Trump Exposes the Sham Investigation Behind the "Venezuelan Backdoor" Theory
Major vindication for Bigger Truth from President Trump's election-security declas.
A newly declassified CIA assessment disproves the Flynn network’s Venezuelan backdoor into Dominion theory, raises serious questions about what former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard knew when she claimed foreign hacking, vindicates Bigger Truth’s reporting and claims from Michigan attorney Matt DePerno, and further suggests that Kurt Olsen has been running sham investigations and lawsuits all along.
In April 2025, Tulsi Gabbard lied to President Trump in a public Cabinet meeting: “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.” The Flynn-linked election fraud disinformation networks have used this clip ever since to support their claims that elections are decided by hackers flipping votes.
In May 2025, with the help of recently resigned U.S. Attorney of Puerto Rico Stephen Muldrow, Gabbard seized the Dominion election equipment in Puerto Rico and hired a contractor to investigate for any indication of vote flipping or foreign hacking.
After a months-long investigation, the contractor found no evidence of vote flipping or foreign hacking. Specifically, they found no evidence at all to support the theory pushed ad nauseum by the Flynn network and their “Venezuelan whistleblowers” that Venezuela maintains a backdoor into Dominion software established by Smartmatic in the early 2000s.
The theory was already technically debunked by the simple facts that the old Smartmatic software and Dominion software are written in different programming languages and Dominion did not actually purchase Smartmatic like the Flynn network claims. Some unrelated assets were acquired by Dominion, but nothing related to software for tabulators or election management systems.
I reported exclusively in February a story that I was shocked no other outlet expressed any interest in: DePerno explicitly warned Muldrow in writing and on the phone that Byrne’s “Venezuelan whistleblower” Martin Rodil was a fraud in January 2025 — months before Gabbard and Muldrow seized Puerto Rico’s election equipment. DePerno provided Muldrow with details showing how Rodil accepted a significant cash payment from DePerno’s Antrim client to provide evidence that Rodil failed to produce.
Muldrow was warned that it was false, there was no rational or evidentiary case to provide probable cause, but he went forward with it anyway.
Now the CIA’s June 29, 2026 assessment on Venezuela’s electronic voting manipulation capabilities has been declassified and we know something worse than “they found nothing.”
The U.S. government concluded Byrne’s theory was impossible in 2006. And the ODNI undoubtedly was aware of this before she lied to the world and President Trump.
What the CIA Assessment Actually Says
Read the assessment yourself. Pay particular attention to the final page.
The Agency writes:
“First, the 2006 Intelligence Community assessment concluded that neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan Government had the capability—that is, the level of control or access required—to manipulate the outcome of an election outside of Venezuela in a predictable fashion.”
2006. Fourteen years before Sidney Powell went on television. Twenty years before Kurt Olsen was given a White House office and access to classified intelligence to look for it.
And the assessment explains why it’s technically impossible — an explanation that quietly demolishes the entire “the machines did it” framework:
“The Venezuelan Government’s ability to manipulate the results of voting in Venezuela rested in part on its ability to control every stage of the electronic voting process, from initial acquisition of the machines to pre- and post-voting machine security, to programming, to storage of paper voting receipts, to control of the audit process. Neither the Venezuelan Government nor Smartmatic would have such a complete spectrum of access during an electoral process outside Venezuela.”
Flynn network will never quote that. Venezuela couldn’t even rig its own elections with a backdoor in the software. They had to own the machines, the programming, the storage, the receipts, the ballots and the auditors — the entire chain, end to end, in a country where it controlled everything from the press to diaper prices. Not only that, the CIA assessed that in each of its own subsequent elections through and including 2020 they appeared to have increasingly diminished control over election outcomes.
This confirms what I have been reporting since Patrick Byrne resuscitated the false theory in the weeks before the 2024 election with the help of former CIA officer Gary Berntsen and Rodil. The theory is incoherent on its face on three counts:
Dominion’s Democracy Suite is a distinct codebase from Smartmatic’s legacy Venezuelan-era software, built on different platforms in different programming languages. Smartmatic, Sequoia, and Dominion all use distinct platforms built with distinct programming languages. There is no shared code lineage. University of Michigan computer scientist Alex Halderman told Reuters the idea is “technically incoherent” for exactly this reason.
