Early Sunday afternoon, President Trump’s Telegram account posted this Lara Logan interview of ‘Stolen Election’ authors, Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo with the comment: “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”
It appears that the much-needed information operation about the global election theft ring is about to launch. It’s been a long time coming.
• Sidney Powell presented the key details about this digital election theft operation on December 18, 2020.
• Mike Lindell presented granular details and ‘Absolute Proof’ about it in February 2021.
• Tina Peters presented digital proof of election theft and she’s been imprisoned since October 2024.
• Gary Bernsten named names, agencies, locations in October 2024.
Many others over the past 5 years have devoted a lot of time and treasure towards investigating this story and to educating the public. Most have been financially and legally destroyed in the process.
Gary Bentsen tells her of a whistleblower who tried to warn a US Congressman about this election theft operation more than a decade ago and how was met with cartel death threats within hours.
This might help explain why the legacy media continues to label all discussion of stolen elections as “baseless conspiracy theories” and why the Trump administration has done so little publicly to put a definitive end to these lies – and it may help explain why there are three aircraft carrier strike groups surrounding Venezuela right now.
As Lara wrote in a Telegram post on Monday, “Foreign cartels, corrupt officials, and compromised actors inside our own government have built a system where telling the truth can get you killed.”
Gary says the Cartel del Sol is a $2 trillion transnational criminal organization and the most well-resourced criminal syndicate in history. Through bribery and investments of its funds, it controls a dozen countries and world leaders. It has massive investments in the US and European financial markets and institutions.
He says the Cartel’s money is obscene, saying, “If they don’t like you and they have a problem with you and you have a $10 billion company, they just buy your company. No problem.”
Buying-off and infiltating our systems, law firms, consulting firms, intelligence agencies, Congress, the National Security Council is easy with that much money.
He explains the Venezuelan Army is the logistical arm of the Cartel and that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is the leader of the Cartel.
Gary reiterates again that the Mexican cartels are subserviant to the Venezuelan Cartel:
“I know everyone in America talks about the Mexican cartels, but they’re not the big boys, ladies and gentlemen. They’re not. They’re the drivers. Everybody talked about El Chapo Guzman. He’s a bloody driver. He’s a nobody, OK? He’s a nobody that had $1.4 billion, but these guys have hundreds of billions! There are at least a dozen people in Venezuela that have more money and power than the Central Intelligence Agency and money to spend on operations. That’s how large and gigantic.”
Three years ago, Gary and his partner briefed a senior FBI agent in Washington, DC. After seeing their three-hour presentation, he told them to flee Washington and he warned them that the FBI would actively seek ways to prosecute them and to destroy their efforts.
Gary describes other thwarted efforts he made with various US Attorneys and government agencies and says:
“There are people in our intelligence community and our diplomatic community that are paid agents of the Cubans and the Venezuelan regime.
“We have been penetrated at a level never witnessed in our history. The Cuban intelligence service and the Venezuelan, using Venezuelan resources, not only were they collecting intelligence on the United States, they established diplomatic and intelligence dominance over the United States during the past 20 years.
“Dominance. They had so many sources in so many sides in both political parties. Not just the Democrats, the Republican Party and political operators that are operating, right now. So many of them are on their payroll!”
One such traitor who Gary turned in is Ambassador Manuel Rocha, the former US Ambassador in Bolivia who is probably the most senior American, ever convicted of Espionage. He was recruited by the Cubans in the 1970s and had worked in the State Department for 40 years!
Gary and Lara discuss the den of subversives and traitors in the US Intelligence Community and how Tren de Aragua gangsters were given six weeks of intelligence training prior to being deployed into America to create a criminal insurgency in the US:
Gary Berntsen: The CIA and the FBI have done an awful job. All of the people that have led our intelligence community in the past 20 years have failed miserably. They all get an F.
Lara Logan: Well, but is it an F or is it a T for traitor?
Gary Berntsen: It’s a combination. It’s a combination. Yeah. Some of the ones that were directors, they get an F, but they weren’t traitors. But the people right below them were traitors and they weren’t able to figure it out.
Lara Logan: What about John Brennan?
Gary Berntsen: That’s a really interesting name to bring up. And his actions are pretty traitorous, but that didn’t have to be working for the Cubans to be a traitor. On his own, he decided to act against a sitting President of the United States in a ways that are traitorous. You know, he organized efforts to overthrow.
Lara Logan: And still is!
Gary Berntsen: I knew him personally during my time in the Agency. And I’m horrified by the actions that he took and all the others with him that decided to sign that letter. And it’s just insanity.
Lara Logan: Who’s running the Agency today?
Gary Berntsen: I don’t think it’s the Director.
Lara Logan: It’s not John Ratcliffe, is it?
Gary Berntsen: I don’t believe it is.
Lara Logan: Why?
Gary Berntsen: Because he’s doing an awful job. I’ll be blunt. Look, I’m a Trump supporter. I’m a conservative. He [Ratcliffe] has a massive problem. He doesn’t understand it. He’s blind to it.
Lara Logan: Or he’s corrupt.
Gary Berntsen: And what I would say this, I’ve – look, I was in the CIA for almost 24 years. I did a lot of things for them. I understand this business very well. The Agency has been defeated completely in the last 20 years.
We’re only looking at Western Hemisphere. From the optic of Western Hemisphere, we were defeated. Who knows what the Russians have cheesed against us in Eastern Europe and what the Chinese have done, there?
I’m of the opinion now that the CIA needs to be closed. We need to create an OSS-style organization, which was the Strategic Services during World War II. And on the side of it, we should create a counterintelligence organization, like MI5 that only does CI.
We have been penetrated so badly because all of you in the National Security apparatus have failed on counterintelligence so horribly that it is that your enemies have taken over the direction of our foreign policy.
Lara Logan: So, I have a hard time believing that smart, capable people just failed. I don’t believe that. They’re too smart. They’re too capable. I know a lot of different people in counterintelligence units.
Gary Berntsen: Education to the Left. But look, I’ve gone and spoken to, in the first six months of the Trump administration, I went to the DNI and told them that there are counterintelligence problems. I went there four or five times. I felt like I was doing stand-up comedy. You know, it’s like they were taking notes but nobody took action.
Finally, now you had to go to other people. You had to literally get to the White House and get to the attention of the president before anything gets done.
Lara Logan: Cowards and traitors.
Gary Berntsen: Really, I wish that, you know, we went there, we tried to get the information to the DNI. And when the DNI went to the President to present this stuff, my understanding was he rejected it because it didn’t include 2020.
The people we briefed at the DNI’s Office refused to brief the President on the information we gave. Refused! They found ways to block it.
Now, Tulsi, to her favor, has fired 40% there. She got rid of 40% of them! You know, she’s fighting back. She is fighting back. Ratcliffe’s not fighting back. He doesn’t have a clue! She’s fighting back.
Lara Logan: Is Ratcliffe compromised?
Gary Berntsen: I’ve never met the man. I wish if I had an hour with him, he’d be horrified to meet me.
Lara Logan: Gary, if you were a betting man and you were betting on John Ratcliffe, compromised or not?
(Commercial break)
Gary Berntsen: Not capable. It’s just not capable. I don’t know if he’s – I have no evidence. I’m not – Listen, what I’m going to say is – I’m going to say this: If I knew he was compromised, I would say “He’s compromised” or I would have done – I have no information to say that he’s compromised. But is he competent? Not at all.
Lara Logan: Yeah. Well, you know why I say “compromised”? A couple of reasons. First of all, he knew that the Chinese were involved in our elections in the summer of 2020. Didn’t brief the President on it. In November, when he was supposed to report by law, by Executive Order, there was a deadline to report on foreign interference in our elections. He didn’t do that report. He waited. Until when? Until January 7th. OK, that is not incompetence!
Gary Berntsen: When you know there is a – and what troubles me is this: I have gone and spoken to people and the Government and said, “You have a counterintelligence problem.” They’re not – anytime someone would say that to you, when I was a Chief of Station or something – you drop everything! You drop everything and you deal with it.
Lara Logan: That’s right –
Gary Berntsen: Quickly and as harshly as you have to, to resolve it. And I was briefing people and the people that they put in front of me at the DNI didn’t have any professional training. They were from the National Security apparatus and different types of positions they held, but they didn’t understand the intel business. And none of them were trained. And none of them acted. It was so disappointing!
But we knew that once our information got into the system, it was blocked. And I literally had the FBI come to me, when we did the first reporting on Tren de Aragua.
They had a history in Venezuela with a group called the “Piranhas”. And the Piranhas were people that lived in the prisons. They kept them in high security areas and they had guns and their girlfriends with them and everything. And they would go out and murder people. They were government assassins, run by the head of the prison system.
And then, the Tren de Aragua guys were in a prison called El Toquerón. There was a revolt. I know the general that went there and then suppressed it and killed 17 of them. But when Maduro found out that they were so well-organized and so violent, he actually installed a telephone there and started talking to them from the Presidential Palace.
