The Election Cartel

Benny: Alright, Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight again, this is a massive announcement from the President. We’ll see what happens next.

Former CIA officer Gary Burtsten is joining us now, who has literally written the book on how elections are stolen throughout the world. His book, entitled ‘Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide’ is a bestseller, and he won the Operations Officer CIA highest award, Distinguished in Intelligence Media and Intelligence Star. And so welcome this Intelligence Star to the program. Good morning. Hi, Gary, how are you?

Gary: Pleasure to meet you and be with you.

Benny: Yes, thank you. Thank you for being on the show. How are how are elections stolen? How are democracies threatened? Maybe we’ll start with that.

Gary: I’d like to just jump in and say that I’m a retired CIA officer. That was I’m the guy that did the entry into Afghanistan 20 years ago, put Karzai in power, speak Persian.

I was the Chief of Hezbollah Operations globally, Chief-of-Station in the Middle East, Chief-of-station a couple of times in Latin America. And so I have been sort of in an opperations environment for most of my life. I wrote a book years ago called ‘Jawbreaker’ about the invasion of Afghanistan with Ralph Pezullo.

So Ralph is actually the writer of the book that you’re talking about, the ‘Stolen Elections’ book. I couldn’t write it, because the CIA wouldn’t have ever approved it. The publication review board wouldn’t have let me write it. So Ralph is the one that the book is was written by Ralph Pezullo.

You can get it on Amazon, but it’s about myself and about Martín Rodil, who is my business partner. We began about seven years ago working together and doing what we call whistleblowing and targeting the Cartel de los Soles, the cartel in Venezuela. People need to understand that the cartel that operate out of Venezuela, which was led by Nicolás Maduro when he was captured, is a cartel worth $2.7 trillion.

That is what they have stolen, in oil money, drug sales, gold, everything else. It’s the largest transnational criminal organization in the history of the world. It makes the mafia in Italy look like pikers.

So we were doing operations against them, collecting on their finances and continually stumbling into this company, Smartmatic, their employees, their involvement with the cartel.

People were telling us things about it. And then, of course, in 2020, when the election was stolen, many of the people that we sources that we had came to us and told us they had contacts inside the Consejo National Electoral.

That’s the National Electoral Council in Venezuela and inside Smartmatic. And they explained to us pretty quickly who the players were, how they were doing this. And so for the next two years, we, Martine and I, traveled the world finding engineers that work for the companies, recruiting them, bringing them on board, debriefing them.

And they essentially laid out this conspiracy, which we found shocking. Look, I was a senior officer in the CIA. I was a top guy in counterterrorism.

I was in charge of the East Africa bombings, the Cobar Tower bombings, invasion. I did a lot of stuff. But I was shocked by the scale of this, and even more shocked by the fact that the IC, the Intelligence Committee of the United States, wasn’t doing anything about it.

We went to them. We brought them information. We briefed them on the cartel early on.

We actually briefed the Trump campaign about election theft before the 2024 election. We went to them in 2020. When the election was stolen in 2020, we went right to the campaign.

We went to Rudy and to Sidney. Sidney and Rudy believed us. The problem was, was they had a very narrow window, right, to prove the case, because you’re up against a January swearing in of a new president.

So from 2020 to 2024, we really put our shoulder to the wheel and built a group of sources. We had assistance from Mr. Patrick Byrne, who’s a fantastic guy that helped finance the recruitment of a dozen engineers from Venezuela who built and managed the system, who built the source code. And we were able to put them together first in the Caribbean for about a year.

And then we wound up moving into Switzerland for a year and set up a computer lab there. And even though we had the plan, we knew early on what this was, it required all those engineers together and the investment by Mr. Byrne to break the engineering, to actually figure out how they were doing it, specifically from a computer engineering perspective. So this has been a long haul.

We briefed the FBI almost a year before the election. We went to an FBI officer in Washington, D.C., and this was during the Biden administration, and we showed them what we had. And that FBI officer told us, you need to leave the city, you need to flee, because if my supervisors find out what you have and what you’re doing, they will destroy your investigation and they will find a way to put you in jail.

So here, I’m a guy that spent 23 years in the CIA, four years in the Air Force. I had to leave the United States and live in Switzerland for a year so that our efforts and our activities wouldn’t be interrupted. After Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, we were able to return.