The entire “connection” between the companies rests on Dominion’s 2010 purchase of certain assets that had belonged to Sequoia Voting Systems — a company Smartmatic had already been forced to divest to American ownership and leadership in 2007 under pressure from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
Nearly two decades of independent development, federal and state certification, and source-code review stand between the Smartmatic software of the mid-2000s and the Dominion systems used in 2020 and 2024. The notion of a dormant “backdoor” surviving all of that is not technically plausible.
What the Assessment Says About Venezuela — And Why It Doesn’t Help Them
The assessment documents Venezuelan intent. It reports that in April 2004, intelligence indicated Chávez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting U.S. president (then President George W. Bush). It reports intelligence that Smartmatic directors held credentials from Venezuelan intelligence services. It notes that the 2006 National Security Threat Assessment rated Smartmatic’s acquisition of Sequoia a “moderate overall threat to US national security interests,” in part because Smartmatic and Sequoia held contracts in roughly 400 U.S. counties at the time. And it states that the 2006 assessment concluded Smartmatic’s potential susceptibility to Venezuelan government manipulation made the acquisition “a potential instrument for Venezuelan officials seeking to undermine confidence in, or manipulate the electoral process in, the United States.”
The word “potential” carries a lot of weight in that assessment.
Regardless, in response to the assessment, Smartmatic and Sequoia were transfered into a U.S.-owned and led entity in 2007 until Dominion purchased Sequoia in 2010.
Intent, though, is not capability, and the assessment makes that clear. Chávez, who died in 2013, wanted to interfere. Smartmatic’s ownership structure was a legitimate counterintelligence concern. And that is precisely why the U.S. government acted: Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) pressure forced Smartmatic to divest Sequoia in 2007. The mechanism the conspiracy theory requires (a chain of custody from Smartmatic software to Dominion) was severed by the United States government nineteen years ago.
Patrick Byrne responded to me directly on X when I wrote a post about this that was widely shared:
He spelled my name wrong.
So Byrne’s claim appears to be that I omitted the words “in 2006” from the short quote I selected to share that somehow makes it false. Further, he seems to suggest that, since the CIA’s original assessment was in 2006, it is somehow invalid, even though the findings in the 2006 assessment were reassessed and confirmed by the CIA in 2021 and again in 2026. The 2006 finding was never overturned, even after Tulsi Gabbard and her faithful servants (now mostly terminated after five rounds of layoffs by Acting DNI Bill Pulte) spent over a year trying to overturn it.
And there’s one fact in the document the Flynn network will pretend not to have read. In March 2018, according to the assessment, Smartmatic ceased operations in Venezuela after publicly accusing the Maduro regime of inflating turnout by more than one million votes in the August 2017 National Constituent Assembly election — figures that diverged from the data recorded by Smartmatic’s own machines.
The company they’ve spent five years calling Maduro’s election-rigging arm publicly blew the whistle on Maduro’s election rigging, using its own machine data to do it, and walked away from the country. If Smartmatic were the regime’s instrument, that certainly wouldn’t have happened.
Emerald Robinson also responded to my post on this topic, which clearly triggered her. Rather than responding to any of the ideas, claims, or evidence I included in my post, she went straight to ad hominem, and demanded I dox my small local church family so she could harass them. She also accused me of being part of the Intelligence Community (IC), so I guess that means I’m getting better at this.
The Serbian Server
Meanwhile, the Flynn network has spent the last year sensationalizing rather than substantiating. Emerald Robinson published a sprawling X thread claiming that Rodil, Berntsen, and Patrick Byrne — with Flynn’s blessing — “saved” the 2024 election by paying $15 in Bitcoin to a “Japanese anon” for the IP addresses of Serbian servers, which they then hacked and neutralized. She called them the “Three Muskateers.”
