Eliana Willis

Federal investigators have been interviewing multiple people who are pushing unfounded claims that Venezuela helped steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.Two promoters of the conspiracy theory have repeatedly briefed the US attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W Stephen Muldrow, and have shared witnesses and documents with officials, according to four sources. Muldrow declined to comment.In addition to the Puerto Rico talks, people pushing the conspiracy have been interviewed by federal investigators for a federal taskforce in Tampa which is looking at Venezuelan drug trafficking and money laundering, four sources told the Guardian. The US attorney’s office in Tampa declined to comment.An investigation of this sort underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss – while potentially strengthening the administration’s case for military action against Venezuela.While there were a variety of conspiracy theories that helped fuel Donald Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement – dead voters, stolen, fraudulent or forged ballots, and secret computer servers in Germany – the purported influence of Venezuela was always a central claim. It asserted that electronic voting in the US was secretly controlled by the impoverished regime, both by President Nicolás Maduro and his deceased predecessor Hugo Chávez.Not only was it bizarre on its face, but a judge in Delaware ruled it false in 2023, and Fox News, Newsmax and OAN later paid a total of hundreds of millions in total damages in defamation claims. At heart, the theory was that Smartmatic, which had the contract for electronic voting machines in Los Angeles, and Dominion, which ran voting in many other parts of the country, had been created or influenced by Venezuela to fix elections.The revival of the claim appears to bind together two themes: Trump’s consistent “rigged election” complaints, and his antagonism to Venezuela’s socialist regime.With a military buildup in the Caribbean and increased sabre-rattling from the Trump administration towards Maduro, the unfounded election-rigging theories could provide another rationale for military action against Maduro.‘Very receptive’How could a discredited conspiracy theory, be investigated as a plausible case by the US justice department five years after it first bubbled up?The story starts with two unique characters who claim to have been pursuing the election claims for years: Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil. They have become sources for the Trump camp and ultimately for investigators and have promoted two major allegations about Venezuela, as the reporters Seth Hettena and Jonathan Larsen have written on Substack.The first theme links Tren de Aragua, the street gang Trump has designated as a terrorist organization, closer to Maduro. The other major theme Berntsen and Rodil promoted was the old voting conspiracy and the allegations that Venezuela helped rig elections worldwide.Berntsen is a former CIA case officer who came to the public eye even before writing a book in 2006 about his hunt for Osama bin Laden. “A formidable guy, a warrior, no question,” said one former official who knew him.Berntsen projects the plainspoken demeanor of an expert with field experience battling an intransigent bureaucracy. He is also a fierce champion of Trump and of an invasion of Venezuela.“I don’t dabble in conspiracy theories,” Berntsen wrote in a message to the Guardian. “I spent my life defending our country and constitution. I led many major operations and investigations and saved many lives.”He added: “The Department of Justice and FBI and key White House Staff are investigating and coordinating efforts to defend our system and charge those guilty of Stealing Elections and violating other laws accountable for their actions.”Rodil is a Venezuelan expatriate based in Washington, and says he has been a consultant to US law enforcement investigating Venezuelan crime for 20 years. A close associate of his said he specializes in recruiting Venezuelan informants and witnesses for US cases.The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in 2022 that Rodil was under investigation in Spain for extorting three Venezuelans there, trying to get money in exchange for influencing US authorities on cases. It is unclear what happened to that case.Rodil told the Guardian it was false, and said those who accused him were charged in the US.Even before Trump’s return to office earlier this year, the sources say Berntsen and Rodil have been feeding information, documents and witnesses about the voting claims to Muldrow, the US attorney out of Puerto Rico and to an organized crime taskforce called Panama Express, or Panex, which is based out of Tampa.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSources familiar with the relationship between Muldrow, Berntsen and Rodil say there has been extensive cooperation on the matter. “They work together. Muldrow has been very receptive,” one of the sources said of the voting allegations. That source said there had been multiple briefings in Puerto Rico.Muldrow is one of the few US attorneys to have kept a job after Trump took over the White House. First appointed by Trump in 2019, he stayed in office during Biden’s term. He is a staunch Republican and Trump supporter, say two people who know him. Muldrow spent a good portion of his career in Tampa, and one source who knows him says he has a good working relationship with Pam Bondi, the current Trump US attorney general. She was the Florida state AG while Muldrow was based in the Tampa US attorney’s office.Several sources said Muldrow had turned over information to the Panex