Gabbard testimony on Puerto Rico voting machines raises questions about role of Venezuela conspiracy theory

When the US director of national intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, testified on Thursday that her office seized voting machines from Puerto Rico, she said it was at the request of the office of the US attorney in Puerto Rico. Left unsaid was that the prosecutor, as the Guardian previously reported, has been the center of a push by Donald Trump supporters to revive a long discredited conspiracy theory purporting to link Venezuela to Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat.Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the conspiracy theory maintains, controlled electronic voting machines worldwide and remotely manipulated results in 2020 to deprive Trump of a presidential victory.It was just one of the theories and grievances pushed by Trump and his supporters. Other complaints involved dead voters, stolen ballots, mail-in ballot fraud and mass voting by noncitizens.A judge in 2023 ruled the voting machine conspiracy involving Dominion Voting and Venezuela was false, and some news organizations that made the allegations have retracted them and paid what amounted to hundreds of millions in defamation claims.Still, as president, Trump appeared to express support for the theory, even days after he ordered a military incursion into Venezuela to capture Maduro this year.It was in early 2025 that the theory got a rehearing in Trump’s justice department. Two longtime proponents, former CIA official Gary Berntsen and Venezuela expatriate Martin Rodil, made the case for it to the US attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W Stephen Muldrow, three sources told the Guardian.The three sources said Berntsen and Rodil also briefed the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) with the same claims.A DNI official, in response to questions, emailed the Guardian that “any information provided by Bernsten [sic] and Rodil was done so voluntarily”. The official added: “Bernsten [sic] and Rodil did not have an impact on ODNI’s decision to assess Puerto Rico machines.”Muldrow’s inquiry into the Venezuela voting conspiracy underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss.The DNI official who emailed the Guardian denied that the office was itself investigating the Venezuela theory, and said: “Despite the false narrative you’re attempting to manufacture, our efforts were not about any election in particular.”But the fact that the unprecedented seizure of the voting machines by a intelligence agency was requested by a prosecutor pushing an inquiry into a fringe theory about those machines shows that at a minimum there is an overlap in the case.On Thursday, questioned by congressman Jim Himes about the seizure of the voting machines, Gabbard said it was a valid effort to look into election issues. “There were questions about whether or not there were vulnerabilities that a threat could have taken advantage of and that was the purpose of their requesting us to look into those vulnerabilities.”Muldrow declined to comment for this story.Berntsen, who has pushed the conspiracy theories about Venezuela on podcasts, messaged the Guardian: “They weren’t looking for Venezuelan connection in technology in Puerto Rico. They were looking for Chinese technology and found truck loads, I will say nothing else. Hopefully you will spend time to prove the crime and not time trying to disprove our work. In the end all we have asserted will be proven.”Gabbard was testifying on Thursday before the House about the annual worldwide threat assessment. During testimony on Wednesday before the Senate on the same report, the senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice-chair of the intelligence committee, noted that for the first time since 2017 the assessment contained no mention of adversary attempts to influence American elections.“I don’t believe this omission means that the threat has disappeared,” Warner said. “It means that the intelligence community is no longer being allowed to speak honestly about it.”Puerto Rico does not have any electoral votes in presidential elections. What is true is that the US territory’s voting procedures performed poorly in local races and often failed to transmit results electronically, requiring other methods to transfer voting results.