But the point was, as we briefed them, we briefed the Department of Justice six months before the election in 2024. We sat with a U.S. attorney, we showed them exactly how it was going to be done. The U.S. attorney told us, OK, they took detailed notes and they told us that the FBI would contact us and work with us against this.

Well, they never contacted us. They investigated us. They pursued us.

If it wasn’t me, it would be hard for me to believe the experience that we had in investigating election theft. But to get back to your initial question, this was something that began in Venezuela in 2003 when there was a recall referendum. And Chavez had come to power in 1998.

Hugo Chavez, the dictator, had come to power legally in 1998. Back in 93, he tried a coup, was in jail, got released. He won a legal election in 98.

In 2003, there was a recall referendum. And the Cuban intelligence service went to him and said, Hugo, you’re going to lose. You need to figure out how to win.

And we think you should look at these electronic voting machines. So they were able to assemble a team of three Venezuelan Americans that had a company in the United States. They’d all studied at Simon Boulevard University in Venezuela, which is a very fine university.

Ironically, the computer lab there is linked to the computer lab at MIT. And they would be brought into Venezuela, flown into Ramp 4, meet with—and that’s the presidential ramp. And in the conference room there, they would have their very first meeting with Hugo Chavez, with Hugo Carvajal, Diosdado Cabello, and Jorge Rodriguez.

And Jorge Rodriguez is the brother of Delcy Rodriguez. And he would eventually be the head of the CNE, the Consejo Nacional Electoral. And they would have a meeting with them, and they would discuss how to steal elections.

And they took money from the Venezuelans, and they told them, we’ve got to do two things. We’ve got to get software, we’ve got to build a source code, and we’ve got to get hardware. So they put a team together to start building the source code that would enable them to do election theft.

And then they flew to Italy and went to Olivetti. You may recall in the old days, Olivetti did electronic typewriters, but they also did lottery machines. So they bought several thousand touchscreen lottery machines in Italy, brought them back to Venezuela, and ran an election, the recall election in 2004, on that technology, using their source code and the hardware from Italy.

Hugo Chavez was thrilled. He was able to steal the election. And then he began improving the system and assisting people like the Kitcheners in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador.

They started stealing elections first all around Latin America. Their first entries into the United States would be in Democratic primaries in Cook County, and in Democratic state primaries in New Jersey. Actually, Carolyn Maloney, who was a Democratic congresswoman in New York, wrote a letter to John Snow during that period saying, hey, these Venezuelans are here and they’re stealing elections in the United States.

And actually, her letter was so specific, it named one of the key technologies that we would learn about a decade later. She had a source, a very good source. So Cythias, under John Snow, initiated an investigation of Smartmatic.

And Smartmatic was forced to sell its company. First, they tried to sell it to themselves, an entity called SGO, which was the board. They were blocked.

And then they attempted to sell it to, and they did sell the technology to a company called Sequoia. But Cythias came again and said, who are you? Are you Americans? Are you Venezuelans? What are you? So they were forced, and Sequoia was forced to sell to Dominion. And Dominion is the company that has been running elections, mostly in the United States and all the swing states, was a company out of Toronto that was in a startup business thing of George Soros.

They had only run one election prior to getting involved in the U.S. And they came into the United States and they started improving the technology and then would get investments of money out of China. The Chinese would become their partners and the system would grow. So what would happen was this, Smartmatic would remain in Venezuela stealing elections, and they would become a global entity stealing elections around the world.

And they had an agreement with Dominion, which had their technology, and Dominion would steal them in America. They cut the world up. And so, you know, we’ve had the engineers that we recruited.

We’ve brought them to the United States. We’ve done multiple debriefings and meetings at the DNI’s office. As soon as President Trump got elected, we went in there.

I felt like I was doing stand-up comedy. Every time I was in, there was another group of eight or nine people there. But the point was, they were horrified by us and our discussions of Venezuela.

Part of the reason for this, what I believe, and I know it’s true, is that during the Obama administration, the IEC, the intelligence community, set up liaison relationships with the Cubans and the Venezuelans, and they probably did things that they are ashamed of. They knew about these machines. They had involvement with them.

