EXCLUSIVE SCOOP: U.S. Attorney of Puerto Rico Warned Against Lack of Evidence in January 2025, Raising Questions About Later Gabbard-Led Voting Machine Probe
Attorney Matt DePerno shared this story that predated the May 2025 ODNI investigation of Puerto Rican Dominion election tabulators exclusively with Bigger Truth.
WASHINGTON — In the days following President Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Michigan attorney Matt DePerno participated in a phone call and Signal group chat that he says was an attempt by Flynn-linked election conspiracy promoters to influence a federal investigation into Puerto Rico’s voting machines.
The January 22, 2025 phone call, according to DePerno, included U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico W. Stephen Muldrow, Venezuelan-born consultant Martin Rodil, and attorney Stefanie Lambert. DePerno has provided Bigger Truth Media with materials from that communication, including notes he kept about the call and screenshots of subsequent Signal messages.
The revelations raise new questions about a voting machine investigation that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard’s office launched months later in May 2025, which initially suggested foreign interference but ultimately found no evidence to support those claims.
DePerno, representing client Bill Bailey in the 2020 Antrim County lawsuit regarding approximately 3000 votes that were flipped from Trump to Biden, secured a legal victory in 2020 when a judge granted him access to Antrim County’s Dominion tabulators.
The January Call
According to DePerno’s account of the January 22 call, Rodil and Lambert arranged the conversation through a Signal group called “Puerto Rico” that included DePerno and Muldrow. The purpose, DePerno says, was to brief him on an alleged investigation into voting machine vulnerabilities with connections to Venezuela.
“They were coming to me because they believed I had access to Trump’s inner circle at the time,” DePerno told Bigger Truth Media. “They wanted me to encourage Trump to expand this investigation beyond Puerto Rico to include every swing state.”
DePerno said the participants insisted they had built an evidentiary case proving Venezuelan interference in Puerto Rican elections. However, he said that as he pressed for details, the case “clearly fell apart.”
“When I asked why they didn’t just bring indictments if the case was built, the answers became circular,” DePerno said. “It became clear they had no actual evidence. I was perplexed as to why they wanted Trump to expand this investigation to other states when they couldn’t prove it in Puerto Rico, where they appeared to have access.”
Warning Muldrow
Following the call, DePerno sent messages to the Signal group warning Muldrow that he was “dealing with a fraudster,” according to screenshots he provided.
In those messages, dated January 23, 2025, DePerno wrote: “You are now on notice that you are dealing with a fraudster,” referring to Rodil. He went on to describe previous interactions with Rodil and associate Gary Berntsen in 2021, claiming they had failed to deliver promised evidence and instead presented what DePerno characterized as recycled material.
“Martin and Gary came to Michigan and didn’t bring any of the data. Instead, they tried to peddle off a power point presentation,” DePerno wrote in the messages.
Shortly after DePerno’s warning, Rodil removed Muldrow from the Signal conversation, according to the message logs.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. Rodil could not be reached for comment, and Lambert responded to a polite text request by blocking the journalist from future text messages.
Connection to Gabbard Investigation
Four months after the January call, in May 2025, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) team led by Gabbard’s office, working with the FBI, examined Puerto Rico’s voting machines for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Reuters first reported the operation in February 2026.
On April 10, 2025, Gabbard said in a public White House Cabinet meeting that “We have evidence of how these these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time—and vulnerable to manipulation to manipulate the results being cast.”
Only a few weeks later, per last week’s reporting, her office obtained some Dominion tabulators and computers in Puerto Rico, with claims that Venezuela was involved in manipulating Puerto Rican election results. However, sources told Reuters investigators did not substantiate claims of Venezuelan interference. Gabbard did not publicly correct or provide additional information to support her initial characterization.
A DOJ spokesperson told Reuters that Muldrow’s office, along with Homeland Security investigations agents and an FBI supervisory special agent, participated in the May 2025 operation, facilitating the voluntary turnover of election equipment to Gabbard’s team.
DePerno said the January call participants were specifically seeking to expand any investigation beyond Puerto Rico.
“The ask was to make sure people committed to investigating election crimes ‘keep together so we don’t lose the effort,’” DePerno recounted from the call. “They wanted continuity as the new administration took over, and they specifically requested that I help encourage Trump’s team to expand their investigation beyond Puerto Rico.”
Now that it appears that the Puerto Rico investigation did not produce evidence of systemic foreign interference or election fraud, it is reasonable to conclude this effort to expand the investigation would have resulted in even more negative press for Trump’s administration.