The Flynn network uses this fantastic tale to take credit for the Trump campaign’s incredible victory in 2024, despite Flynn’s and Byrne’s consistent efforts throughout that campaign cycle to convince their followers the elections are hopelessly rigged so there’s no point in voting. Here’s a prime example of how Byrne weaponized these Venezuela claims just one week before the election:
I do find it interesting what Byrne is actually confessing to with his Three Muskateers claim. If he really had private U.S. or foreign citizens hack and disable a Dominion server in Serbia to alter the conditions of a U.S. election — even in a direction they liked — that would itself be unauthorized computer intrusion and, by any honest definition, election interference.
Kurt Olsen’s Distraction Op
In April 2026, Reuters reported that Gabbard’s office brought in a Virginia cybersecurity contractor, Mojave Research, to conduct the forensic examination of the Puerto Rico Dominion machines seized in May 2025. Kurt Olsen is the Flynn network attorney sanctioned in Arizona for false statements in Kari Lake’s case, widely credited for advising Tina Peters into the conduct that sent her to prison for nine years, and who two sources with direct knowledge tell me was the lawyer behind Mike Lindell’s 2021 promise that the Supreme Court would vote 9-0 to reinstall Trump. Olsen attached himself to that investigation with one goal: prove the Venezuelan backdoor.
Mojave looked, for months. In briefings between June and October 2025, Olsen pushed the team to search harder for the suspicious code he was certain was there. When they couldn’t find it (because it didn’t exist), Olsen repeatedly told the team it was “clearly doing it wrong.”
Mojave CEO Jason Wareham said he “lost count the number of times Olsen said ‘Maricopa is a crime scene,’” and described Olsen’s evidence-free theorizing as a “cacophony” of rumor and opinion that eventually led the firm to stop working with him.
When they produced a report showing no Venezuelan backdoor, Olsen sent a September message to President Trump accusing Mojave of serving the “deep state” and secretly taking money from George Soros. Mojave opened its books to disprove the smear, calling it “patently absurd and ridiculous.” Soros’ Open Society Foundations told Reuters it had never even heard of the firm.
It didn’t matter. Olsen fought for Mojave’s termination and won; the contract was killed in October. That same month, Trump made Olsen his Director of Election Security and Integrity, working out of the White House and reporting directly to the President.
Reuters reported in May that Olsen also led an investigation into Dominion’s hardware in his efforts to ban the “machines.” In the summer of 2025, he had a team, most likely linked to Tulsi Gabbard’s “Director’s Initiative Group” (DIG), whose members are widely speculated to have been terminated by Pulte but were working closely with Olsen at the time, disassemble Puerto Rico tabulators looking for malicious hardware from China.
They found none, but that was never reported on by conservative media.
At Trump’s request, starting with his official appointment to the DOJ in October 2025, the CIA gave Olsen access to intelligence related to the 2020 election. It’s hard to believe they wouldn’t have started with the newly declassified CIA assessment on Venezuela interference. He had the Mojave software forensics. He had directly overseen the failed search for malicious hardware. He had the obvious fact that Smartmatic and Dominion use different programming languages and platforms. Every authoritative source available to the most cleared election investigator in America said the same thing.
He responded by smearing the examiners, ignoring their warnings about vulnerabilities that went unaddressed until this month, and redirecting the machinery of the federal government toward investigations that have thus far produced zero verifiable evidence of fraud in 2020.
Olsen has been a full time operative since the 2020 election. He has directed one failed lawsuit after another. He’s been a driving force behind fabricated and false claims. He’s been sanctioned by courts. He claimed Trump would be put back into office by a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling months after Biden’s inauguration. He had full access to all classified information anywhere in the U.S. Government — and he failed to produce anything substantive whatsoever.
A source with direct knowledge told me that Olsen was called into the White House in January 2026 and told he would soon be fired if he didn’t produce results. A week later the Fulton County, Georgia raid occurred — a raid the FBI’s own search warrant shows originated from an Olsen referral. The warrant was based on long-established errors and violations of rules and procedures, but nothing new. And that investigation has yet to produce any new evidence of fraud.
In June, Olsen became a lead attorney on Joe diGenova’s grand jury team in the grand conspiracy investigation out of Florida.
The Cost: Time, Precious Time
The cruelest irony of the whole affair is that Mojave actually found something — just not what Olsen and Gabbard wanted.