Ultimately, Cuba and Venezuela would have the Chinese become their partners. And the Chinese, of course, then would wind up doing the manufacturing. So, the hardware would be manufactured outside of Beijing, about 60 miles outside of Beijing.

We had the name of the company. They would move the hardware to Taiwan. And in Taiwan, they would white label it as made in Taiwan.

You know, if you read about the laws governing technology, people sort of accept the fact that Taiwan accepts downstream technology from China. But the fact is, is that technology allowed it to communicate. It allowed the Chinese also to enter.

So, you wound up with the Venezuelan cartel had created the software. The Chinese wound up building the hardware. And then, of course, these guys understood tradecraft.

So, when I talk about tradecraft is they don’t want to do the attacks in the U.S. or Venezuela. Dominion, the company out of Canada that would take over like 32, 33 percent of the market in the United States, set up a research center in Belgrade. So, in Belgrade, they had 98 system administrators, Serbians, Venezuelans, and some Chinese operating off of Huawei servers that controlled the swing states in the United States.

Our votes were stored in Belgrade and communicated to Hong Kong. This has been going on for years. This is an attack.

This is the most grave attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And one person who really wanted to get to the bottom was Donald Trump. Trump understood that there’s a problem.

A lot of people in the IC have done everything possible to block us. They have done everything possible to disparage us, to call us, to say that we’re trying to damage U.S. foreign policy. The fact is, is we know more about the cartel than they do.

And we know who they’re dealing with in the United States. And we’ve had members of the cartel tell us which Americans are on their payroll. And we’ve walked that into and told them who was working for them and who was being paid to their horror.

So, this has been a very difficult road that we’ve been on. Mr. Rodile is very, very brave, my business partner. They have tried to kill him multiple times.

Patrick Byrne is a hero. Patrick Byrne put his fortune on the line, spent tens of millions to break the engineering. Without Patrick, we wouldn’t have finished this.

Mike Flynn was a big help. Mike Flynn flew out. Mike Flynn met with the engineers to see it, to see how they were, how they would, we were using images, court-approved images in the United States and practicing with them, entering the systems.

You know, the U.S. government knows quite a bit about this. And they didn’t want to report. And look, there are people in jail in the United States that have confessed.

Hugo Carbajal, the chief of the DHSIM, the Directorate General of Counterintelligence Military in New York, you think they’re debriefing him? Benny, if you were the chief of the CIA or the chief of the FBI or the chief of any of these things, would you go and wouldn’t you want to debrief the chief of a foreign hostile intelligence service if he’s in a jail that you control? Would you go there and do that? They didn’t for three years. There are some people in there talking to him now, I believe. But I literally had to do a video to say, Mr. President, there’s a man there.

Please move him to Quantico. Please put him down there so they don’t kill him in jail. Have they moved him? No.

These are, I know these are some serious accusations, but this is the most deadly, serious threat to our country, our electoral system. This has been going on since at least with significant capacity since 2010. So, Gary, what you’ve just laid out here is the largest espionage cartel crime in human history.

Let me say something else, please. Three years ago, an American ambassador by the name of Manuel Rocha was arrested, right? Manuel Rocha had been ambassador in Bolivia. Manuel Rocha had been the political counselor at South Com, sitting next to General Hill, reading every intelligence report, everything.

My business partner and I are the ones that turned him in. We did. We found him.

They didn’t find him. We flew to Puerto Rico, sat with two FBI counterintelligence officers, hammered this out with them. And then that U.S. attorney there very bravely sent the message to Miami.

They targeted Rocha and Rocha’s in jail. They got him in meetings. They had an FBI officer posed to be a Cuban intelligence officer, and he confessed under six hours of working for the Cubans.

That was done by two civilians. OK, retired, you know, I’m retired. I’m 68, you know.

So let me run this back just so that we can get the architecture of this. Nicholas Maduro creates election theft technology. Hugo Chavez does.

Hugo Chavez does. Maduro inherits it. The Venezuelan cartel creates the technology to steal elections.

They start stealing elections. The Chinese make a large investment, a material investment in that and start creating the hardware. This all gets laundered through into American elections.

And therefore, our elections can be stolen by a cartel abroad of communists. Yes. Something else that was interesting.

And our elections are stolen. Yes. Just this is my point here.