They organized these guys. And then, they gave them six weeks of intelligence training, a group of them, 300 of them, deployed them into America and then sent 5,000 behind them to create a criminal insurgency in America.
Lara Logan: Which is a foreign military invasion.
Gary Berntsen: This was during the Biden administration. I told the Department of Homeland Security people overseas – I had to go out of the United States, because I was outside of America anyway, at that point trying to avoid being arrested by the FBI for our election efforts – went to a group of Homeland Security guys, gave them the information.
They said, “We can’t do anything with it. The administration won’t let us act on this.” They waited until the day that Donald Trump was elected. The day Trump was elected, I got a phone call within 24 hours. “Mr Berntsen, we have the report you gave us. Would you introduce us to the source?”
I said, “In minutes.” 15 minutes later, I called the source, married him to that Case Officer and he started providing him information. We picked up another source, turned him over to the FBI, another source over to the FBI.
None of the people in the bureau or the CIA or the FBI could recruit damn sources. It’s like it’s a lost skill, OK? We really weren’t doing a very good job. We recruited this and got this sort of thing going.
And then of course, Tom Homan and Kristi Noem show up and those guys are ready for the fight. I’ll say that. Kristi Noem and Tom Homan, I’m big fans. Those guys are up for it.
Whereas, the intel people are not up for it. Those two are up for it. And so they went after them.
Within 24 hours of Trump’s election last year, the DHS called to tell him they were ready to take on his case. Gary and his partner had recruited several of the IT engineers directly involved in the Smartmatic, Dominion, Sequoia, Hart InterCivic operations used to steal multiple US elections since 2008 and in 71 other countries around the world. These engineers are now living in the US under Witness Protection. Gary’s been advising the Trump administration and they’re in possession of all his findings.
In the extended 2-hour interview, he and Ralph explain the top 14 techniques used in vote theft operation:
• Pre-planning a year in advance using voter rolls.
• Shaving small percentages in Red areas, never using the same method in adjacent counties.
• Internet connectivity + backdoors allow remote alteration.
• Audits are designed to be defeated (images deleted/overwritten, proprietary code shielded, rules changed so auditors can only look at screens, not the “box”).
The election theft technology was originally developed to keep Hugo Chávez in power in a 2004 referendum, which it succeeded in doing.
So Chávez gave these engineers $200 million to perfect this system and to get it to be used in some Latin American elections, where it was then used to elect Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and the Kirchners in Argentina.
Gary doesn’t think Brazilian President Lula works for them. He calls him a “Lefty who has his own vision” but he says former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “AMLO” received $200 million from Diosdado Cabello for his campaign a few years ago. He says AMLO is owned.
He adds:
“Just so people can understand. The election theft and stolen elections is a major piece of the story with the Cartel. Because it’s a drug-trafficking cartel. So when you look at Venezuela, think of Costco, OK? It’s the Costco of cocaine. But the raw material, the Kirtland, is actually Bolivia and Peru and Colombia. So literally 50 planes a day leave Santa Cruz Airport in Bolivia and are flown in.”
The conversation turns to the current Color Revolution in which we are living and how effective it has been at pitting us against each other and then, we learn about how Hollywood actor, Danny Glover got BLM financed by the Venezuelan government:
Ralph Pezzullo: Black Lives Matter was funded by NGOs that were controlled by George Soros with the money coming from Venezuela and China. We know that, now.
Gary Berntsen: Hugo Chavez marched in the two of the ladies from Black Lives Matter and gave them $20 million in black suitcases in a room. We have a witness. I have a witness that did this, who was there when they did that. Yes, that’s where it started.
Lara Logan: So he handed them money.
Gary Berntsen: $20 million in cash. Danny Glover took them down there.
Lara Logan: Yeah, I remember. And they even posted about being down there. And I remember one of the posts was about “How wonderful it was to be in a sane country, where you could have reasonable, intellectual conversations with decent people”.
Ralph Pezzullo: Tell that to the 10 million Venezuelans who have left the country, their own country. A third of the country has fled Venezuela.
Lara Logan: What about the 1 to 2,000 who disappear every month in extrajudicial killings? What about all the women who are raped in Venezuelan prisons? What about the more than 80% of the population that’s rifling through trash cans, living in poverty, that doesn’t even have food?
Gary Berntsen: And the Cartel has at least $2.7 trillion placed outside, in banks around the world…
Lara Logan: Has there ever been anything that big?
Gary Berntsen: Nothing ever. No organized crime entity has achieved the heights –
Lara Logan: In history, right?
Gary Berntsen: In history. And then, here’s Maduro, begging, “Oh, no war, no war. The crazy Americans.”
Meanwhile, he’s got several thousand people in a shopping center in the middle of the city that’s been converted into a prison being tortured. Only the Venezuelans turn shopping centers into torture chambers.
Something troubling that Gary brings up is that Ric Grenell and others at the State Department are lobbying to have Maduro replaced – not by Nobel Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, who actually won the 2024 election as Edmundo Gonzalez‘ vice-president – but by Jorge Rodriguez and Delcy Rodriguez, brother and sister who he describes as the “Spawn of the Devil”.
This is what caused Patrick Byrne to tell Alex Jones a couple of weeks ago that he thought Grenell was “compromised”.
Jorge and Delcy Rodriguez’ father was a guerrilla in the 1960s and was kidnapped, so their mother fled Venezuela and married Carlos the Jackal. Gary says brother and sister have been Cuban DGI assets for 35 or 40 years, like Maduro, who was trained in Cuba at the age of 14.
The podcast is two hours long and incredibly interesting. They get into the roles of Cuba, China, Russia and Serbia and then, they talk more about their experiences during the War in Afghanistan and about the backstory of the 2012 Benghazi Attack.
It’s all fully transcribed below.
TRANSCRIPT
(Opening montage)
Gary Berntsen: The Mexican cartels, I know everyone in America talks about the Mexican cartels, but they’re not the big boys, ladies and gentlemen. They’re not. They’re the drivers. Everybody talked about Chapo el Guzman. He’s a bloody driver. He’s a nobody, OK? He’s a nobody that had $1.4 billion, but these guys have hundreds of billions!
There are at least a dozen people in Venezuela that have more money and power than the Central Intelligence Agency and money to spend on operations. That’s how large and gigantic.
(Going Rogue show titles)
Lara Logan: Welcome to this week’s episode of Going Rogue with Laura Logan. We have a really important episode today. It is quite Earth-shattering and it affects every single one of us.
You probably haven’t heard this before and there’ll be a lot of people trying to tell you it’s not true. They’re lying.
But before I get into that and introduce my guests, I would like to begin with a word from one of our sponsors.
(Commercial break)
Lara Logan: My guests today, you’ve been working together a long time. We have Gary Berntsen, formerly of the CIA. And Gary, you’re somewhat of a, well you could say a legend, I suppose it depends on who you ask.
In CIA circles, either “Diehard, crazy, wild, uncontrollable conspiracy theorist,” or “One of the most brilliant, beloved, patriotic and dedicated men. A man – a true operator – not one of these fake CIA people that sits in the office in Langley and pretends to do something called “analysis”.
Gary Berntsen: Well, I was very fortunate to have a good career and had great mentors. I grew up in the Middle East division of the CIA. I was a Persian speaker and it’s great to be with you here, today and to be with Ralph.
Lara Logan: Well, and I want to dig more into what you’ve done, because I think it’s pretty extraordinary and people really need to know and understand, so that they can, that’s a good context for evaluating why you’re here today and what you’re talking about.
But your partner in crime, so to speak, Ralph Pezzullo. Ralph, you and Gary have been working together a long time. You’re a fabulous author. I mean, but you’ve done a gazillion books.
Ralph Pezzullo: Thank you.
Lara Logan: It’s like, what is it? Like 60?
Ralph Pezzullo: No, no, no.
Lara Logan: 30?
Ralph Pezzullo: 30. Yeah.
Lara Logan: I know. You’ve done 30 books. You’re a great writer.
Ralph Pezzullo: Thank you. Thank you.
Lara Logan: A brilliant man, actually.
Ralph Pezzullo: Thank you. Thank you.
Lara Logan: Not as wild and crazy as Gary.
Ralph Pezzullo: Well, not on the surface.
Lara Logan: And author of a very famous book, ‘Jawbreaker’, which actually was featured on 60 Minutes, when I was a 60 Minutes correspondent.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes.
Lara Logan: And I was really jealous, because I wanted to tell that story, having been in Afghanistan. But you didn’t pick me, Gary. You picked somebody else at 60 Minutes to tell that story.
Gary Berntsen: I was on NBC. It was the very first interview. Then, I did CBS. But you did the interview with Hank Crumpton years later, there in the Panjshir. And I watched that and you interviewed Amrullah Saleh during that. It’s a great interview. It’s a great show.