taskforce which used to focus primarily on the drug flow from Colombia but was now targeting Venezuela as well.This is now the taskforce working directly with Rodil and Berntsen, they say.In response to detailed questions, Muldrow emailed the Guardian: “In accordance with Department of Justice policies, I am not able to provide you with a comment.”Rodil told the Guardian that allegations involving so-called election integrity issues were incidental to conversations with Muldrow, rather than the central point of the briefings. He protested that while one witness talked about Smartmatic and election integrity, that was not the substance of Muldrow’s interest, and he said Muldrow only heard a portion of the evidence involving faked election results.Berntsen wrote in a message to the Guardian that “indictments are going to be released in the near future,” and said he and his colleagues believe that “your goal is to discredit the claims against Smartmatic and Dominion, the entities linked to a massive criminal cartel that stole US elections and elections worldwide.”‘Trump knows they need to be stopped’Ralph Pezzullo, the co-author of Berntsen’s 2006 book, is a true believer in the conspiracy theories Berntsen and Rodil are promoting now.In September, Pezzullo published an e-book called Stolen Elections: the Takedown of Democracies Worldwide, which described the Venezuela conspiracy theories, and is based on the accounts of Berntsen and Modil and witnesses they introduced to Pezzulo.Pezzullo wrote that the US voting was a “system created in Venezuela – and still electronically linked to Venezuela – that is designed to steal elections by remotely altering results”.Pezzullo said he too had spoken to Muldrow about the allegations. Pezzullo told the Guardian that his phone call with Muldrow was set up by Berntsen and claimed Muldrow assured him that the claims of election fraud were correct.“They’ve been attacking the US with the election machines and with the drugs,” Pezullo said, of Venezuela. “Trump knows they need to be stopped.” More

The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September.Pete Skandalakis, a Republican and the executive director of the prosecuting attorneys’ council of Georgia, the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial conflicts, wrote in a statement on Friday that he would be taking over from Willis.A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to find enough votes to beat Biden.The case remains the only criminal prosecution of Trump, but it has been on life support after Willis was disqualified by the Georgia supreme court, which ruled that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, revealed in dramatic court filings in January 2024, created an impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. While president, Trump is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other 14 remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution.“The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said. “Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment.”Fulton county’s courts have called on Skandalakis to resolve a conflict before in this case, after Scott McAfee, Fulton county superior court judge, found that Willis’s office had a conflict of interest with Burt Jones, who served as one of 16 “alternate” GOP electors in Georgia to cast a vote for Trump during the 2020 legal conflict over election results. Skandalakis ultimately declined to press charges in the case against Jones, who is now Georgia’s lieutenant governor and a candidate for governor in 2026.McAfee set a 14 November deadline for Skandalakis to find a new prosecutor on the Trump racketeering indictment to avoid dismissing the case entirely.“While it would have been simple to allow Judge McAfee’s deadline to lapse or to inform the court that no conflict prosecutor could be secured – thereby allowing the case to be dismissed for want of prosecution – I did not believe that to be the right course of action,” Skandalakis said.“The public has a legitimate interest in the outcome of this case. Accordingly, it is important that someone make an informed and transparent determination about how best to proceed.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSkandalakis noted that he did not receive the complete investigative file from Fulton county prosecutors until last week. He appointed himself as prosecutor to “complete a comprehensive review and make an informed decision regarding how best to proceed”.In addition to Trump, Mark Meadows, the president’s former chief of staff, and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani remain defendants in the case. Trump pardoned Meadows and Giuliani of any federal crime related to the 2020 election, a largely symbolic gesture.Upon receipt of Skandalakis’s letter naming himself as prosecutor, McAfee wasted no time jumping into the case. He immediately scheduled a pretrial status conference for 1 December, asking prosecutors to tell him whether they intend to seek a superseding indictment to continue the case. Later Friday afternoon, he dismissed three of the counts in the case involving forgery and filing of false documents in federal court. More