Countries around the world. Our elections are stolen, along with other countries elections through this technology that can be manipulated by manipulating simply the tallies at the end as just algorithmic. What they do is the many, many fat.

How would an election be stolen in Cook County, for instance? There are, you know, 14 different techniques within the hardware where they can go at the tabulator. They go with the scanners. They go at.

So what they have done, what they have in Venezuela is just imagine this. Imagine one hundred and fifty CNE, Consejo National Electoral Government engineers and one hundred and fifty smartmatic engineers working together. And they have engineers and they have statisticians and they have comms engineers.

And it’s the science of election theft. So you want to do two things. You want to figure out how to steal election one and how to defeat audit two.

So let me give you an example. On absentee ballots, absentee ballots come in, they put them on a scanner, scanner takes a picture, then they put another one, takes a picture. It does like a hundred of them.

And then when it’s got a hundred pictures, it’s ready to save them all. That picture of those hundred votes disappears. One comes in from Serbia and they’re all voting for one candidate, possibly Joe Biden.

And then that is saved on the machine. In many states, you’re not allowed to look at the physical ballot in the box. You must do the audit on the machine.

Benny, these people actually own a number of the audit companies that come in to do the audit. They bought and own the paper companies. Some of the ways they do it also is just imagine you have a piece of paper, right, like eight by eleven, and the margin is, say, an inch on either side.

Well, if you change that by a quarter of an inch, it forces the machine to trip after about 50 or 100 of these things you run through. Then a Smartmatic employee comes over or Dominion Tech puts a thumb drive in the machine to fix the problem. And now it’s loaded for theft.

They had at least 14 ways on the machine. And you can use number one and number three, number one, number nine, six and eight. And you never use the same technique in contiguous counties.

Also, if you look at a state like Colorado, you have a state that is red through most of it and it has blue, right, in Colorado Springs and Denver. They don’t steal the election in Colorado Springs or Denver. They shave all those other counties.

So instead of a conservative winning 70 to 30, they win 68 to 32. And they take points every place and they have designed this one year in advance. This is the greatest grift in the history of the United States, these machines.

And it was a evil attack on our democracy. And we have briefed this to a lot of people. A lot of people were afraid.

They ran away from us. We’ve just continued on and on. And we brought witnesses and they’ve testified in front of members of the Department of Justice.

We actually tried to assemble the group of them together and get the DNI to give us a contract to do additional. And the DNI gave a contract to their friends, not to the people that we assembled that could have done it. I will say this.

One politician in America that was very, very brave, that stood with us, Mark Wayne Mullen. Correct. Mark Wayne Mullen.

Yes. He was not afraid. And this is when he was a senator.

He saw it. He took us to people. He was a real hero about this.

So so grateful then. So, I mean, this is kind of Gary’s kind of hard to process all this. I know.

And we started we started the show off by saying Nicholas Maduro would be the key to everything and that this that the black bagging of Nicholas Maduro. You were correct. I was listening to you.

Had a much more profound and important piece in all of this. And while I don’t have the full architect constellation, I have had conversations with Elon Musk about this and Mark Wayne Mullen about this. And some of them have been on the show to talk.

There’s some gaps and you’re filling in a lot of the gaps. So it’s like it’s really remarkable to see. OK, so dig down on one or two things.

One, the intelligence community. You’re saying that the American intelligence community allowed for this to happen. Can you unpack that? We have probably the most problematic counterintelligence environment in our history.

The Cuban intelligence service using Venezuelan resources have probably recruited more penetrations of the IEC than in any time since the founding of the agency in the late 1940s and the passing of the National Security Act of 1947. Look, the Cubans have a history, right? They recruited Ana Montes, who was at DIA, the head of the Latin American desk for Cuba and Venezuela. They recruited Kendall Meyer at the State Department, who was the chief of intelligence and research for 30 damn years, was their asset.

He was arrested 10 years ago, right? The Russians had, you know, had gotten Hansen. They got Older James. But I’m telling you that, and that was a shock for us, right? When Older James and Hansen were arrested in that period, it was devastating because we lost a lot of sources.

The Cubans using Venezuelan resources have done 10 times that damage. We have more people walking around who have been in senior positions and have been on the payroll of our adversaries than at any time in our history. Look, I came into the agency into the career service trainee program in 1982.