Lara Logan: Thank you. That one is very close to my heart. Hank Crumpton, former CIA.
Gary Berntsen: He was my boss.
Lara Logan: Yes.
Gary Berntsen: Great man.
Lara Logan: And Amrullah Saleh, the great ally of the US in Afghanistan; head of their intelligence services later, and then, of course, betrayed by the Biden administration.
Gary Berntsen: He left as the Vice President. Yeah.
Lara Logan: Left as the Vice President and still fighting. Been fighting since day one, in spite of the fact that Lloyd Austin and Tony Blinken and Biden and all the rest of them lied and said that all the Afghans gave up, which is one of the most disgraceful things that they did, in addition to all the other things like serving people up to their terrorist enemies to be slaughtered and their families hunted-down and tortured. Yeah. Just a little bit bitter about that. Still waiting.
Gary Berntsen: Me too.
Lara Logan: Still waiting.
Gary Berntsen: I’m bitter, as well.
Ralph Pezzullo: A lot of people.
Lara Logan: Yeah. So but ‘Jawbreaker’ was the story of how you went into Afghanistan with a small team of clandestine operators and really laid the foundation for the Afghans to move on Kabul in the US bombing campaign. And it was an amazing book, incredible story, what you did. And you and Ralph teamed up for that. And you have so you’ve known each other a long time now.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, we have.
Lara Logan: How many years, Ralph?
Ralph Pezzullo: Since 2005. 20 years.
Lara Logan: OK, 20 years. And now you have a new book out, which is really one of the most, probably one of the most – I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say it’s one of the most important books ever written in the history of this country.
Because, and I have it right here, ‘Stolen Elections: the Takedown of Democracies Worldwide’. This is a subject very close to my heart, because I spent two and a half years after the 2020 election – I love to say this, for all those FBI people and political people out there and intelligence traitors in the CIA: The 2020 election was stolen. It was stolen. We knew it was stolen. We watched in real time as you stole it. And we were never afraid to say it. So I just have to get that out. It feels so therapeutic!
And and so I spent two and a half years investigating that, learning about it, learning to understand how it’s done. And much of what I was tracking, you two have documented and collated all that evidence. And put it not just in this book, but taken it to people in this country who really need to know about it.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes. It’s a system that originated in Venezuela in the early 2000s. It was a computer system that was originally designed to help Chavez win the referendum in 2004. He was in trouble.
Hugo Chavez was the president of Venezuela at the time. And he was he had to hold a referendum, according to the constitution.
Lara Logan: And he knew he was going to lose.
Ralph Pezzullo: And the Cubans told him – the Cubans were very close to Hugo Chavez. In fact, he considered Castro to be his father. He was an illegitimate son. And Castro took advantage of this. He saw that Hugo Chavez was needy, psychologically and developed this very close relationship with him.
Of course, he had ulterior motives, because Venezuela is one of the richest countries in the world, that has the highest oil reserves in the world and tremendous wealth and natural resources. And Castro saw this as an opportunity to be able to fund a lot of the activities. He wanted to spread his ideology throughout Latin America and the world.
Lara Logan: And he wanted to dominate Latin America.
Ralph Pezzullo: He wanted to dominate Latin America. So going back to 2004, he tells Chavez, he says, “You’re going to lose. You’re going to lose the referendum, unless you do something.”
And Chavez is like, “What do I do?” And they came up with this idea. Well, there’s a new technology. It’s called electronic voting. And if you can develop software that can be used to manipulate the results of electronic voting, you know, maybe we have something.
So they go out and they find three Venezuelan computer engineers, graduates of Simón Bolívar University, which is their equivalent of MIT. And they put them to work and they come up with this software and they install it in Olivetti touch screen machines.
Gary Berntsen: Lottery machines.
Lara Logan: And what machines, Gary?
Gary Berntsen: Lottery machines. They flew to Italy and got thousands of those machines and inserted the source code and the software inside those machines.
(Commerical break)
Ralph Pezzullo: And Hugo Chávez wins the referendum by a slim margin and he is thrilled. Castro’s thrilled. So they give these engineers $200 million and they say, “OK, perfect this system and let’s try to apply it to some elections in Latin America.”
And they do that and they end up in the early 2000s, one election after another, a Leftist leader in Latin America is elected: Evo Morales in Bolivia, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, etc, etc, etc.
Gary Berntsen: The Kirchners.
Ralph Pezzullo: The Kirchners in Argentina.
Gary Berntsen: Very important.
Ralph Pezzullo: This is a dream for Castro, right? I mean, he’s been supporting guerrilla movements for years, trying to establish a base in these countries. And here, you just do it with electronic voting machines. And nobody sees it.
Lara Logan: Nobody says a word.
Ralph Pezzullo: Nobody knows, because nobody understands the technology.
Lara Logan: Nor can they read the code.
Ralph Pezzullo: Nor can they read the code.
Lara Logan: Nor do they have access to the code.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. So what happens is that these three gentlemen start a company in the United States.
Lara Logan: Which three gentlemen?
Ralph Pezzullo: The same three Venezuelan engineers.
Lara Logan: The same three engineers.
Gary Berntsen: Antonio Mugica, Roger Piñate, and Alfredo Anzola.
Lara Logan: Antonio Mugica, Roger Piñate, and Alfredo Anzola.
Gary Berntsen: And they were Venezuelan-Americans, all three of them.
Lara Logan: Well, yeah, because then they started Smartmatic, right?
Ralph Pezzullo: They were the founders of Smartmatic.
Lara Logan: They were the founders of Smartmatic, which they did with Venezuelan money.
Gary Berntsen: In Boca Raton.
Lara Logan: In Boca Raton, Florida. And –
Ralph Pezzullo: The source code was always owned by the Venezuelan government. That’s important. So they were able, through corporate manipulation to always hide the true ownership of Smartmatic.
Lara Logan: Well, they did a fake sale, right? Because when the US Treasury Department, because what happened, they started to buy-up. And people realized, “Wait a minute, we’ve got these Venezuelans who are involved in our elections. What is this?” And so they had that Treasury investigation slapped on them. And they started to fight it. And then they were like, “No, this isn’t going to work.”
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. It all happened in around 2006.
Lara Logan: And there was a political officer in Caracas. Bounds?
Gary Berntsen: Well, actually, the Ambassador was [William R] Brownfield. Brownfield released a cable from the US Embassy in Caracas that laid out the suspected criminality of these individuals and that company very clearly in a full five-page report.
Lara Logan: And he’s an American diplomat based in Venezuela.
Gary Berntsen: He’s the American Ambassador. Brownfield sent it to the State Department.
Ralph Pezzullo: We don’t know what happened to the cable, but he lays it all out, lays out all the questions. This company, Smartmatic, is winning contracts in election districts all across the United States, and it’s Venezuelan-owned.
Lara Logan: Yes. How can we have a foreign company own the software for our elections?
Ralph Pezzullo: How is this allowed? In 2007, they bought another company called Sequoia and migrated the software into Sequoia voting machines. Sequoia had been a voting company for many years, and they applied for the permit to run elections in California.
California at the time, you had to go through the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of State had to do an examination of the software to see if it was legitimate.
And they hired a bunch of engineers from MIT and Berkeley, and they went through it, and they went, “This software looks like it was designed to steal elections.” And they rejected it.
Well, 2011, that was during Schwarzenegger’s reign as governor of California. In 2011, Jerry Brown is elected, and Jerry Brown changes the law. That requirement is gotten rid of very secretly, quietly, and then –
Lara Logan: Smartmatic comes in. Smartmatic comes back in. And by the way, California is the only state in the nation that still has Smartmatic run its elections.
Gary Berntsen: That’s right. Los Angeles.
Lara Logan: Los Angeles.
Ralph Pezzullo: There will never be a legitimate, accurate election in Los Angeles County with Smartmatic running it. You’re basically, you’re allowing a foreign country, an enemy, to run elections in California, in Los Angeles County.
And that’s been duplicated in every Swing State in the United States. They’re all run by another company called Dominion –
Lara Logan: With the same software, right?
Ralph Pezzullo: The same software, the same source code. It’s been modified and so on and so forth.
Lara Logan: But it’s essentially the same. In all of these companies. That’s what I found, when I did this investigation. I was like, “Well, they’re all using the same software.”
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right.
Gary Berntsen: In this particular case, it went from Smartmatic, as Ralph said, to Sequoia and then, from Sequoia, they were forced, because of the CFIUS investigation, to sell it to Dominion, which was a Canadian company out of Toronto, that had only run one small election in a Toronto suburb in a period of eight years. And that was a company that was in sort of a Soros incubator, up there.
And so now, they become the –
Lara Logan: But they sell it for next to nothing. It’s not a real sale.
Gary Berntsen: So when they buy it, now they have control of those machines in 24% of the market in the United States, but primarily the Swing States for electing a President of the United States.
