted Rodil in prior stories.
The Herald said it was keeping the unnamed member of Berntsen’s team anonymous “to protect the identities of the team’s sources in Venezuela.”
Whether or not it was Rodil, other associates are also invested in Venezuela policy and/or regime change, although there’s little evidence of ties to the current intel efforts.
Berntsen and Rodil have registered a number of companies in the fields of law, international consulting, energy (oil), and, in at least the case of RH2 Global, “asset recovery.”
Some of their partners, including at least one fellow former CIA official, have only tenuous links to anything related to Venezuela. But some associates stand out for what they, Rodil, and Berntsen have done in the past.
Farhad Azima
Corporate filings identify Berntsen as a manager of a now-inactive company called Denx, LLC. Partner Farhad Azima was the subject of a 2017 Associated Press investigation.
Azima was a former gunrunner who apparently did contract flights for the CIA. Denx was a private intelligence firm. One of its pitches offered regime change for sale.
The AP says the client was “apparently” a disgruntled Kuwaiti royal. A Denx PowerPoint presentation — “A Methodology For Change” — laid out how Denx might smear Kuwaiti officials as corrupt and in bed with Iran.
After stoking public resentment, Denx would then light the fire with protests such as a “rent-a-crowd flash mob.” One presentation slide read, “The stakes are very, very high ($30+ billion) and are easily worth killing over.”
A leaked email showed the slide deck as an attachment sent from Berntsen’s account to Azima’s, but Berntsen denied any knowledge of it.
“We wrote proposals up and we didn’t execute any of this,” Berntsen told the AP. Berntsen said he wouldn’t have helped undermine a U.S. ally.
A third Denx manager also told the AP he didn’t know about the plan. Like Berntsen, he was former CIA, formerly stationed in Latin America.
Scott Modell
Denx’s third manager, Scott Modell, was a partner at Rapidan Energy Group, a research firm where he’s now CEO. He also figured into a British lawsuit involving Azima and one of the United Arab Emirates, Ras Al Khaimah (RAK).
The emirate was suing Azima over a business dispute. Modell was not accused of anything, but in a 2020 ruling, the judge drew some conclusions about Modell’s work with Azima.
Azima had been retained to conduct a public-relations campaign against RAK. He commissioned Modell to write up a pitch.
The proposal included damaging the emirate’s reputation, but also “Organized protests and other forms of manufactured dissent.”
One recommendation involved duping RAK officials into deals with “disreputable individuals.” The plan counted 65 potential transactions that could be arranged with criminal entities including “Latin American drug cartel figures.”
RAK stood to get ripped off of substantial amounts of money. And when the deals came to light, the scandal could embarrass RAK, compelling United Arab Emirates authorities to limit RAK “aggression” against Azima’s client.
Azima claimed that he told Modell to strike from the plan what the judge called “suggestions of illegal and deceptive activity.” The judge didn’t buy it. Under cross-examination, Azima admitted discussing “Illegal operation[s]” with Modell.
Today, according to his bio at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Modell is a senior advisor to U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which reportedly carried out the initial boat strike.
Another former partner of Berntsen is also a former U.S. government official. And has ties to Rodil.
Bart Marcois
During the administration of Pres. George W. Bush, former foreign service officer Bart Marcois served as an advisor, principal deputy assistant, to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Now Marcois is on the board of Bahrain-based American Global Consulting, which offers a range of consulting and public-relations services on issues including “energy security policy,” Marcois’s specialty.
Marcois was partners with both Berntsen and Rodil in a short-lived company called Chancellors Law Group that was dissolved in 2021.
In April 2020, with Covid soaring, Berntsen and Marcois filed to launch a nonprofit to help out. Their foundation would “provide relief to refugees and other victims of totalitarian governments and oppression in South America.”
Relief would take the form of supplies and “security services” for those suffering from inadequate medical care or “fleeing from oppression.” No annual report was filed and the foundation doesn’t appear in online IRS records.
More recently, Marcois has boosted Berntsen’s narrative about Venezuela. The Fairfax County, Virginia, Republican committee published a Marcois article less than two weeks after the Herald piece, headlined “Is Tren de Aragua a Military Incursion? You Bet!”
Marcois argued that James Boasberg, the judge hearing Trump’s Alien Enemies Act claim, was “blatantly corrupt,” with “conflicts of interest.” Marcois didn’t disclose his ties with Berntsen.
The article has Berntsen telling Marcois that Tren de Aragua’s training under Maduro includes arson. Arsonists, Berntsen says, started many of the Los Angeles wildfires4.
“How many of them were paid or coerced by TdA [Tren de Aragua] or their surrogates?” Berntsen asks. Marcois blames the gang for “probably” $300 billion worth in fire damages from last year on.
