Top Venezuelan Spy Confirms Trump's Biggest Fear | Ralph Pezzullo

TL;DR

Author Ralph Pezzullo details how Venezuelan whistleblowers uncovered a foreign-run election-fraud scheme using Smartmatic software to steal US elections.

Key Points

• 1.The book exposing election fraud was killed by its publisher at the last minute. Skyhorse Publishing, which had signed the deal and fully typeset the manuscript, pulled out citing fear of lawsuits — a reference to Fox News's $757M Dominion settlement that effectively silenced media coverage.
• 2.The two core whistleblowers are Martin Rodil and Gary Bernson. Rodil is a Venezuelan former DEA source expert in financial crimes; Bernson is an ex-CIA officer who led post-9/11 teams into Afghanistan and co-wrote the book 'Jawbreaker' with Pezzullo.
• 3.The election fraud system originated in Venezuela's 2004 referendum. Hugo Chavez, warned by Cuban intelligence he would lose, commissioned three engineers from Simon Bolivar University to develop vote-manipulating software — initially deployed on Olivetti lottery machines — guaranteeing his victory.
• 4.Cuba's Fidel Castro was the primary driver behind the scheme. Castro's economy depended on cheap Venezuelan oil and he had long tried to install leftist governments via guerrilla warfare; electronic vote manipulation became his new tool, enabling wins for Ortega in Nicaragua, Correa in Ecuador, and the Kirchners in Argentina.
• 5.Smartmatic is the Venezuelan government-owned company at the center of the operation. The source code for the voting software is stored in a vault at Venezuela's national bank; Smartmatic disguised its Venezuelan ownership through corporate restructuring and acquired US firm Sequoia to enter American elections.
• 6.Smartmatic entered US election districts around 2006–2008 through bribery. The DOJ later indicted Smartmatic for bribing Philippine officials to win voting-machine contracts; one founder, Roger Piñate, faces charges. Whistleblowers allege similar bribery was used in specific US states and counties.
• 7.A US embassy cable from 2006 and a congressional letter both warned about Smartmatic. An embassy officer in Caracas flagged the company's fake American identity to the State Department; Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney warned CFIUS the ownership was foreign — both warnings were ignored.
• 8.The whistleblowers recruited 20 engineers who worked inside Smartmatic and Dominion. These insiders have direct knowledge of the source code and the vote-switching mechanism; they were relocated with their families to a secure foreign country with a computer lab, partially funded by Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.
• 9.A high-ranking FBI official told the whistleblowers to hide the evidence and flee the country. After presenting their findings to the FBI and members of Congress — from both parties — they were told nobody would pursue it; Pezzullo says both Republican and Democratic members of Congress have used the software.
• 10.USAID's CEPS program allegedly used US taxpayer money to spread the software to 72 countries. The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening — whose partners included the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute — was discovered by DOGE and is under investigation by the Trump administration.
• 11.A consortium of US adversaries — Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran — collaborated on the operation. China and Iran provided top technicians and capital to perfect the software; cartel drug money was allegedly funneled through cutouts to fund US organizations including Open Society Foundations and Black Lives Matter.
• 12.Trump's biggest fear is a conundrum: exposing the fraud would destroy US intelligence relationships worldwide. Trump initially wanted to blow the whistle using Maduro's arrest as leverage — potentially to force a public confession about the 2020 election — but intelligence agencies pushed back, warning it would devastate US foreign relations and credibility.