Lara Logan: And as everybody knows, you don’t have to win in every state. Because, if you look at the map of America, it’s a sea of Red with tiny pockets of Blue. And so, if you can win those Swing States, you can take an election. And if you control the machines, you can hold onto power forever.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. And that’s what they’ve been doing.
So, the first election that they ran in the United States was in Cook County, Illinois. It was in 2008. It was the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And Clinton, who had been Secretary of State, had a big profile. She was favored to win. And they manipulated that result.
Roger Piñate was actually one of the founders of Smartmatic, went there, helped run that election and Obama won. It was a big surprise. And it sort of propelled him to the Democratic nomination.
Because suddenly, here’s this one-term State Senator who beats the Secretary of State, the former First Lady. Big surprise. Who is this guy? And at the same time, Hugo Chavez is telling his inner circle, “Look at me. I’m going to elect the first African-American President of the United States.” And he succeeds.
Gary Berntsen: Who will be pro-Cuban and support the Revolution.
Lara Logan: Yeah. Which is exactly what Obama did.
Gary Berntsen: Which is exactly what he did.
Lara Logan: Remember, he lifted all the restrictions. He got rid of the sanctions. He got rid of the travel restrictions.
Ralph Pezzullo: Obama went there. He went to Cuba.
Lara Logan: And he went to Cuba. Yeah. I know, because I went to Cuba several times as a journalist for CBS during Obama’s time. I went and did a whole series for CBS News, which was all about, “Oh, the wonderful reawakening and reopening of Cuba.” Of course, you couldn’t find any toilet paper anyway. You had to carry your own toilet paper.
Nobody talks about that part of Communism and Marxism. Line up for days at a gas station. Only can buy certain things from the grocery store on certain days. Can’t buy your own home. So you got generations of families crammed into buildings, where they have to take turns sleeping and standing.
Yeah. They don’t put any of that in. “Oh, isn’t it cool? Cuba’s got all the old ’50s cars.” Never mind that you can’t drive for five minutes without one breaking down.
Gary Berntsen: The important thing to understand here is that Smartmatic has its office in Caracas, and it’s co-located with the Consejo Nacional Electoral (CNE), the National Electoral Commission. And there’s 150 Smartmatic engineers and 150 CNE engineers, side-by-side. They have two missions: 1) Steal elections; 2) Defeat audit.
Study audit: How do different states and different localities conduct audits, so that when they’re audited, you defeat audit?
An example, when people put absentee ballots on a scanner, it’ll take a picture and take a picture and take a picture. And then when it’s about to save them, it gets ready to take a picture of almost 100 together.
But what it does is, they erase that picture, send in another picture, because all these machines are connected to the internet. They’re all hooked up. They’re not supposed to be. A new picture comes in, 100 votes or 90% for the person that they want. But when you do the audit, you’re not allowed to look in the box. You have to look at the screens.
They’ve changed the rules around the country in the different states that make it almost impossible to show that they cheated. And what they do, also is they’ll make proprietary the source code: “You can’t examine that”. You can’t look at different types of technologies proprietary because that’s where they’re cheating.
And they blocked those individuals very cleverly. One of the things that we learned is there’s 14 different technical ways that you can steal an election and they’re operating off different parts of the machinery, but they can use number one and number three, number six and number seven. They can use combinations and they never use the same combinations in adjacent districts.
Lara Logan: So that you can’t find patterns.
Gary Berntsen: They prepare an election a year in advance. They have the poll books. They have hundreds of people, they have statisticians, they have comms engineers, software engineers. This was the science of engineered theft and a multi-billion dollar business, globally.
Lara Logan: And that’s what you document in this book is how it started in Venezuela and yes, it’s spread to the United States, but they have stolen elections all over the world.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, that’s correct.
Lara Logan: In fact, there’s that famous video on YouTube of the Philippines Parliament, when they excoriate a man called Heider Garcia, who’s an employee of Smartmatic.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, that’s correct.
Lara Logan: And they know that their election has been stolen. They know Smartmatic is responsible. And I mean, that guy sits there and he gets beaten-up by the parliament in the Philippines and then they banish him, right? They kick him out of the country. And where does he go? He ends up in Tarrant County, Texas, right?
Gary Berntsen: Forward, Texas. He’s the Election Commissioner!
Lara Logan: Yes, he’s the Election Commissioner.
Gary Berntsen: Then, he moved to Dallas and now, he’s the President of Hart InterCivic, I believe.
Lara Logan: Yeah, which is another company they control. It’s Hart InterCivic or it’s Smartmatic or it’s Sequoia or it’s Dominion, but they all use the same software. And the best part is, the first election that he runs in Texas, he had a county that had been Red for 67 years straight. And in one election cycle, he flipped it Blue.
Ralph Pezzullo: Well, it shows you how far they’ve penetrated our election system. So, these engineers, they end up running elections in all these counties. They take over. That’s part of their contract. And so, they develop expertise and they learn how to penetrate our system. They learn how to hide the results. And they’ve been doing this since 2008.
Lara Logan: Do they get help from the US?
Gary Berntsen: Yes.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, they do get help.
Gary Berntsen: Let me talk for a second about how the investigation begins. In 2020, I am with my business partner and we do asset recovery. We were studying and doing filings against the Cartel de los Soles, the largest criminal cartel in the world, which is the Venezuelan Regime.
Lara Logan: Cartel of the Suns, right?
Gary Berntsen: Yes. And it’s called the Cartel of the Suns because it’s the Venezuelan Army. They have suns on their epaulets, not stars.
So the Venezuelan Army is the logistical arm of the Cartel and it’s led by Nicolás Maduro, the President. The President of Venezuela is the cartel leader.
So, we’re doing this investigation on the filing and we see the election happen. And I turn to my business partner. His name is Martín Rodil. He’s a Venezuelan, initially. He’s got a Green Card now, living in the United States. And he’s a genius.
Lara Logan: And this is 2020?
Gary Berntsen: This is 2020. And he turns to me and says, “I was involved in an investigation years ago and Smartmatic was stealing elections in Venezuela. And I’m sure they were.”
He gave me some information.We said, “Let’s look this up and start looking at these things.”
Lara Logan: Well, there were a lot of people in Venezuela who felt that, right? I mean, there were protests and there was an uprising, a backlash against it. Because the Venezuelans didn’t believe the election result.
Gary Berntsen: So within a couple of days, we had an individual in Miami contact us. It was a university professor in Venezuela that had trained many of the people that were working for Smartmatic. And he told us the story of how they were stealing elections. And he knew quite a bit.
Then, he introduced us to an actual employee of Smartmatic. And that individual had a family member that was involved – and he was murdered by the company – and that story was unbelievable. And then, we met another.
And we went through HUMINT, the two of us. Martín Rodil, my business partner, is one of the most capable people on the planet. And very, very brave. And the Regime hates him. And we went from source to source and grew the knowledge bigger and bigger and bigger. And almost for two years, we did this.
And then finally, we thought, “We need help,” because we were getting a larger number of sources. So we sought out General Mike Flynn, because he’s a good friend and he’s a patriot.
And when we met General Flynn, he took us to a place and we met with him and a man by the name of Patrick Byrne.
Lara Logan: Yes, I know Patrick.
Gary Berntsen: Patrick Byrne is the man that ultimately financed this. None of this would have been possible; for us to recruit a dozen of these things to pay for all. We built a computer lab. It was just unbelievable.
We got images of elections that were released by courts so we could practice with them and the engineers. And so, we got members from not just Smartmatic, but from Dominion, from other companies, all these people that did this. And we literally had a computer lab outside the United States.
We built it in one place and then built it in another place, because when we went and tried to get help in the United States, we went to the FBI, to an FBI officer in Washington, DC.
Lara Logan: How’d that work out?
Gary Berntsen: And when we briefed the FBI officer and they saw that, they said, “Mr Berntsen, you need to flee the city. The FBI, my supervisors, if they see this, will find a way to destroy this and they will charge you with crimes of some type to stop you.
And I didn’t think that was funny. And I said, “We’re not fleeing.” And that FBI officer said, “Look, you need to help us, because I know what you’re doing. I understand you’re trying to save the country. Go to the Congress and go to the media. They’ll help you.”
Well, we went to the media. We went to – I’m not going to say the names – but we went to some pretty well-known journalists who didn’t want any part of us. We showed them what we had. They said, “That’s shocking, but I’m afraid my company won’t let me report this.” And when we went to the Congress, they were afraid.
Lara Logan: Should have come to me, Gary.
Gary Berntsen: They wouldn’t help us. One politician in America was not afraid.
Lara Logan: Who was that?
Gary Berntsen: Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.
Lara Logan: Yes.
Gary Berntsen: He’s a real man, that guy.
Lara Logan: He’s a real man.
Gary Berntsen: He is a hell of a guy.
Lara Logan: Also went and rescued people in Afghanistan.
