Ex-CIA Operations Officer Reveals How Venezuela Has Stolen Elections in Interview with Lara Logan and Gives Details in New Book
- Elisa Ballard
- Dec 6, 2025
- 8 min read
December 6, 2025
On the 11/21/25 podcast “Going Rogue with Lara Logan”, Ep. 45 – Lara Logan* interviewed Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo for over 2 hours, posting it on her X account which has so far received 1.1 million views. Ralph Pezzullo has written a new book entitled “Stolen Elections – The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide,” using sources that Berntsen, one of the most decorated CIA operations officers in recent history, and his whistleblower partner, Martin Rodil, have been able to uncover during a 4-year investigation. Rodil is a Venezuelan-born expert on money laundering and corruption having worked closely with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to recover assets obtained illegally by criminals operating all over the world.
Ralph Pezzullo is an acclaimed American author, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, and podcaster known for his New York Times bestselling works in nonfiction, military thrillers, and historical narratives. Pezzullo’s father, Lawrence, was a legendary U.S. diplomat who brokered the 1979 resignation of Nicaragua’s strongman dictator, after more than four decades of rule. Pezzullo’s writing often draws from personal experiences in global hotspots, blending firsthand geopolitical insights with gripping storytelling. Books co-authored or written by Pezzullo have sold over six million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 20 languages. He hosts the top-ranked documentary podcast, Heroes Behind the Headlines, which features in-depth interviews with unsung figures from major news events. In 2005, Pezzullo co-wrote with Berntsen, the New York Times best-selling book “Jawbreaker” about Berntsen’s field command of the combined CIA-Special Forces teams that were sent into Afghanistan after 9/11.
The new book involving stolen elections is over 370 pages in length with detailed information on what Berntsen and Rodil have been able to uncover in their quest to bring criminals to justice. The book alleges that elections all over the world, including in the U.S, have been manipulated by foreign adversaries since 2004. The book chronicles how the source code for election tampering was crafted by a small technology start-up company called Smartmatic, a Delaware-incorporated company, whose registered address was Boca Raton, Florida, home of the father of one of the two young Venezuelan engineers who were its principal officers, Antonio Mugica and Alfredo Anzola. Later, another Venezuelan computer engineer, Roger Piñaté was brought on board. In 2003 this very small company won a $128 million contract with the National Elector Council of Venezuela (CNE) and developed Smartmatic’s Automated Electoral Solution (SAES). This new election system was created for and purchased by the pro-Chávez Venezuelan CNE in order to keep socialist President Hugo Chávez in power in response to a referendum in 2004. This included delivery of 20,000 touchscreen voting machines. Ownership of the SAES source code was given in part (28%) to CNE. The referendum vote was expected to oust Chávez; however, exit polls and a report of the International Statistical Review indicated that massive election fraud took place, keeping Chávez in power.
On March 8, 2005, Smartmatic acquired Sequoia Voting Systems, a California-based company. In November 2007, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States required that Smartmatic sell Sequoia since it was owned by Venezuelans, but the source code developed by Smartmatic had already been installed in the Sequoia systems. In fact, in 2007, Sequoia’s voting system failed to pass California’s voting system certification when it was found to have several fundamental problems that would allow unauthorized use of central vote counting computers and polling place equipment. (Per the book, “Later, after California Governor Schwarzenegger’s term ended, and Democratic Governor Jerry Brown took over, the Brown administration changed the rules so that electronic voting systems would no longer need to submit their source code for review.”) In 2007, Smartmatic sold the company to Sequoia’s management team and a group of investors.** In 2010, Dominion, a Canadian-founded company with offices in Toronto, Denver and Dallas, acquired Sequoia from Smartmatic. According to a source that Berntsen and Rodil say was a Venezuelan engineer who created the Smartmatic source code, Dominion may have changed the programming language, but “the architecture, the flow chart, the essence is still owned and controlled by the same Venezuelans.”
In 2018, Dominion was acquired by its management and Staple Street Capital. According to Berntsen and Rodil, the “capital” behind Staple Street Capital’s purchase comes from China or the Chinese Communist Party. Dominion’s Vice President, Goran Obradovic, is a dual citizen of Serbia and Canada. The book states that Obradovic wrote on Twitter in 2020 that the software Dominion used in the U.S. and Venezuelan elections was written in Serbia. Dominion and other election system companies’ hardware is made in China. The Serbian government has strong ties to the Chinese technology giant Huawei and has continued to secretly expand surveillance systems provided by Huawei.***
Currently, there are three major companies that run elections through the use of electronic tabulation computer systems in the United States. Dominion is the largest with about fifty to sixty percent of the market; with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic being the other two.