I served abroad in the Middle East and, you know, learned Persian, worked against Iran, was a chief against Hezbollah, did a lot of things. But I was selected for very, very large jobs like bombings. Like, I led the response to the East Africa bombings and captured those guys.

When they needed to invade Afghanistan, we sent four teams in. I had the biggest piece of the invasion. I seized Kabul.

I was the architect of the battle in Tora Bor, that fought and killed most of those Al Qaeda guys. You know, I didn’t fall off an onion truck on the way to this. And then I worked in Latin America as the chief of station to encounter narcotic programs after the Afghan conflict, because I wanted something different, you know.

I got another language, got Spanish, went down there, did that, and then I left. But we have a terrible problem, counterintelligence problem. And something happened in the United States after the Cold War.

You know, we all joined the national security apparatus. I did in the 1980s, because, you know, the United States had a population of about 200 million, the Russians were 300 million, the armed forces was larger. I studied Russian in college.

You know, after the Air Force, I went through the PLC program in the Marine Corps to be an infantry officer, and was a skydiver. And I was recruited by an agency recruiter and didn’t take that commission and went to the agency instead. So I was a case officer and a paramilitary officer.

The level of commitment to the Constitution was a little different there, because we had an existential threat from the Russians. The world has changed. People don’t see the world the same way.

And people are selling out. There are a lot of people that have sold out. Just so you know, Manuel Rocha, who was arrested as a spy, was recruited in the 70s.

He was seeded into the State Department. They recruited him in Chile 10 years before and seeded him in, worked him up until he was an ambassador. They do long term intelligence operations.

I have said to a lot of people that, you know, my vision of the future is that we need to build a new intelligence service, a smaller one, like a OSS or a DSS, Directorate of Strategic Services, and a very large CI service, like MI5. There are very good people, fine people, there’s guys like Sam Faddis, John Maguire, bring them back, let them run it. There’s some really great people out there that have 30 or 40 years of experience and understand this business.

Not everybody can do this, just because you’re smart. Look, we have been defeated by these people for the last 20 years. But OK, so zooming in a little bit and coming in on the question of that the intelligence, that our intelligence services allowed for this to happen, allowed for this penetration of software and hardware created and written by our enemies in order to run American elections.

And they didn’t stop it. Why didn’t they tell the president in 2020? The 2020 election was stolen. Clearly, we have it.

We have the whole thing. We’ve briefed this. We’ve showed them how they’ve done it.

We’ve them how they entered into the system. We showed them how it was done. And and how come they didn’t warn the president that these capabilities existed when the president was screaming that the election was stolen? He was correct.

Why did the I.C. stand and say nothing? It’s like COVID. They knew. Yes, they knew.

Yes. Shame on them. Yes.

Shame on them. So what will the president say tonight? Well, is this what the president’s going to say tonight? Is this the architecture? I think that the president. Well, you have to remember something that I think he will focus on China because China came in with massive resources and they’re a gigantic enemy.

I don’t know how much he’ll say about the Venezuelan stuff, because you’ve got to remember there’s prosecutions going on. Yeah, there are legal cases down south. Right.

The president of Smartmatic, Roger Pinata, is in jail down in Miami. Because of a bribery case in the Philippines, but it wasn’t bribe to get the contract, it was bribe to get a response. Now, they’ve had their superseding indictments that have come on to that case because we brought witnesses, have been introduced there.

But the witnesses are there. What hasn’t been there, Benny, is a will on the part of the government. The one person with the real will in this is Donald J. Trump.

The rest of these people haven’t had the will. They want to look away. Look, there’s, and I’m going to say this, that all of these election companies, we focused on Smartmatic and Dominion, right? And that alliance that they had.

But there’s other companies and there are Venezuelan senior engineers that went there with the source code in these other companies. You know, we wrote the book, Ralph wrote the book about Martine and I, and Martine is a Venezuelan-American. He’s a genius.

He really is. He is the bravest guy I’ve ever met. And the cartel has threatened him again and again.

And it has been disheartening to watch our government fail to execute. Look, they won’t even pursue the cases, the legal cases, with finance that we brought to them. It’s been very difficult to get them, I mean, billions and billions of dollars.