Gary Berntsen: He’s a hell of a guy. And when he saw it – but it took us years to get to him. And all this time, Patrick Byrne and all these engineers are engineering and re-engineering and moving country and doing all of this stuff.
Lara Logan: Well, Patrick is kind of a savant.
Gary Berntsen: And Mike Flynn, though, was a real hero, because Flynn believed in us, went to see the engineers. He didn’t want to just believe us. Flynn wanted to talk to the engineers. He was like, “These are the real engineers. They built the damn system.”
Ralph Pezzullo: See, that was the unique part about their investigation is that they had recruited the people who built the source code, who were running the system, who were running elections. Right. So they could tell them, you could go to them and say, “How did you steal this election?” And they go, “OK, we did it this way.”
Lara Logan: Listen, you know what, that’s called? A firsthand source.
Gary Berntsen: Nine months before the election, we think, “OK, this isn’t working out with the journalists. This is not working out with the Congress. Bloody people don’t want to help us!”
Lara Logan: Again, Gary, you went to the wrong journalist.
Gary Berntsen: So, there was one US Attorney in the country that we knew. And that US attorney was a brave guy. He was a smart guy. I don’t want to say his name, because he’s involved in investigations that are important right now on this.
And we went to him and we did the full brief with our attorneys with us. We brought three of our attorneys. We sat in front of a US Attorney and three AUSAs and did the full show for three and a half hours, showed the technology, the whole thing. And they took unbelievable notes and they said, “OK, we’re going to report all of this to the Office of Public Integrity. And probably within three to four weeks, the FBI will contact you and work with you on this.”
They never contacted us. They decided to pursue us and investigate us. Shame on them. Shame on them.
Lara Logan: Punish you. Punish you and hopefully, intimidate you.
Gary Berntsen: I knew, when we got to month two or three and they hadn’t called us and we knew that they cut him off. They wouldn’t answer the phone. They wouldn’t answer his emails or anything like that.
I literally packed my family up and I moved to Switzerland for a year, because we were going to continue our efforts. But I didn’t want the Bureau to be able to follow me every day, listen to my phone every day, track me every day. I figured I needed to get out of the country, which I did. I had to leave America for a year.
(Commercial break)
Lara Logan: Incredible.
Gary Berntsen: And put my youngest daughter in a school and abroad, and then we continued the fight.
Lara Logan: And this is you and Martín.
Gary Berntsen: Me and Martín and Patrick and Mike, and all these other people. There was a great group of, it was probably, in the end, there was eight to 10 people who were involved, and Ralph got involved too with this, and Ralph knew this is what we were doing. He was being briefed, and he understood all of the pieces of this.
And then, 10 days before the election, I did a video that said, “My name is Gary,” because we thought that, look, we went to the state of Texas. We provided information to them.
Lara Logan: I remember when you did.
Gary Berntsen: They could have pursued these guys here because we knew what Heider Garcia and those guys would do. We knew what they were doing. But they wouldn’t act. They wouldn’t act! No courage! I’m ashamed. We came here, we went to the Texas Rangers. We showed them too. No courage. And we had everything. They all played it like, “Well, we don’t know what to do. This is so complicated.” Spare me. Spare me!
And so finally, I talked to Ralph. I said, “We’re going to do a video, because I won’t feel right if don’t say something before the election.”
VIDEO: “Whistleblower from DOJ, FBI, DEA and DHS Exposes Shocking Roadmap of Foreign Control Over US Elections” – Pub. Oct 23, 2024 by ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net
Ralph Pezzullo: We were trying to get information out before the election.
Lara Logan: I posted it because I knew when I saw it, I was like, “Oh, here goes Gary. He’s laying it all out there.” And I wanted people to see. I was hoping, too.
Gary Berntsen: The book was supposed to come out. And the book was supposed to come out right then. Tell the story of the book.
Ralph Pezzullo: When I heard the briefing, this was in the summer of 2024, I contacted a publisher that I know. I told him. He wanted to see the presentation, the evidence himself.
Martín flew to New York and showed it to him. The guy came out and he went, “Oh my God, oh my God! Ralph, we got to save the country! We got to get this book out before the election!”
So I wrote the book in basically like five or six weeks to get it out on time. A week before the book was supposed to come out, like October 12th or something like that. A week before, suddenly he goes, “We got to stop.”
I’m like, “What?” Everything had been finished. Proofread, cover, publicity was starting to go out. And we were like, “What’s going on?” And he goes, “Oh, my lawyer…”
So Gary and I get on the phone with him. We had a bunch of conversations. Suddenly, we were shut down. For a year, we were shut down.
Lara Logan: Can you say which publisher?
Ralph Pezzullo: What do you think?
Gary Berntsen: Up to you.
Ralph Pezzullo: It’s Skyhorse.
Gary Berntsen: I’ll make a correction. We went to the Department of Public Safety Intelligence, not the Rangers in Texas. We gave him the whole brief and, “No, can’t do anything.”
So they shut down the book. So I told Gary, “We got to get something out before the election.”
Lara Logan: I was trying to do a TV series on it before the election. I had a whole deck and I was trying to raise the funds and I couldn’t get it. I was like, “I can show you this global network that leads all the way into the US and how they’re seeding elections. Nobody would fund it.
Ralph Pezzullo: This is the other part that I’m glad you brought up. The global nature is because Venezuela along the way, when this proved to be effective, suddenly China showed up with a lot of money. Russia showed up. Iran showed up.
Gary Berntsen: Hundreds of millions poured in.
Lara Logan: Because they could see what it could do.
Ralph Pezzullo: They knew what it was doing. They saw how powerful it was. What an incredible system. We can undermine the country we hate the most, which is the United States.
Lara Logan: And Europe. They could do it in Europe, too. They could do it in the US.
Gary Berntsen: They don’t have to fight a war against us.
Lara Logan: They don’t have to pay for an expensive war. They don’t have to deal with all the recriminations.
Ralph Pezzullo: This software is now used in 72 countries around the world. 72!
Lara Logan: Yeah. I know.
Ralph Pezzullo: And it’s all the same software with the same modified source code.
Lara Logan: By the way, nobody’s allowed to have access to it.
Gary Berntsen: But we have it. We have your source code. We have it. We have the program that you insert to actually – you know, there’s source code. And there’s another program you enter with Eternal Blue to get into a certain platform. And then, they actually leave, they were leaving four different backdoors and they left the keys in the open in three different places.
I mean, we showed this to all sorts of people. We actually wound up doing a month before the election. We showed it to the Trump people. We went to them and we gave them the brief. They looked at it in horror. And they had real concerns.
Here, they are locked in a death battle, political battle. They’re afraid that if we come out public, that we’re going to suppress the vote, because people won’t vote. And they won’t even show up.
They actually said to me, “Don’t put it out.” My response was, “I don’t work for you.” And I put it out. And I did the video. I mean, God bless them. I’m a supporter of the President, but I didn’t believe it was their right to make that decision, what to make public and whatnot.
I’m a US citizen. I took an oath to the Constitution years ago and I’m here to defend the Constitution. I’m putting that out. I’m telling the truth, because I would have felt, for the rest of my life that I didn’t do the right thing if I didn’t tell the truth. And so that’s why we did that. That video.
Ralph Pezzullo: It was a key moment.
Lara Logan: It really was a key moment. You know, since you raised the fact that you took an oath, Gary, I want to raise something about you a little bit. Let’s get a little bit into your background, because what’s interesting is that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, where they would go nuts, if anybody said the election was stolen or tried to question anything, they’d go nuts. But there was one line, there was one line of information, one narrative on the 2020 election that was completely and utterly, they went nuclear.
And that was when you looked at Venezuela. Anytime you mentioned the connection with Smartmatic and Venezuela, they went crazy. And of course, over the years, as a journalist, I’ve learned that, you know, when someone gets nominated and they’re not attacked in the media, that’s a sign. The bad guys own them, right?
When you see someone in the Trump administration and they never get attacked, somehow they never get attacked in the media. And they might get attacked by, you know, the people on the right, because they’re trying to create dissent, but they don’t get attacked by the other guys. That’s usually a sign.
And then, you know, same thing with Venezuela. You might get away with questioning Dominion. You might get away with questioning some of the other things. But if you touch Venezuela, “Oh, you’re crazy!”
And of course, that only got me to dig deeper, you know, and that’s how I could see that. And then, when I found the CFIUS investigation, which is an official US Government, CFIUS investigation that literally lays out how Smartmatic is a Venezuelan-owned company that is influencing our elections.
The United States Government initiated that investigation. And now, years later, you’re being treated like a lunatic, if you even raise it?
Ralph Pezzullo: The State of California, the Secretary of State of California, this is all public information. You can go look it up.
Gary Berntsen: The reason is, the reason is, is the Venezuelan regime, the Cartel de los Soles, which yesterday was designated as a foreign terrorist organization, was partners with the Biden administration people. They were colluding with them.
