A Venezuela election conspiracy may be fueling the Trump admin’s attack on Fulton County

When Director of National of Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking in the shadows at the site of the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election hub late last month, it immediately drew scrutiny.

As the nation’s top intelligence officer, Gabbard’s role is primarily concerned with national security threats from abroad. So what was the country’s spy chief doing at a domestic raid of an election office?

Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County during the election hub raid reportedly came at the request of President Donald Trump, who personally ordered her to Fulton County and coordinated her actions with one of the two deputy FBI directors leading the operation. 

For a number of election deniers and far-right commentators, Gabbard’s unusual involvement wasn’t a surprise — rather a sign that the Trump administration’s 2020 probe would finally confirm a long-held, outrageous conspiracy: The impoverished, socialist government of Venezuela secretly controlled the voting companies Dominion and Smartmatic, and rigged their voting machines to fix the 2020 election for Joe Biden. 

Patrick Byrne, a prominent election-conspiracy theorist who aided Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election — and one of the most vocal proponents of the Venezuela conspiracy — said the Fulton County raid was “exactly what we were asking [Trump] to do” in 2020.

“I’m excited… it doesn’t surprise me that our illustrious DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, was involved,” Byrne said in an interview with LindellTV’s Emerald Robinson the day after the raid. “I’m very confident what they’re going to find.”

The conspiracy theory connecting Venezuela with American voting has deep roots. It stretches way back to the days after the 2020 election, when prominent Trump figures like Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell falsely claimed that voting machine vendors Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly Venezuelan companies that were founded to rig elections for the country’s former leader, Hugo Chávez.

Byrne may have been one of the biggest spreaders of the Venezuela conspiracy — Dominion sued Byrne, along with other election deniers, for defamation, which is ongoing — but it didn’t start with him.  

The origins of the Venezuela conspiracy reportedly started with Gary Berntsen, a former CIA case officer, and Martin Rodil, a Venezuelan-born consultant who’s claimed to have worked for nearly two decades with US law enforcement to investigate corrupt Venezuelan officials.

Berntsen, a controversial figure who retired from the CIA in 2005, mounted an unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate challenge against Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), with the backing of the state’s burgeoning Tea Party. Though he no longer works in the CIA, he has close ties to key figures in the Trump administration and, along with Rodil, was the origin of the narrative that both Dominion and Smartmatic are covertly controlled by Maduro’s regime as part of a transnational criminal organization to control dozens of countries, according to reporting by journalist Jonathan Larsen.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Berntsen didn’t just have ties to the MAGA world, but all the key figures and media networks that spread the Venezuela conspiracy: Byrne, Powell, Fox News, Newsmax — all of whom helped to spread the false claims about Dominion and Smartmatic. 

Despite the conspiracies — which also falsely claim that Smartmatic owns Dominion, or vice versa, depending which conspiracist you ask —both companies’ origins are public information and well documented: Dominion Voting Systems was founded in 2002 in Toronto, Canada. In 2025, it was purchased by a former GOP election official and rebranded as Liberty Voting. Smartmatic was incorporated in Delaware in 2000 by three Venezuelan-born engineers, who had long since expatriated from their home country. 

There are other signs that the Venezuela conspiracy may be behind the FBI’s Fulton County raid. A recent Reuters report revealed that Gabbard led an investigation in May into Puerto Rico’s voting machines, allegedly to work with the FBI to probe claims that Venezuela hacked the U.S. territory’s voting machines — but the investigation reportedly didn’t lead to any evidence that such vote tampering occurred. 

Gabbard’s Puerto Rico investigation was also allegedly spurred on by Kurt Olsen, a special government employee at the White House who was recently appointed director of election security and integrity. Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer, was deeply involved in the “Stop the Steal” efforts to help Trump overturn the election — and spoke with the president on the phone at least three times on Jan. 6, 2021. Gabbard’s office reportedly tapped Mojave Research, Inc, — a U.S. intelligence contractor — to investigate Puerto Rico’s voting machines for vulnerabilities, but Olsen pushed the contractor to broaden the scope of its work and find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election

After the FBI’s search warrant affidavit for the Fulton County raid was unsealed Tuesday, the records revealed the entire criminal probe into the 2020 vote in Georgia originated with Olsen — and relied heavily on debunked claims of voter fraud. 

Though the Venezuela conspiracy wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the unsealed search warrant affidavit, election deniers and conspiracy theorists are nonetheless convinced it’s all connected — and that the Trump administration will soon expose it. Byrne was even apparently called into a White House meeting in early January, shortly after Maduro’s capture.

“It’s about Venezuela being the base of election fraud,” Alex Jones said on a recent episode of his show, shortly after Maduro was captured. “Folks, when this house of cards starts falling perfectly this year, the 250th anniversary of this country, what a present,” Jones added. “And Trump intends all of this to be going and done by July 4th.”