According to sources that Berntsen and Rodil have spoken to, elections in the U.S. are being manipulated in all of the swing states (battleground states) and every swing county in the United States. The manipulation is planned over a year in advance and done with the insertion of fake ballots, bloated voter rolls, vote-flipping software, and targeted voting machine breakdowns in key polling locations. The Venezuelan drug cartels and the Chinese are mainly supplying the money to conduct the steal. Corrupt elements in the CIA and FBI are covering for these crimes, with double agents (many from Cuba) imbedded in various agencies. There are also private companies in the U.S. who have been involved in providing due diligence reports for Venezuelan shell companies to major banks so that cartel money can continue to flow throughout the world. The book names Frank Holder, who was a CIA asset, and a Cuban agent as facilitating money laundering for the cartels. After Berntsen and Rodil brought their evidence to the DOJ and FBI, they have since opened a case on Holder but time will tell if anything is done to bring him to justice since the case would expose the failures of the intelligence community to properly vet their assets.
The drug cartels in Venezuela have grown stronger, with the help of Cuba, through their connections with Colombian guerilla forces. The “Cartel de los Soles” in Venezuela is headed by President Nicolás Maduro Moros and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals in the Maduro regime. The cartel supplies illicit drugs all over the world with the help of Chinese money laundering. The Trump administration has designated the “Cartel de los Soles” as a foreign terrorist organization. The gang “Tren del Aragua” from Venezuela was also designated as a foreign terrorist organization in February of this year and is involved in a range of criminal activities, including human smuggling and the illicit drug trade. Venezuela is a hub of criminal activity all over the world and this rogue state has been controlling elections through the election software they created. Over 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past few years as problems with lack of food, medicine and essential services have escalated along with violence and gang warfare.**** President Trump has recently authorized lethal strikes on narco-terrorist’s drug boats in international waters in Latin America and has closed the airspace over Venezuela, pressuring President Maduro to step down.
Early on in their investigation, Berntsen and Rodil were able to brief General Michael Flynn, Attorney Sidney Powell, former prosecutor and Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, and members of the Trump campaign about the intelligence they had up to that point. However, there was still more work to be done collecting evidence and recruiting more sources to make a more robust case for election fraud. In November of this year, President Trump issued pardons to Giuliani, Powell, and former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who had been accused of trying to subvert the 2020 election according to U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.
When Berntsen and Rodil provided the evidence they had gathered to the FBI two years ago, nothing was done with it and they were told by a senior FBI official to flee Washington, DC and avoid going to the Department of Justice with the information because “they will destroy or discredit you or put you in jail.” They also presented the information to a U.S. Attorney and two Assistant U.S. Attorneys who also didn’t do anything with it other than send a summary to the Department of Public Integrity at the Department of Justice. Instead of acknowledging the existence of evidence of foreign interference in U.S. elections, the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia filed an indictment of Donald J. Trump alleging he spread false claims about the fraud in the election. Berntsen stated in the book that someone in the DOJ leaked his and Rodil’s names to the people working for the cartel. As a career CIA officer, Berntsen had risked his life many times for U.S. interests and has been appalled at the way he has been treated by the government he defended.
As time went on and their efforts continued, Berntsen and Rodil were running out of their own funds for the investigation. Fortunately, they were put in contact with Patrick Byrne, the founder and former CEO of Overstock.com, who then began helping them financially.
Interestingly, the book states that the 2024 Presidential election was shielded from interference by the international criminal cartel through the help of cyber security experts by shutting down the servers that the criminal cartel was using in Serbia and other countries. Evidence that is referenced in the book, as well as evidence from other teams working on election fraud issues have been submitted under the protections and authorities warranted by the Cybersecurity Act of 2015. This evidence has been submitted to various organizations including the Department of Homeland Security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) recently produced a report that states that the U.S. election supply chains for all major vendors and machine types are deeply intertwined with foreign (especially Chinese) manufacturers which “creates an undue or unacceptable risk”.
Recently, two members of Smartmatic were indicted for bribery and money laundering in connection with the 2016 elections in the Philippines, by the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida.
In October of this year, Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a new election company run by a former Republican election official. John Poulos, the former Dominion CEO, confirmed the sale to Liberty Vote in a statement. Liberty Vote is founded and run by Scott Leiendecker, who has served as the election director for the city of St. Louis. Liberty released a statement that said the rebranded company will have a “paper ballot focus” and will “prioritize facilitating third-party auditing”. *****
What, if anything, will be done to bring to the forefront the evidence that foreign adversaries have been able to control elections in the United States? The Biden administration, according to the evidence collected, should never have come into power. The U.S. border was opened for a mass invasion of unvetted foreigners during Biden’s four-year term and we almost lost control of our country, coming very close to the brink of no return. Will people continue to be swayed by the mainstream media’s pronouncements that claims of election fraud have been debunked when, in fact, the evidence has been swept under the rug for years due to corruption in the highest levels of government and the CIA-controlled mainstream media. Logical minds will realize that computer software source code can control and manipulate election results and leave no footprints behind through the ability to erase unauthorized entries into the computer’s timestamp logs. We should never allow for proprietary, secretive software to be involved in tabulating votes. We need to make any election tabulation code “open source” and subject to scrutiny by computer cybersecurity experts prior to certification for use along with requiring robust audits using paper ballots for every election to verify results.
* Lara Logan is an award-winning investigative journalist and former full-time correspondent at “60 Minutes” and Chief Foreign Correspondent for CBS News.
***Per globalsecurity.org
****Per Miami Herald; unrefugees.org
*****Per abcnews.go.com; wired.com