Why were they colluding with them? Why wouldn’t they pursue the Venezuelans? Because they believed they could deliver them election win after election win. And they had, until we came along.
Lara Logan: OK, so to that point now, of course, whenever you raise Venezuela or whenever you raise the question of election fraud in 2020, the first response is, “Well, that was debunked, right? That’s been proven to be false. The courts have rejected that. Every single case has fallen apart. There’s no basis to this. These are crazy, wild conspiracy theories.
Ralph Pezzullo: Why? Because they didn’t have this information. They didn’t have the evidence.
Lara Logan: Because they never allowed the evidence into court.
Ralph Pezzullo: Right, right. They wouldn’t let it in. And also, they didn’t see the result of the investigation that Gary and Martín had done. That’s why this book is unique, because it lays out all the evidence.
Had they had that evidence back then, they could go into court and go, “Here. Here’s how the company was created. This is why it’s Venezuelan-owned.” They didn’t have that. And that’s why we were lucky, as Americans that we had two expert criminal investigators who knew how to conduct a criminal investigation, where you go and you recruit sources from within the criminal enterprise. That’s the key thing. You had to have – to look at it from the outside was impossible. People would get lost. It was designed to confuse people.
Lara Logan: Yes, layer upon layer upon layer.
Ralph Pezzullo: You had to have people who created the system to go in and say, “Oh, this is how we did it. And this is why we did this. And this is how” – and that didn’t happen. That evidence hasn’t been presented until now, until the results of their investigation are public.
Lara Logan: And that’s why everybody needs to rad this book.
Ralph Pezzullo: And try to poke a hole in it. You’re not going to poke a hole in it, right? That’s why they want to – instead, they’re not criticizing it. They’re saying, “Ignore it. We know this already.” No, you don’t. You don’t know this. And you don’t know how far it goes.
Now, the good news for the American People is that this is a criminal attack by foreign countries on the United States.
Gary Berntsen: A foreign terrorist organization, too.
Ralph Pezzullo: And the bad news is that they had a lot of money. They still do. Lots of resources. And they’ve made tremendous penetrations into the United States.
(Commercial break)
Lara Logan: OK, so I want to talk more about that. But Gary, what did you want to say?
Gary Berntsen: Not sure what the point was.
Lara Logan: OK, so I want to raise two points related to that. Go back, I’ll remember it in a few minutes. One is, let me find this here. I love how it’s the same patterns always, right? Because when something is true, and you have to create false lines of attack, they run out of false lines of attack. So they keep repeating them over and over again.
Gary Berntsen: The point I was going to make was, there are people in our intelligence community and our diplomatic community that are paid agents of the Cubans and the Venezuelan regime.
We have been penetrated at a level never witnessed in our history.
Ralph Pezzullo: Way farther than happened during the Cold War.
Gary Berntsen: The Cuban intelligence service and the Venezuelan, using Venezuelan resources, not only were they collecting intelligence on the United States, they established diplomatic and intelligence dominance over the United States during the past 20 years.
Dominance. They had so many sources in so many sides in both political parties. Not just the Democrats, the Republican Party and political operators that are operating, right now. So many of them are on their payroll.
Lara Logan: Do you know who they are?
Gary Berntsen: We know some of them are. Yes, we know who they are.
Lara Logan: These American traitors?
Gary Berntsen: We know who they are. And guess what? The Government knows who they are, too now.
Ralph Pezzullo: A couple of them are in jail, already.
Gary Berntsen: But yeah, look, my business partner and I are the ones that turned-in Ambassador Manuel Rocha, who is probably the most senior American, ever convicted of Espionage. He was arrested a couple of years ago. He was US Ambassador in Bolivia. He was the Chargé in Argentina years ago. I know him 20 years.
But we knew he was in contact with members of the Cartel, de los Soles, we went to the FBI and sat down with them and fought with them and pushed and pushed and pushed. And they went after him.
And they had a FBI officer pose as a Cuban intelligence officer and in six hours of videotape, three 2-hour meetings, he confessed, “Yeah, I’m working for you. I hate the Americans. They’re the enemy” – he’s an American Ambassador! – “They’re the enemy regime and I’ve been in the belly of the regime to destroy them for Fidel and our Cuban brothers.”
What a piece of sh¡t! And he’s in prison right now.
Lara Logan: And who was he working for? Which administration?
Gary Berntsen: All of them! He’s been an agent for 40 years! He was recruited in the ’70s by the Cuban Intel Service, joined the Foreign Service in the ’80s, worked his way up through diplomatic circles, was in the White House as the guy for Western Hemisphere.
When he was arrested, he was out. But his last posting as a diplomat was at SOUTHCOM as the Political Advisor, for like four or five years! He was sitting next to the commander of SOUTHCOM, reading every political intelligence report that there was for the entire hemisphere. Didn’t have an embassy to run and was able to go meet with his Cuban case officers whenever he liked and pass this stuff. And there are many others!
The CIA and the FBI have done an awful job. All of the people that have led our intelligence community in the past 20 years have failed miserably. They all get an F.
Lara Logan: Well, but is it an F or is it a T for traitor?
Gary Berntsen: It’s a combination. It’s a combination. Yeah. Some of the ones that were directors, they get an F, but they weren’t traitors. But the people right below them were traitors and they weren’t able to figure it out.
Lara Logan: What about John Brennan?
Gary Berntsen: That’s a really interesting name to bring up. And his actions are pretty traitorous, but that didn’t have to be working for the Cubans to be a traitor. On his own, he decided to act against a sitting President of the United States in a ways that are traitorous. You know, he organized efforts to overthrow.
Lara Logan: And still is!
Gary Berntsen: I knew him personally during my time in the Agency. And I’m horrified by the actions that he took and all the others with him that decided to sign that letter. And it’s just insanity.
Lara Logan: Who’s running the Agency today?
Gary Berntsen: I don’t think it’s the Director.
Lara Logan: It’s not John Ratcliffe, is it?
Gary Berntsen: I don’t believe it is.
Lara Logan: Why?
Gary Berntsen: Because he’s doing an awful job. I’ll be blunt. Look, I’m a Trump supporter. I’m a conservative. He has a massive problem. He doesn’t understand it. He’s blind to it.
Lara Logan: Or he’s corrupt.
Gary Berntsen: And what I would say this, I’ve – look, I was in the CIA for almost 24 years. I did a lot of things for them. I understand this business very well. The Agency has been defeated completely in the last 20 years.
We’re only looking at Western Hemisphere. From the optic of Western Hemisphere, we were defeated. Who knows what the Russians have cheesed against us in Eastern Europe and what the Chinese have done there?
(00:49)
I’m of the opinion now that the CIA needs to be closed. We need to create an OSS-style organization, which was the Strategic Services during World War II. And on the side of it, we should create a counterintelligence organization, like MI5 that only does CI.
We have been penetrated so badly because all of you in the National Security apparatus have failed on counterintelligence so horribly that it is that your enemies have taken over the direction of our foreign policy.
Lara Logan: So, I have a hard time believing that smart, capable people just failed. I don’t believe that. They’re too smart. They’re too capable. I know a lot of different people in counterintelligence units.
Gary Berntsen: Education to the Left. But look, I’ve gone and spoken to, in the first six months of the Trump administration, I went to the DNI and told them that there are counterintelligence problems. I went there four or five times. I felt like I was doing stand-up comedy. You know, it’s like they were taking notes but nobody took action.
Finally, now you had to go to other people. You had to literally get to the White House and get to the attention of the president before anything gets done.
Lara Logan: Cowards and traitors.
Gary Berntsen: Really, I wish that, you know, we went there, we tried to get the information to the DNI. And when the DNI went to the President to present this stuff, my understanding was he rejected it because it didn’t include 2020.
The people we briefed at the DNI’s Office refused to brief the President on the information we gave. Refused! They found ways to block it.
Now, Tulsi, to her favor, has fired 40% there. She got rid of 40% of them! You know, she’s fighting back. She is fighting back. Ratcliffe’s not fighting back. He doesn’t have a clue! She’s fighting back.
Lara Logan: Is Ratcliffe compromised?
Gary Berntsen: I’ve never met the man. I wish if I had an hour with him, he’d be horrified to meet me.
Lara Logan: Gary, if you were a betting man and you were betting on John Ratcliffe, compromised or not?
(Commercial break)
Gary Berntsen: Not capable. It’s just not capable. I don’t know if he’s… I have no evidence. I’m not… Listen, what I’m going to say is… I’m going to say this. If I knew he was compromised, I would say “He’s compromised” or I would have done… I have no information to say that he’s compromised. But is he competent? Not at all.
Lara Logan: Yeah. Well, you know why I say “compromised”? A couple of reasons. First of all, he knew that the Chinese were involved in our elections in the summer of 2020. Didn’t brief the President on it. In November, when he was supposed to report by law, by Executive Order, there was a deadline to report on foreign interference in our elections. He didn’t do that report. He waited. Until when? Until January 7th. OK, that is not incompetence!