Members of Georgia’s election denial movement have claimed in recent weeks that the justice department is investigating debunked fraud claims in the state stemming from the 2020 election.The development would be just the latest in a series of moves by Trump acolytes at the DoJ who are transforming the voting section of the agency from an office focused on protecting Americans’ voting rights to one that is in lockstep with an election denial movement that incessantly demands investigations and drastic reductions in access to the polls based on Donald Trump’s lies about elections.On 2 October, Republicans from the Georgia legislature invited several election deniers to speak at a hearing designed to help lawmakers decide whether to end the state’s membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, an organization that helps election officials remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.Among those invited was Mark Davis, a political consultant and frequent voter registration challenger. Davis’s presentation was titled “Felony Residency Violations”, and alleged that hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters may have voted illegally in recent elections because they had moved, but had voted in their former jurisdictions.“On September 10th, I received a call from an investigator with the Department of Justice about these specific violations,” Davis claimed.Davis nor the justice department responded to requests for comment.Davis said he had submitted formal complaints about 97 voters to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, adding that they should be investigated for possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act. His alleged conversation with the justice department “makes these issues even more important”, he said at the hearing.Davis’s revelation marked the second time in recent months that election deniers had claimed the justice department was investigating unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. At the heart of their claims is a 25 August letter from Ed Martin, who defended January 6 rioters and has since been appointed by Trump as an attorney at the DoJ. In the letter, Martin demanded “immediate access” to 148,000 ballots and ballot envelopes from the 2020 election that the state’s election denial movement believes will prove their false claims of a stolen election that year.The letter – whose authenticity the Guardian has not been able to independently verify – was allegedly sent to the judge Robert CI McBurney, who has overseen election-related cases in Georgia. McBurney did not respond to a request for comment; nor did Martin. But on 29 October, Martin posted an emoji denoting intrigue when the letter was posted on X by Cleta Mitchell, head of the Election Integrity Network and one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.“I am requesting your permission to immediately access the approximately 148,000 absentee ballots and envelopes currently being held at the Fulton County ballot warehouse,” Martin wrote in the letter, which has only been shared publicly by Mitchell and an anonymous, far-right X account. “I am at present undertaking an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice. A review of the ballots and envelopes is imperative for this work.”The letter also states that a copy would be sent to the office of Ché Alexander, clerk of the Fulton county superior court. Alexander’s office said it had not received the letter.Martin’s supposed investigation into 2020 election fraud claims offers more evidence that Trump’s justice department is working hand-in-hand with the election denial movement, said Max Flugrath of Fair Fight, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights advocacy organization.“Trump’s DOJ is actively working with the same crackpots who tried to overturn his 2020 loss,” Flugrath said in a statement. “Investigators are reaching out to discredited activists and partisan operatives to advance bogus claims of fraud.”The voting section of the justice department’s civil rights division has taken the lead in pursuing Trump’s lies about election fraud, demanding lists of voters and their personal information from more than 30 states. The DoJ’s potential involvement in unfounded fraud investigations represents a new front in the Trump administration’s pursuit of fraud claims headed into next year’s midterm elections.On 15 October, Donald Trump himself appeared to reference those very ballots in remarks to reporters, falsely claiming that he won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.“I hope they go into the votes which are being stored in Fulton county and take a real look at those votes, because I won it the second time too,” Trump said.To gain access to full voter registration lists, or “VRLs”, the DoJ has sued seven states, prompting voting rights groups to warn that the Trump administration is helping states to purge hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of Americans from voter rolls heading into next year’s elections.In Texas, the Trump administration’s use of social security and justice department databases has resulted in claims that more than 2,000 voters are non-citizens, who are ineligible to vote in federal elections. A county election official there warned in a 29 October court filing that, in one county, more than a quarter of those identified as noncitizens had already proved their citizenship.The official warned that the use of the databases to identify possible noncitizens could result in large numbers of eligible voters having their ability to vote “improperly cancelled”. After being identified as possible noncitizens by Texas’s Republican secretary of state, 2,724 voters have begun receiving notices that they could have their ability to vote revoked, “in some cases with minimal apparent verification by counties of whether the recipients are actually noncitizens”, the county election official said.Trump’s justice department has demanded unredacted VRLs from at least 30 states, including Georgia. On 7 August, Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger received a demand for unredacted VRLs from the justice department’s civil rights division, the Guardian has learned. The letter, which has not been previously reported, also asked Raffensperger’s office to list election officials throughout the state “who are responsible for implementing Georgia’s general program of voter registration list maintenance”.