According to Marcois, Berntsen came forward to the Herald in March to refute the New York Times report that U.S. intelligence actually points away from operational ties between Maduro and Tren de Aragua5.
And the same day Marcois’s article appeared, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) cited the Herald article about Berntsen, entering it into the congressional record. In a hearing, Hageman quoted the Herald’s unnamed source saying that Tren de Aragua members “are soldiers sent in an asymmetrical warfare operation against the United States.”
Marcois, a Fairfax County Republican official, wrote in his article that Berntsen gave the administration “proof.”
Marcois saw the proof, he wrote, but didn’t share it in the article. Under Biden, Berntsen tells Marcois, the CIA “refused to look at it.”
Berntsen says, “We tried to brief them about this three years ago, but they were directed by the Biden Administration to ignore it. And now those officials are trying to undermine President Trump.”
Just last month, Marcois Tweeted “Predictions that Venezuela will be free.” But not all Venezuelans.
This summer, a very high-profile Venezuelan expatriate was looking at serious U.S. prison time. There’s no public evidence he was a client, or even that he knew Rodil or Berntsen. But they know him. And they vouched for his value to the U.S.
The Guilty Plea
In 2019, the Miami Herald — the same reporter — wrote that the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez’s former intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, who’d been captured in Spain, “may spill the darkest secrets of Chavismo [Chávez’s ideology] in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
The sources were unnamed but “close to the case.”
One source went on the record with the Herald, vouching for Carvajal’s value to American law-enforcement agencies. That was Rodil. Carvajal, Rodil told the Herald, “has the details on all the players and all the crimes committed during the era of Chávez and Maduro.”
If Carvajal was paying Rodil to broker a trade of intel for leniency, it wasn’t disclosed in the Herald’s report. But Rodil certainly made the case for it:
“If he [Carvajal] decides to cooperate, he would become the biggest threat against Venezuelan officials who were involved in all these crimes. Not only because he is a firsthand witness, but he also has the databases with contemporary documentation at the time the crimes were committed.”
The Herald didn’t say how Rodil knew about the databases. Or why U.S. officials thought Carvajal might talk in exchange for leniency. But nothing seems to have come of it. Spain didn’t even extradite him to the U.S. until 2023.
Berntsen weighed in publicly a year later. A video posted Oct. 18, 2024 — by another former CIA operative and Berntsen business partner — has Berntsen referring to Carvajal as a Cartel de los Soles leader.
Carvajal’s real value to U.S. law enforcement is unclear. Carvajal split with Maduro before fleeing Venezuela. And first he released a video calling for mass protests to replace Maduro with Juan Guaidó, recognized by the first Trump administration as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.
This summer, with Carvajal’s trial approaching, Berntsen made a public plea for Trump to give Carvajal a deal. His open letter — and even a video — vouched for Carvajal’s intelligence value, including on Tren de Aragua. And the identities of compromised U.S. officials.
Berntsen told Lindell TV’s Emerald Robinson that Emil Bove, then in the Justice Department, “inexplicably” was blocking a deal for Carvajal. Even though, Berntsen says, Carvajal put in writing his willingness to talk. It’s not clear how Berntsen knows this and he didn’t disclose any ties to Carvajal.
When Carvajal pleaded guilty in June, Robinson reported it as a plea deal. She credited Berntsen for the deal.
Except, it’s not clear what deal she’s talking about. Prosecutors said he’ll have to serve at least 50 years in prison, effectively a life sentence. Carvajal’s lawyer said prosecutors never offered a deal.
That said, it’s unclear why Carvajal would plead instead of taking his chances with a jury. The Associated Press suggested that the plea might have been a gambit to win a reduced sentence in return for Carvajal’s intel.
The same Herald reporter who’s quoted both Berntsen and Rodil cited “confidential sources” who said Carvajal told U.S. officials that Maduro had a hand in Tren de Aragua’s creation and made it a paramilitary arm of the government. Carvajal also offered the U.S. evidence “implicating Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials in a range of illegal activities,” the Herald’s unnamed sources said.
But even the Herald questions Carvajal’s credibility, citing his “history of shifting loyalties and politically motivated statements.” So maybe the Justice Department wasn’t buying whatever Carvajal was offering, the same line Rodil and Berntsen handed Trump.
Berntsen told Associated Press reporter Joshua Goodman that Carvajal was “a very bad man,” but that the U.S. should cut him a deal. “[W]e need to defend democracy,” Berntsen said.
Goodman wrote that unnamed “backers” of Carvajal were vouching for his intel value on matters important to Trump:
“…his backers say he can provide potentially valuable insights on the inner workings of the spread of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua into the U.S. and spying activities of the Maduro-allied governments of Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.