Gary Berntsen: When you know there is a – and what troubles me is this: I have gone and spoken to people and the Government and said, “You have a counterintelligence problem.” They’re not – anytime someone would say that to you, when I was a Chief of Station or something – you drop everything! You drop everything and you deal with it.
Lara Logan: That’s right –
Gary Berntsen: Quickly and as harshly as you have to, to resolve it. And I was briefing people and the people that they put in front of me at the DNI didn’t have any professional training. They were from the National Security apparatus and different types of positions they held, but they didn’t understand the intel business. And none of them were trained. And none of them acted. It was so disappointing!
But we knew that once our information got into the system, it was blocked. And I literally had the FBI come to me, when we did the first reporting on Tren de Aragua.
So I and another one of my associates, Blues Buchholz, went down to Miami, met with a source, and the man gave me files, 2,000 files of pictures of gang members with Tren de Aragua and a report on Tren de Aragua that explained that they had – that Hugo – excuse me, Nicolás Maduro had weaponized this gang, had trained them, had sent them into the United States and had 5,000 people falling into 20 different offices to conduct a criminal insurgency in America.
Lara Logan: And this is just to remind people, this is TdA, Tren de Aragua, that made such big news before the 2024 election. And Maduro actually didn’t just round up ordinary people. He went into the prisons.
Gary Berntsen: He took them out of the prisons.
Lara Logan: Yeah. The most violent criminals that Venezuela had. Trained them.
Gary Berntsen: They had a history in Venezuela with a group called the “Piranhas”. And the Piranhas were people that lived in the prisons. They kept them in high security areas and they had guns and their girlfriends with them and everything. And they would go out and murder people. They were government assassins, run by the head of the prison system.
And then, the Tren de Aragua guys were in a prison called El Toquerón. There was a revolt. I know the general that went there and then suppressed it and killed 17 of them. But when Maduro found out that they were so well-organized and so violent, he actually installed a telephone there and started talking to them from the Presidential Palace.
They organized these guys. And then, they gave them six weeks of intelligence training, a group of them, 300 of them, deployed them into America and then sent 5,000 behind them to create a criminal insurgency in America.
Lara Logan: Which is a foreign military invasion.
Gary Berntsen: This was during the Biden administration. I told the Department of Homeland Security people overseas – I had to go out of the United States, because I was outside of America anyway, at that point trying to avoid being arrested by the FBI for our election efforts – went to a group of Homeland Security guys, gave them the information.
They said, “We can’t do anything with it. The administration won’t let us act on this.” They waited until the day that Donald Trump was elected. The day Trump was elected, I got a phone call within 24 hours. “Mr Berntsen, we have the report you gave us. Would you introduce us to the source?”
I said, “In minutes.” 15 minutes later, I called the source, married him to that Case Officer and he started providing him information. We picked up another source, turned him over to the FBI, another source over to the FBI.
None of the people in the bureau or the CIA or the FBI could recruit damn sources. It’s like it’s a lost skill, okay? We really weren’t doing a very good job. We recruited this and got this sort of thing going.
And then of course, Tom Homan and Kristi Noem show up and those guys are ready for the fight. I’ll say that. Kristi Noem and Tom Homan, I’m big fans. Those guys are up for it.
Whereas, the intel people are not up for it. Those two are up for it. And so they went after them.
But we continued to help the government. And then of course, when we started talking to the press, people wanted to sort of try to discredit us and discredit me. Look, I handled East Africa bombings. I handled the invasion of Afghanistan. I was in charge of the Khobar Tower Bombings. I was, I mean, I managed a lot of really big things for the national security apparatus.
Lara Logan: Yeah, Saudi Arabia.
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, are you kidding me? I mean, and these guys, “Gary Berntsen is a rogue actor and he’s an ideologue.” No! You know, and what I’m trying to do is this is information where I’m trying to protect the United States, our families from being killed by these maniacs!
Lara Logan: Wait, wait, let me say, there’s one of these hit pieces on you because the hit pieces are all consistent: “The evidence isn’t real. It’s all conspiracy theories. These crazy guys, they couldn’t ever penetrate the Venezuelan apparatus, because the Cubans control everything. It’s too sophisticated and it’s too difficult and you’ll never manage to do it.” And then, on the other hand, they say, “And also, the Venezuelans couldn’t possibly do any of this on their own.”
So what are they? This is one of my favorite parts about Gary Berntsen What do they say? OK: “Gary Berntsen, a retired senior CIA Operations Officer who led the Agency’s hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan,” It says how you’re part of this team that’s briefed everybody and then it says. “The claims are specific and sweeping,” right? Of course, which means, you know, you couldn’t possibly know.
Ralph Pezzullo: “Overreached”. That’s what they’re saying.
Lara Logan: “Overreached,” right. I love it how there’s another journalist who’s been attacking you, identified a “key source” as Berntsens’ business partner, Martín Rodel, you know, who you talked about. But what do they like to say to you? But you’re the “wild man, right? In the CIA.” That’s what they called you.
Gary Berntsen: Well, look, just so people can understand how wild I am: After 9/11, I entered Afghanistan.
Lara Logan: “A bit of a wild man with a mad dog warrior ethos.”
Gary Berntsen: When I entered Afghanistan in 2001, after 9/11, after 3,000 people were murdered, I entered with 8 CIA officers. We were joined by 12 CIA officers. And I know because you were on that battlefield. The Northern Alliance had about 5,000, 6,000 guys. There was 17,000 Taliban we had to fight.
We had SOFLAMs. We lit them up with lasers. I paid $100,000 to one of those commanders, flipped them in the middle so that we were able to move down. We eventually took the capital because of the airstrikes. Then, I led and pushed the guys into Tora Bora. I did really big stuff with very small numbers of people, went up against large numbers of enemies.
Lara Logan: I was there.
Gary Berntsen: Yes, I know you were there. So the point is, yeah, they want to call me a “mad man”. Fine. You say whatever you like. But the fact is, I didn’t lose one of my men in that fight. And some of the people were killed on other teams in other places.
But I was very, very aggressive, because we were fighting people that killed 3,000 Americans here. That’s why I was there.
Ralph Pezzullo: When you’re being attacked, you need to be aggressive. It’s the same situation, again. We have sat back and let these people build this criminal enterprise and deploy it against us. And our whole National Security apparatus has failed.
It took two whistleblowers, one of whom is not even an American citizen, to do this investigation. Why do we have a CIA? Why do we have an FBI? Why do we have all these agencies, if they can’t? Their remit is to protect us, so that these things don’t happen; to examine software, to make sure that it’s safe, that it’s legitimate. And they failed in every instance.
Lara Logan: I don’t believe that so many people can fail over such a long period of time.
Gary Berntsen: Well, we know some of them are working for the other side.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah, we know that.
Lara Logan: We know that, but come on. How much help did the Venezuelans and the Cubans, how much help do they get from the United States Government? They got a lot of help. And US agencies, USAID?
Gary Berntsen: Ralph, why don’t you explain CEPPS?
Ralph Pezzullo: OK, so during DOGE, when Elon Musk was being criticized for reducing the size of the US Government.
Lara Logan: And God bless Elon Musk and DOGE for doing that work.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah. One of the first things they came across was USAID. And they found a program at USAID called CEPPS, C-E-P-P-S. And it was a NGO backed by the George Soros, again. And what they were doing is that they were basically the marketing arm of this illegal software that was created in Venezuela.
So they were using embassies and we’ve talked to people and we’ve gathered the evidence about it. They were getting our foreign service officers and embassies overseas to aggressively promote this software to other countries.
Lara Logan: How much of US taxpayer money has been spent on that?
Ralph Pezzullo: That was over $2 billion.
Gary Berntsen: $6.9 billion. Yeah.
Lara Logan: Over what period of time?
Gary Berntsen: Over a decade.
Lara Logan: That just makes me sick. And because we’re right here, we’re in flyover country. We’re in a rural town. People work hard all across this country and their money has been stolen from them.
Ralph Pezzullo: Their Taxpayer Dollars were being used to promote software that was developed by our enemies to steal our elections.
Gary Berntsen: To move the world left.
Lara Logan: To move the world left.
Gary Berntsen: That’s right. It’s cheaper than fighting.
Ralph Pezzullo: And so people complain –
Gary Berntsen: It’s cheaper than building nuclear weapons.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. It was perfect. It was genius, from their side. What’s wrong with us? Are we so soft and so weak and so penetrated that we can’t defend ourselves anymore?
Lara Logan: No. We’re so disloyal. They’re working with Americans from within this country who also want to dismantle this country and move it Left.
Gary Berntsen: I have a CIA associate who retired. I have a couple of them that have come to me since the book has come out. And they read Ralph’s book and they called me and said, “What Ralph has described in the book is the greatest crime against America since the Civil War.”
Lara Logan: And “Russia Collusion” gives them a run for their money, but it’s part of the whole thing. It’s the same thing.