The Broader Network
Rodil and Lambert are both connected to a network of election conspiracy promoters centered around Patrick Byrne and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Lambert, a Michigan attorney, has worked closely with Byrne and Flynn through The America Project, a nonprofit that has funded various election-related ventures. She previously leaked portions of election equipment data in Michigan and has promoted widely discredited theories of foreign election interference.
Lambert was representing Patrick Byrne in the Dominion v. Byrne federal lawsuit until the court banned her from representing Byrne following her leaking discovery documents contrary to court orders. She also faces two criminal indictments in Michigan relating to her actions following the 2020 election.
The Guardian reported in November 2025 that Berntsen and Rodil “have been in frequent contact with” Muldrow and have supplied him with witnesses and documents related to theories about Venezuelan control of U.S. voting machines. Muldrow declined to comment to The Guardian, but sources told the outlet he was “very receptive” and had held multiple briefings in Puerto Rico.
These theories have been widely discredited by election officials and investigators.
“Three Musketeers” Narrative
In November 2025, Emerald Robinson, a Flynn-linked influencer with a podcast on Lindell TV, claimed that Rodil, Berntsen, and Byrne—whom Robinson referred to as “The Three Muskateers”—along with Flynn—prevented Venezuelan election interference in 2024 by providing $15 in Bitcoin to a “Japanese anon” who supposedly gave them IP addresses of Serbian servers used to rig elections.
The narrative, amplified across Flynn’s networks of podcasters and social media influencers, has been used to falsely explain the military raid that resulted in the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro as primarily about U.S. election security.
Maduro’s indictment documents do not include any claims of Venezuelan interference in U.S. elections.
Robinson’s lengthy threads on X on the topic failed to include any verifiable evidence, and yet the Flynn network promoted the claims aggressively, attempting to create a false equivalency between Maduro’s arrest and foreign election interference claims.
Also in November, Byrne appeared on Robinson’s podcast to announce that he was an “Obama tier one CIA asset” and that he had “helped set up Trump for Russiagate.” That same day, he went on Alex Jones’ Infowars podcast to demand Trump go to war with Venezuela to “save our elections.” This was before the operation the resulted in Maduro’s arrest.
The Flynn network has long amplified claims of Venezuelan influence in U.S. elections—going back to statements by Sidney Powell in the days after the 2020 election. The claims are based on a connection between Venezuelan-designed election software over 20 years ago by Smartmatic, which later was transferred to other companies before it landed with Dominion. There is no evidence that Dominion’s current software contains any of the original coding from 20 years ago.
DePerno’s account of the January call suggests Rodil, who DePerno believes makes his living as a whistleblower, had no evidence to support his claims other than claims by Rodil and other Venezuelan whistleblowers of “potential vulnerabilities.”
Project Foot Patrol
DePerno’s skepticism of Rodil and Berntsen in the January 2025 call was rooted in a prior failed business relationship dating to 2021.
According to DePerno, he paid Rodil and Berntsen in September 2021 to provide evidence of election fraud related to the November 2020 election. The arrangement was requested and paid for by Bill Bailey, DePerno’s Antrim County client, who is since deceased.
“When I met Martin and Gary Berntsen in Sept 2021, and talked to Rich Higgins, we made a deal where [my client would provide money] to help secure witness testimony and they would provide me with actual evidence of fraud related to the November 2020 election,” DePerno wrote in the January 23, 2025 Signal messages, “including witness testimony, plus a hard drive that would contain program architecture, schematics for code build, lag data used to execute the logic, formula used to create the cheat, and actual whistleblower testimony about code build and how it was executed.”
However, according to DePerno, when Rodil and Berntsen came to Michigan, they failed to deliver the promised evidence.
“Martin and Gary came to Michigan and didn’t bring any of the data. Instead, they tried to peddle off a power point presentation called ‘Project Foot Patrol,’” DePerno wrote in the messages.
DePerno told Bigger Truth Media that he had another person present for the presentation who quickly recognized the material as recycled and unsubstantiated.
“I had another guy there with me for their presentation, and after less than five minutes he took me out into the hall,” DePerno said. “He said, ‘This is just recycled foot patrol garbage. They have nothing.’ We went back in the room and asked him what other evidence he had because this was just recycled stuff and they just packed up and left so fast.”