When I said to you it’s $2.7 trillion, that is not an overstatement. We have surrendered filings under Cuitams for $50 billion, $30 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion, again and again and again of money stolen by that cartel. It is a wash in the world.

It is a wash in all these major companies. And they’ve invested those things in companies in the United States and in Europe and China and Russia. You just cannot.

I mean, the Venezuelan cartel is Spectre. You know, like James Bond movies. Yeah, I mean, that’s it.

This is how I frame this, how I frame it up, that the story needs to be told from a James Bond perspective. This is like greater than any Mission Impossible movie. And it needs, it’s like it actually needs, it needs to be cast and somebody needs to do a screenplay because this is a remarkable story.

So how did this, so how did this not, how did the election not get stolen in 2024? And how do we prevent election theft in the future? In 2024, we knew that they were going to attack the swing states via Serbia during that office right there. And so it was arranged for a team of patriotic Americans to use the Cybersecurity Act of 2015 and block them. So they blocked them by shutting down the server houses or, I mean, was there a raid? They were attacked.

They were attacked electronically. Attacked electronically, so they shut down the servers in Belgrade. Yes.

Wow. Um, anybody go away in handcuffs? Anybody walk in with a GoPro and film what was happening? No, we were told to do nothing. Okay.

We were told by the campaign to do nothing and I did a video. Remarkable. Okay.

So, so how do you prevent it in the future? Do you, I mean, how do you prevent it in the future? Like, so, so what do you need to get rid of now? You need to get rid of electronic voting. Yeah. Ralph Pazullo did a great job writing the book that he wrote.

Ralph and Martine were at an event in Las Vegas last week and there was 700 people there live and 3,000 people online. And we’re doing this hand to hand. We’re doing this in every city, every show, everybody we could talk to.

You got to read the book. And, um, um, you know, we, my business partner, I have borrowed millions of dollars to finance this ourselves. Patrick spent tens of million.

We spent millions ourselves financing our activities over the last six years. We’re not rich people. Okay.

We have accumulated massive debt doing this because we care about the constitution. I have kids. I have grandkids.

I don’t, I’m not backing down. Final question. Is my contention correct that the black bagging of Nicholas Maduro was to get to the core of all this and to get him to, to talk about how these systems operate to get his witness on this? Um, I think that, that, that it’s part of it.

They, I’m not sure that the, they, they, they knew that, look, they knew that. So let me just explain something about the drug trafficking out of Venezuela. It was like the Costco, the drugs, the physical drugs are produced.

The cocaine is produced in Bolivia, right? In Bolivia, they get three places, the Apollo, the Chapari and the youngest, most of it comes out of the Chapari. Then there’s a lot of other cocaine that comes out of Peru. But I’m sorry, Gary, I have, I’m short on time here.

Okay. I’m sorry. But the point is, this is yes.

The answer is it’s a combination of things. It’s the drugs and the election stuff. Yes.

So that’s a day. Okay. So that’s part of it.

That’s part of the Nicholas Maduro. Okay. Wow.

So I’m sure you’ll be tuning in tonight. I, I hope, I hope the president, I hope they’ve listened to you. Uh, I, is it what you’ve told us here is just utterly remarkable, terrifying, but remarkable.

And it rings true because of, I’ve heard it from multiple other people. A lot of other people helped us. There’s a people like Conrad Reynolds out of Arkansas and Bill Waldron.

There are other people, former army officers that stepped up and helped us too. And a couple of other donors, but it’s been a, um, uh, and then it’s a very brave journalists, Emerald Robinson, Laura Logan. They, they stepped up.

She’s incredible. Yeah. Well, thank you, Gary.

I don’t, you know, here’s the book and you can go to the book. You buy the, you know, you just use the, here’s the Amazon link right here. Stolen elections by Ralph Pazullo, uh, Gary Bernson.

Uh, I, this is me. I hope you’ll come back. I have a feeling we’re going to be needing to talk about this for quite a while.

Uh, and thank you very much for your time. I’m a big fan of your show. May God bless you, Gary.

You can follow Gary right here on X. Here’s his personal X account. Uh, make sure you’re fighting with the Patriots who are fighting for us. The most important fight this battle.

Thank you, Gary. Godspeed.