The contractor identified genuine software flaws in the Puerto Rico machines, consistent with vulnerabilities University of Michigan professor Alex Halderman documented in 2021 and CISA warned about in 2022 in Dominion’s ImageCast X systems. There is no evidence they were ever exploited, but the vulnerabilities are real, and in Mojave’s view potentially present in machines elsewhere in the country.
Mojave recommended a concrete remediation plan: analyze more machines, stand up a task force to help states patch, fund the effort, penalize states that refused. Per Reuters’ sources, states needed to begin implementation by May 2026 to finish before the November midterms.
That deadline came and went.
The report exists. We now know its formal title and date, because CISA cited it in a footnote of the election security report released this month: Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite Preliminary Vulnerability Assessment, Mojave Research for the ODNI, September 25, 2025. CISA also disclosed something remarkable in the same passage — that while it reviewed Mojave’s report, CISA was never given access to the devices and could not conduct its own examination.
So Olsen and his DIG team had access to the hardware, but they did not permit access to the nation’s civilian cybersecurity agency. That is what “election security” looked like under Olsen and Gabbard: the contractor fired, the report shelved, the country’s cyber defense agency held at arm’s length, and the lawyer who called the examiners Soros assets given free reign and the nation’s highest security clearance.
Every week Olsen spent demanding Mojave find Venezuelan ghost code and chasing down fabricated conspiracy theories stole precious time from any legitimate investigation that might have produced results we could sink our teeth into.
Kurt Olsen has only been an obstacle to President Trump’s objective of making our elections secure and trustworthy.
The Timeline
Below, as a thank you for my paid subscribers, I have developed an extensive timeline of the events surrounding this story, starting with the 2000 founding of Smartmatic all the way through President Trump’s July 10, 2026.
Conclusions
President Trump’s July 10 speech and declas was truthful and compelling. There were several revelations - especially Chinese acquisition of voter data and the IC’s failure to disclose key assessments to President Trump before and after the 2020 election - that beg for solutions. For many reasons, Congress really should pass the SAVE America Act, and as honest journalists and the rational middle of American voters assess this information it should compell longterm solutions.
Matt DePerno is vindicated. He called Rodil and Berntsen frauds in writing in January 2025, at personal cost within his own political world, and every subsequent forensic and intelligence finding has proven him right. The man the media on the right ignored was the only one in that Signal chat telling the truth.
This reporting is vindicated. Every pillar of what I published — the warning to Muldrow, the emptiness of Rodil’s “evidence,” the Gabbard timeline problem, the Flynn network’s pattern of weaponized failure, and the argument that the fake story was crowding out the real work — is now supported by the declassified record.
Tulsi Gabbard has to answer for what she knew. The finding that Venezuela never had the capability to touch our machines predates her tenure by nineteen years. The NIC memorandum warning that fabricated machine-compromise claims would be nearly impossible to disprove sat in her own agency’s holdings — and she personally declassified it, eleven months after telling the President the machines were vulnerable to manipulation. She either never read her own community’s work or didn’t care. Either way, she used the DNI’s position to lend the Intelligence Community’s credibility to Flynn network mythology, and she never issued a correction when her own contractor came back empty.
Kurt Olsen should be removed from the grand jury team. A man who responded to exculpatory forensics by inventing a Soros conspiracy about the examiners, who has been sanctioned for false statements to courts, who is widely credited with connecting Tina Peters to Conan Hayes and helping oversee a criminal defense theory that I believe was designed to put her in prison, and whose central theory is now contradicted in writing by the CIA has no business anywhere near a grand jury. Every day he remains is a day the eventual work product is poisoned.
The machines were never rigged from Caracas. Maduro was arrested for trafficking drugs, not because he is a witness to election fraud. But American elections were sabotaged all the same — including by the people who spent five years grifting off fairy tales of “masheeen frawd” to demoralize and disenfranchize Republican voters, filing designed-to-fail lawsuits, setting up patsies to take the fall for their false claims and misdeeds, and engaging in lunatic antics to provide the media with plenty of red meat to use against Trump.