“He may also be angling for Trump’s attention with information about voting technology company Smartmatic. One of Carvajal’s deputies was a major player in Venezuela’s electoral authority when the company was getting off the ground.”
Goodman doesn’t say who Carvajal’s “backers” are. But when Goodman and another AP reporter wrote about Carvajal’s 2021 arrest in Spain, the source vouching for Carvajal’s importance was Rodil:
“‘Carvajal is the key link that can explain the business dealings between Colombian guerrillas, Mexican drug cartels and other criminal organizations in the U.S. and Europe,’ said Martin Rodil…”
And Berntsen claims there are other links.
The Election Conspiracy
The claims about a covert Maduro army destabilizing the U.S. barely count as a sidebar in Berntsen’s story. Berntsen’s real focus — and Pezzullo’s — is election theft. Not just 2020. Not just America.
Seventy-two countries.
Dominion and Smartmatic are tendrils of the Maduro regime, which created and runs the largest transnational criminal organization in history, with upwards of $2 trillion on hand, by Berntsen’s count.
And Maduro’s not going it alone. Other international players are part of the scheme:
China
Russia
Cuba
Iran
Serbia
All told, the cartel “controls a dozen countries and world leaders,” Berntsen says. He told Carolla why no one knows it:
“It’s the wealthiest, most powerful criminal enterprise in the history of the world. They have paid off everybody on all sides…
“The press wouldn’t see us, and Congress — even people on the far right, Freedom Caucus members — they didn’t want anything to do with us. They were intimidated. They were afraid.”
Which doesn’t mean Berntsen didn’t get meetings: “I had a senior CIA officer say it’s too big for us,” he said in April.
Today, Berntsen says, the CIA is “trying to promote” a Maduro replacement, former Maduro minister-turned-dissident Miguel Rodríguez Torres. “Cartel light,” Berntsen says.
Instead, Berntsen’s lobbying for Maria Corina Machado, described by El Pais as a right-wing radical. “Shame on you people” in the U.S. government for boosting Torres, Berntsen says. “We have to stop that.”
It’s not just the CIA Berntsen’s up against. When he took his story to the FBI, an official warned Berntsen to skip town or the bureau would come after him. In the Justice Department, a U.S. attorney referred Bernten’s info to the Office of Public Integrity, which never responded.
Berntsen says he briefed Fox News and Newsmax. “We were in contact with journalists at Fox News,” he told Carolla. “They knew what we had. Fox did and Newsmax. We offered them access to our witnesses, which they would not take.” Neither would the execs.
“We briefed Newsmax's corporate attorney, as well,” Berntsen said in his October 2024 video. He went into more detail about Fox with Carolla:
“In Fox News’s case against Dominion, we briefed Fox News trial attorneys. Our lawyers were present when we did that. Fox News corporate officers refused to be briefed directly for that case. They wanted plausible deniability.
“Fox News corporate knew we had significant evidence and, more importantly, witnesses. When all the facts are known, Fox News executives and board will have to explain why they went down on their knees for enemies of the U.S.
“We briefed Newsmax’s corporate attorney, as well. Though their settlement with Smartmatic is not public, any settlement with either company and their masters, the Cartel de los Soles, the Cuban DGI [Directorate of Intelligence], and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] makes it more difficult for those of us trying to defend the country and our democracy.”
With proof in hand from Berntsen, why would Fox and Newsmax settle? It cost Fox, after all, $787 million.
One possibility, Berntsen suggests, is that “someone else facilitated payments so it can make it all go away, and it would smother the global effort to investigate.”
The implication: Cartel de los Soles used Dominion and Smartmatic to steal the 2020 presidential election, then sued Fox and Newsmax for saying it was stolen, then agreed to pay the legal settlements — to themselves — to make their own lawsuits go away. Despite having proof, Fox News and Newsmax went along with it.
Newsmax didn’t respond to my questions about their work with the Maduro regime. Fox Senior Executive Vice President for Corporate Communications Irena Briganti declined to respond to Berntsen’s claim that he gave his info to Fox journalists.
“Our editorial process and sourcing is confidential, so not something we’d engage on here one way or another,” she said. (Her response reflects prevailing journalistic norms not to reveal methods and sources.)
As for Berntsen’s suggestion that the Maduro cartel sponsored Fox’s settlement payments, including that $787 million to Dominion, Briganti told me that “[T]he wild speculation about the source of the settlement funds is completely false.”
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 will help me keep digging.
Berntsen uses the term “Tren del Aragua” rather than the more common “Tren de Aragua.”
Mullin was actually an XFL fighter.
AEI and Noriega report.
Did you have to make a crime board in your study to keep all this straight? Wow! I, too, need to reread several times!
Totally worth the wait for this! I definitely appreciate the effort you put into this piece. Although it's unsettling to say the least.