IN another of our election fraud series we learn that Gary Bernsten, a former high-ranking CIA operative who helped uncover a global election rigging cartel based in Venezuela, accused his former employers of refusing to take action against the cartel because it was “too big”.
Not only was the cartel “too big” but very violent. A key witness against the cartel was captured by cartel members, tortured and murdered on video, which was sent as a warning to the family of the witness.
Bernsten and his associate Martin Rodil (pronounced Mar-teen) were investigating for the US DEA and DOJ the flow of money from the Cartel del Sol when they began to learn from informants that the cartel was also involved in election rigging through computer programs developed by Venezuelan engineers working for Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
New allegations of election fraud are being raised in regard to the US mid-term elections, but media “fact checkers” are doing their best to refute them, let alone report the existence of a global election rigging cartel, whose operations have been detailed in Ralph Pezullo’s self-published book Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide.
Bernsten, who led the CIA’s most important counter-terrorist deployments from 1995 through 2005 and from 2007 served as an intelligence and counterinsurgency adviser in eastern Afghanistan, made the claim when he appeared on the recent US midterm election night panel hosted by former CBS journalist Lara Logan.
Bernsten and Rodil, a Venezuelan-born political consultant and investigator, were repeatedly told by cartel informants that “the cartel controls elections everywhere”, which, on Bernsten’s urging, led them to conduct their own further investigations into that very matter.
Rodil told the panel that a lot of people became focused on the election machines themselves, however they were simply a tool.
“The machine is just a tool, this is actually a financial mafia controlling election companies to control power … so machines and election company is just one element of a bigger conspiracy,” he said.
“At some point, when 2020 (election) happens, we start realizing, talking to the people right after the election – General Flynn was one of them with Patrick Byrne and other great persons that were trying to understand what happens – we start realizing it will take years for us to get American software engineers to see if we can get access to software and try to do reverse engineering to understand what is actually happening here.”
Rodil says the first Venezuelan cartel engineer and informant, who had sought political asylum, was located in Houston. He had informed the DOJ and Homeland Security during the Obama administration of the election fraud, but his information was buried.
Bernsten said the CIA had been aware of the allegations of election fraud for 20 years, but had failed to inform any other people in the US government.
The Houston informant told Rodil and Bernsten that a group of 20 had left the company that was building the election program and he was part of “Team B” while the 10-member “Team A” was in the United States working in election companies and others all over the world.
The investigators then set off for Chile, Brazil and Peru, then to Spain and Portugal. “We were across the globe chasing those engineers,” said Rodil.
According to the Guardian article, Federal investigators had been interviewing multiple people “who are pushing unfounded claims that Venezuela helped steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump”.
The Guardian’s sly spin was that 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.”
They got the last bit right and the US now has the allegedly three-times elected Venezuelan president Nicholas Maduro in custody after a dramatic raid in January this year.
So, did The Guardian review and debunk the claims made in Pezullo’s book? No. They, like other media outlets, simply call election rigging claims “unfounded” because a single Democrat-appointed US judge summarily rejected the claims of vote rigging in the defamation cases.
In his March 31, 2023 summary judgment ruling, Judge Davis determined that the evidence proved none of the election-rigging statements about Dominion were true, and because the Democrat judge settled the question of truth or falsity himself, the jury was explicitly barred from weighing whether the conspiracy theories were true.
When they had assembled a group willing to cooperate they passed the information on to General Michael Flynn who assembled a team to finance the engineers to build an election company in the Bahamas. It took a month after all the hardware was shipped from Florida.
The entire operation was eventually moved to Gstaad, Switzerland, after the engineers encountered harassment from US immigration officials.
Media in denial
A November 2025 article by The Guardian, a British-based left-leaning establishment media company, headlined the claims around Venezuelan election rigging as “unfounded” on the basis that a judge found Fox News, Newsmax, and One America Network guilty of defaming Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic by claiming they rigged the 2020 elections.
They also claim a raft of other “investigations” after the 2020 election found “no evidence of large scale election fraud”. Bernsten, Rodil and Pezullo’s investigations strongly suggest otherwise.
Technically the judge could have been correct, as courts are often bound to apply the plain, literal, and ordinary meaning of the words written in a statute, in this case a defamation statute, even if the court’s ruling appears to contradict known facts.
Had the trial proceeded, the jury would only have been asked to decide whether Fox News acted with “actual malice” (knowing the claims were false or acting with reckless disregard for the truth) and the amount of damages owed.
On April 18th, 2023, a 12-person jury was seated and opening statements were minutes away when Fox News and Dominion announced a $787.5 million settlement, ending the case before any evidence was presented to the jury.
In Smartmatic’s separate Delaware defamation lawsuit against Newsmax (also presided over by Judge Davis), the parties reached a $40 million settlement on September 26, 2024 – which occurred just as jury selection was underway and before opening statements began, meaning no jury ever heard evidence or deliberated on the claims against Smartmatic in Delaware.
In his panel appearance with Logan, Pezullo reiterated his claim that Smartmatic software was being used in virtually every election machine across the country and was able to “subvert our whole election process” across the country.
So why hasn’t Smartmatic sued Pezullo for defamation? According to Pezullo and his colleagues, it’s because Smartmatic doesn’t want to deal with the discovery process.
Pezullo went on the explain that Smartmatic repeated it’s company selling strategy (to avoid liability) last year when it sold Dominion Voting Systems to a company called Liberty Vote, run by a Republican. “They didn’t change the machines, they didn’t change the software, they just changed the names,” he said.
Pezullo also detailed the discovery of Smartmatic links to USAID, the agency stripped of funding by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
He said within USAID they found an organisation called CEPS (Consortium of Election Processing and Strengthening) which was basically marketing Smartmatic software to dozens of countries around the world (Ed. including Australia).
Rodil added that $6.2 billion was given by the US government to third world countries to buy the Smartmatic technology.
When asked by Logan if they all used the same technology, Rodil used the example of his Apple phone, the programs on which were owned by Apple, which could do whatever it wanted to with the software with or without his permission at any time. “That’s exactly what happened with election machines,” he said.
He said even if 10% or even 3% of the software licensed for use in a county election machine belonged to the cartel, the machine was compromised.
When Rodil and Bernsten briefed the Trump team before the 2024 election and some people raised the objection that the machines were not connected to the internet, Rodil pointed out that it didn’t matter because they had source code that proved elections were not stolen on election nights, but in a long lead-up process up to a year in advance.
“It’s a long process where they analyze each county, they understand the voter registry, they understand what are the needs, they do the intelligence, the electoral intelligence, and then they pro-program the machines based on the need they have on election night.”
