Gabbard testimony on Puerto Rico voting machines raises questions about role of Venezuela conspiracy theory | Puerto Rico
When U.S. director of national intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard testified on Thursday that her office had seized voting machines in Puerto Rico, she said it was at the request of the U.S. attorney’s office in Puerto Rico. Left unsaid, as the Guardian has previously reported, is that the prosecutor is central to efforts by Donald Trump supporters to revive a long-discredited conspiracy theory that allegedly links Venezuela to Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
The conspiracy theory suggests that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controlled electronic voting machines around the world and remotely manipulated the results in 2020 to deny Trump a presidential victory.
This was just one of the theories and complaints put forward by Trump and his supporters. Other complaints included dead voters, stolen ballots, mail-in ballot fraud, and mass voting by noncitizens.
In 2023, a judge rules on voting machine conspiracy involving Dominion Voting and Venezuela it was wrongSome news outlets and some news organizations that made the allegations retracted the allegations and paid damages totaling hundreds of millions for defamation claims.
Still, as president, Trump appeared to express support for the theory even days after ordering a military strike on Venezuela this year to capture Maduro.
The theory was rehearsed in Trump’s justice department in early 2025. Former CIA official Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil, who have long defended this claim, presented the case to W. Stephen Muldrow, the US attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, three sources told the Guardian.
Berntsen and Rodil also briefed the director of national intelligence (ODNI) office with the same allegations, three sources said.
A national intelligence official said in an email to the Guardian in response to questions: “Any information provided by Bernsten [sic] and Rodil did so voluntarily.” The official added: “Bernsten [sic] and Rodil had no influence on ODNI’s decision to evaluate the Puerto Rican machines.”
Muldrow’s investigation into the Venezuela voting conspiracy underscores how Trump’s justice department has become a key weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss.
In an email to the Guardian, the DNI official denied that the office itself was investigating the Venezuela theory, saying: “Despite the false narrative you are trying to produce, our efforts were not specifically related to any election.”
But the fact that the unprecedented seizure of voting machines by the intelligence agency was requested by a prosecutor who forced an investigation into a fringe theory about the machines suggests there is at least some overlap in the case.
Questioned by Congressman Jim Himes on Thursday about the seizure of voting machines, Gabbard said it was a valid effort to examine election issues. “There were questions about whether there were vulnerabilities that a threat could exploit, and that was the purpose of asking us to examine those vulnerabilities.”
Muldrow declined to comment for this story.
Berntsen, who conveyed conspiracy theories about Venezuela to podcasts, gave the following message to the Guardian: “They were not looking for a Venezuelan connection in technology in Puerto Rico. They were looking for Chinese technology and they found it by the truckload, I won’t say anything else. I hope you will spend time proving the crime rather than trying to refute our work. In the end, everything we claim will be proven.”
Gabbard was testifying before the House of Representatives on Thursday about her annual worldwide threat assessment. Testifying about the same report in the Senate on Wednesday, Mark Warner, a senator from Virginia and vice chairman of the intelligence committee, noted that the assessment did not mention hostile attempts to influence American elections for the first time since 2017.
“I don’t believe this omission means the threat is gone,” Warner said. “This means that the intelligence community is no longer allowed to speak honestly about this issue.”
Puerto Rico has no electoral votes in presidential elections. What is true is that US territories have voting procedures bad in local races and often could not be delivered Electronic transmission of results requires the use of other methods for transmitting voting results.