Project Foot Patrol was a discredited theory that circulated in election conspiracy circles in 2021. The theory claimed that data analysis of precinct-level results could prove algorithmic manipulation of vote totals. However, election security experts and data analysts debunked the methodology, noting it confused normal statistical patterns with evidence of fraud and relied on flawed assumptions about how voting systems operate.
By the time Rodil and Berntsen presented it to DePerno in late 2021, Project Foot Patrol had already been widely discredited in both mainstream media fact-checks and among more credible election integrity researchers.
DePerno said he immediately sought to recover the payment his client had made.
In his January 2025 Signal messages warning Muldrow, DePerno referenced this history: “When called out on the attempted fraud, Gary and Martin quickly left. I contacted their attorney, Rod Wittstadt, to return the money, but I was ghosted.”
DePerno said the 2021 experience made him immediately suspicious when Rodil and Lambert approached him again in January 2025 with similar claims about Venezuelan election interference.
“They were using the same playbook,” DePerno said. “Big claims, dramatic presentations, but when you press for actual evidence, there’s nothing there.”
Questions About Gabbard’s Role
The timeline raises questions about why Gabbard championed the Puerto Rico investigation and promoted machine fraud narratives months after DePerno says he exposed the underlying claims as unfounded to the U.S. attorney involved.
In the April 2025 White House briefing, Gabbard said her office was investigating evidence of hacking interference in U.S. elections and reviewing voting systems for security vulnerabilities, but she did not cite evidence of foreign involvement and later issued no public correction after intelligence officials found none.
But as the DNI, questions linger as to whether she should have known in advance that the investigation would yield nothing and whether she intended to provide sound bites for the Flynn network of election conspiracy theorists.
This is not the first instance where Gabbard’s actions as DNI have drawn scrutiny:
In early June 2025, she released a high-production video warning of imminent global nuclear war, providing fuel for narrative interference with Trump’s planned strike on Iran. She later claimed Iran lacked nuclear capability, contradicting U.S. intelligence assessments and leading Trump to publicly dismiss her claims.
She promoted criminal referrals against Obama administration officials for “treason” in connection with surveillance activities, but the documents she released were insufficient for prosecution, according to legal experts.
She released documents in June 2025 promoting the “all the bad guys are on the left” Russiagate narratives. The Flynn network used this to promote claims that Flynn was vindicated regarding the 2016 Russiagate investigation, though serious questions about Flynn’s role in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation remain unanswered.
Flynn has been notably defensive of Gabbard on social media, including an allcaps warning in a February 2025 X post: “THIS IS MY FINAL WARNING AS IT RELATES TO CONFIRMATIONS OF @realDonaldTrump’s NOMINEES. IF THERE ARE PEOPLE INSIDE OF THE ODNI, THE CIA, OR THE FBI THAT ARE WORKING TO SUBVERT THE NOMINATIONS OF @TulsiGabbard, @Kash_Patel or @RobertKennedyJr, I AM WRITING TO LET YOU KNOW, YOU BETTER STOP NOW.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a detailed email request for comment about the Puerto Rico investigation or its origins.
Background on Muldrow
W. Stephen Muldrow is a career DOJ prosecutor who was nominated by President Trump in June 2019 and confirmed as U.S. Attorney for Puerto Rico in September 2019. He was one of the few Trump-appointed U.S. Attorneys asked to stay on after Biden’s inauguration in 2021.
Before his appointment, Muldrow spent 18 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Florida’s Middle District, rising to Acting U.S. Attorney from 2017-18. He worked closely with then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who now serves as U.S. Attorney General under Trump.
DePerno said he agreed to the January 22 call because Lambert told him they had assembled enough evidence to bring a legal case that could expose fraud in the 2020 election. He was curious to learn what they had.
“What she actually meant was that we were talking about how to persuade Trump to make this investigation bigger than Puerto Rico. They wanted Trump to work with Byrne’s people,” DePerno said. “But there was never any real case. They were trying to weasel their way into the DOJ with this.”
“When I asked Muldrow how well he knew Martin, he indicated he had worked with him for ‘a couple years,’” DePerno added.
Muldrow’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
This is a developing story. Additional updates will be posted as more information becomes available.
this is revealing a complex relationship (or lack thereof) between trump and gabbard. on the one hand gabbard may be feeding bad info to some sacrificial clowns so they can make it public via flynn network podcasters, on the other hand the same podcasters are trying to get info to trump to influence him. could it be that this is how gabbard would keep her hands clean of something stupid that trump would do if he acted on the bad info?