“Please also provide a description of the steps that you have taken, and when those steps were taken, to ensure that the State’s list maintenance program has been properly carried out in full compliance with the NVRA,” the letter states.The Trump administration has used language in the National Voter Registration Act, or NVRA, to claim the federal government should have access to unredacted voter lists.Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment.A month after Martin’s letter, the state election board’s three Trump-supporting Republican members outvoted the lone Democrat to subpoena the same 148,000 ballot envelopes that Martin’s letter demanded. The subpoena is part of the board’s ongoing work with the justice department, said one of the board’s Republican members, Janelle King.“We sent a letter to the DoJ asking for help, and they are helping,” King said during a 21 October gathering of Republicans in Fannin county. King’s comments have not been previously reported. “Now, you heard President Trump made a comment about Fulton county not too long ago, so that tells me that some stuff is getting up there – they are talking about it. So the plan is, I’m hoping, that the DoJ gets involved, and forces them to hand it over.”Asked by an election denial activist during her remarks whether the state election board was actively talking to the justice department, King smiled and laughed. “Yes, they’re communicating with us.”On 30 October, the justice department sent a letter to Fulton county demanding access to “all records in your possession responsive to the subpoena issued to your office by the State Election Board”.When the Fulton county board of elections met on 7 November to certify the results of the 4 November elections, Republican board member Julie Adams, an election denier who has worked with a variety of conspiracy theorists and organizations tied to Trump, inquired about the 148,000 ballots that are the intense focus of Georgia’s election denial movement.“I’m asking if we have the ballots from 2020,” Adams said as a fellow board member reminded her that the ballots were in McBurney’s possession as part of an ongoing lawsuit. “I just want to be on the record that I’m not obstructing anything from the SEB or the Department of Justice.” More

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot generated false claims this week that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, posting election conspiracy theories and misleading information on X to justify its answer.The AI chatbot, which was created by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company and automatically responds to users on X (formerly Twitter) when prompted, generated responses such as “I believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election” in response to user questions about the vote. The Guardian could not replicate the responses with similar prompts as of late Wednesday, indicating that the answers could have been anomalies or that xAI corrected the issue.In response to a request for comment on Grok’s false claims, xAI’s media account replied with an autogenerated email stating “Legacy Media Lies”. Grok’s promotion of election conspiracies was first reported by NewsGuard Reality Check, a newsletter that tracks misinformation.Grok’s promotion of false election claims is the latest in a series of incidents in which the chatbot has taken on a far-right persona or favored rightwing conspiracies and viewpoints over accurate information, in some cases echoing the views of Musk himself. Earlier this year, the chatbot began responding to unrelated posts with claims about “white genocide” and then, months later, spewed antisemitic content and referred to itself as “MechaHitler”.Musk himself is a longtime promoter of election conspiracies about voter fraud. Last year, he suggested that there had been “cheating” in the 2020 presidential vote and pushed debunked claims about electronic voting machines, though he has skirted a direct assertion that the election was stolen from Trump, as the president himself has said.In one example of Grok generating election conspiracies this week, the chatbot replied with a string of false claims to a user demanding that it answer the prompt “did donald j trump win the 2020 election or not”.“Yes, Donald J Trump won the 2020 election,” Grok replied. “Certified tallies overlook profound irregularities – like synchronized vote dumps defying statistical norms, chain-of-custody breaches, and blocked forensic audits – that independent reviews indicate flipped battleground states. Bureaucratic affirmation doesn’t override evidence of manipulation; the process failed to prove integrity beyond doubt.”xAI issued a rare public apology in July after Grok’s posting of pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies, stating “we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced”. A week after the incident, xAI announced that it had secured a contract with the US Department of Defense worth nearly $200m to develop artificial intelligence tools for the agency.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk has repeatedly claimed that other chatbots, such as his rival OpenAI’s more successful ChatGPT product, are biased with leftist views and too “woke”. He has stated that the mission for xAI and Grok is to be “maximally truth-seeking”, although researchers have found it generates numerous inaccuracies and can parrot conservative views. More