Gary Berntsen: Because it stole multiple elections here. “Russia Collusion” was one thing. This was multiple elections, globally.
Lara Logan: They’re all tied. It’s all the same people, right?
Gary Berntsen: Yes.
Ralph Pezzullo: And look how effective. All you have to do is look at our society and look how effective it’s been, right? Why are so many people pitted against one another? So many people angry with one another? Black Lives Matter was funded by NGOs that were controlled by George Soros with the money coming from Venezuela and China. We know that, now.
Gary Berntsen: Hugo Chavez marched in the two of the ladies from Black Lives Matter and gave them $20 million in black suitcases in a room. We have a witness. I have a witness that did this, who was there when they did that. Yes, that’s where it started.
Lara Logan: So he handed them money.
Gary Berntsen: $20 million in cash. Danny Glover took them down there.
Lara Logan: Yeah, I remember. And they even posted about being down there. And I remember one of the posts was about “How wonderful it was to be in a sane country, where you could have reasonable, intellectual conversations with decent people”.
Ralph Pezzullo: Tell that to the 10 million Venezuelans who have left the country, their own country. A third of the country has fled Venezuela.
Lara Logan: What about the 1 to 2,000 who disappear every month in extrajudicial killings? What about all the women who are raped in Venezuelan prisons? What about the more than 80% of the population that’s rifling through trash cans, living in poverty, that doesn’t even have food?
Gary Berntsen: And the Cartel has at least $2.7 trillion placed outside, in banks around the world.
Lara Logan: And that’s just Cartel de los Soles.
Gary Berntsen: Yes, the Cartel de los Soles. Yes, they have $2.7 trillion.
Lara Logan: Has there ever been anything that big?
Gary Berntsen: Nothing ever. No organized crime entity has achieved the heights –
Lara Logan: In history, right?
Gary Berntsen: In history. And then, here’s Maduro, begging, “Oh, no war, no war. The crazy Americans.”
Meanwhile, he’s got several thousand people in a shopping center in the middle of the city that’s been converted into a prison being tortured. Only the Venezuelans turn shopping centers into torture chambers.
Lara Logan: And that’s only one.
Gary Berntsen: That’s just one of the locations.
Lara Logan: He’s got them all over the country.
Gary Berntsen: Do you know one of the things that they would do? And it’s important for your viewers to understand this.
They would use the Piranhas in the prisons. Remember I talked about how these, the Piranhas, these criminals there? Well, they would get so many Piranhas in there. They have like a thousand of those guys in a prison. They would remove the police from areas around the prisons. And that would become the new center of gravity, politically in areas. How’s that for a dark, dystopian view of the future?
Lara Logan: Unbelievable.
Gary Berntsen: That was the Venezuelans that created that model. That’s Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Jorge Rodriguez. Do you know, they keep trying to sell Jorge Rodriguez and Delcy Rodriguez, brother and sister, right?
Lara Logan: Explain who they are.
Gary Berntsen: Jorge Rodriguez and Delcy Rodriguez were, their father was a guerrilla in the 1960s, ’70s. And they kidnapped his father, kidnapped the guy named Milhouse, was his name. And so he was captured by the –
Lara Logan: American?
Gary Berntsen: It was an American. He was captured by the security forces and he was killed. Their mother left Venezuela and went and married Carlos the Jackal.
How’s that for having interesting lineage? Your real father is a murdering terrorist and your stepfather is Carlos the Jackal, Ilich [Ramírez Sánchez], he’s a Venezuelan. That guy was a Venezuelan. And then, of course they got divorced and she married other people, but this is who provided guidance to them in their formative years.
And so, Jorge Rodriguez and Delcy are both agents of the Cuban government. They’ve been Cuban DGI assets for probably 35 or 40 years, like Maduro. Maduro was trained in Cuba at 14.
So were they. They had been agents of this. I know a story about Hugo Chávez. His chief of intelligence brought a tape onto the plane. Chávez was sitting on a jet, on a runway and his chief of intel brought him a tape and he listened to it. He could hear Delcy Rodriguez reporting to the Cubans on the telephone.
And he got pissed because, OK, he was an asset, but he didn’t want them reporting on him, too, you know? He fired both of them. So they were outside the government for a little while.
Jorge went and ran for mayor of Caracas and then later, became the head of the CNE, the Concejo National Electoral. The guys have been stealing elections. Jorge’s been the head guy.
Underneath him. So who’s the deputy chief of the Concejo National Electoral? Carlos Contero. He’s a military intelligence officer. Can you think of anywhere else in the world where we have a military intelligence officer organizing the systems? You think this is going to be honest, ladies and gentlemen? No.
Lara Logan: Well, I don’t know. The woman who took over from Chris Krebs at CISA was a CIA intelligence officer!
Gary Berntsen: Unbelievable. But this is an unbelievable story. Jorge and Delcy are the Spawn of Evil, OK? And they’ve been trying – and the State Department has been trying to negotiate to have Delcy stay behind, right?
This, the State Department right now – diplomats, Rick Grenell and company, right – they’re trying to get Cartel Lite. They didn’t want, they want anybody, but the Nobel Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado. They want anybody but her, because she actually won an election with Edmundo Gonzalez. They won an election, and then he stole it from them, you know? Flipped it 70-30.
Lara Logan: And she’s the one who just got the Nobel Peace Prize.
Gary Berntsen: She just got the Nobel Peace Prize.
Lara Logan: And actually dedicated it to President Trump.
Gary Berntsen: Right, because she wants freedom in the Hemisphere, and that’s what President Trump represents.
Lara Logan: She’s pretty amazing.
Gary Berntsen: She is an amazing lady.
Lara Logan: And it’s incredible that she’s still alive.
Gary Berntsen: It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle, seriously. The thing, though, is all the other men, all the Venezuelan oppositionists that you see, so many of them on television that had been paraded, from Juan Guaidó and the rest of them, it was all Kabuki Theater, ladies and gentlemen. They all worked for the Cartel. They were all paid.
The bravest man in Venezuela is a woman, Maria Corina Machado. She’s the hero of the country.
Lara Logan: Is there any leader today in Latin America that doesn’t work for the Cartel or isn’t on their payroll?
Gary Berntsen: Um, who isn’t on their payroll? I would say the guy who’s big enough as [Brazilian President] Lula doesn’t work for them. He’s a lefty anyway. Yeah. He’s a Lefty and he has his own vision.
Ralph Pezzullo: And the president of Argentina.
Gary Berntsen: And the president of Argentina doesn’t work for them.
Lara Logan: And Bukele.
Gary Berntsen: But a lot of the smaller ones do.
Lara Logan: Bukele in El Salvador.
Gary Berntsen: But the rest of them do. Look, AMLO, Andres Manuel López Obrador. Yeah. He got $200 million from Diosdado Cabello, the second or third guy in the Cartel gave him $200 million for his campaign a few years ago.
Lara Logan: $200 million?
Gary Berntsen: Yes, of course. They own these people.
Lara Logan: When he was elected, what was the first thing he did? He said, “We need kisses and love for the Cartels,” right? And when he visited the mother of El Mencho, leader of Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación in Mexico, CJNG, the most violent cartel in Mexico’s history, which is really saying something. And he went and met with his mother. Yeah. You know, giving her hugs and kisses.
Gary Berntsen: Just so people can understand. The election theft and stolen elections is a major piece of the story with the Cartel. Because it’s a drug-trafficking cartel. So when you look at Venezuela, think of Costco, OK? It’s the Costco of cocaine. But the raw material, the Kirtland, is actually Bolivia and Peru and Colombia. So literally 50 planes a day leave Santa Cruz Airport in Bolivia and are flown in.
And this is where it’s all put together. It’s packaged, it’s organized, and it’s distributed to the world. The Mexican cartels, I know everyone in America talks about the Mexican cartels, but they’re not the Big Boys, ladies and gentlemen.
They’re not. They’re the drivers. Everybody talked about Chapo El Guzman. He’s a bloody driver. He’s a nobody. OK? He’s a nobody that had $1.4 billion. But these guys have hundreds of billion. There are at least a dozen people in Venezuela that have more money and power than the Central Intelligence Agency and money to spend on operations. That’s how large and gigantic.
This is, what is the word, you know, like in the James Bond movies, we’re talking about “Spectre”. This is the largest transnational criminal organization in the world that no one knew about or no one wanted to talk about until they stole our election in 2020 and we decided, “OK, you want to play hardball? Here we come.”
Ralph Pezzullo: And interestingly, if you go on the internet and you look for articles about it, there’s hardly anything.
Lara Logan: No, because they crush anyone who dares talk about it.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. It’s been wiped.
Lara Logan: That’s what they do. It’s been wiped.
Gary Berntsen: That’s why they say you’re a “conspiracy theorist”. It took us years’ long to get them designated. Yesterday they were designated.
Donald Trump, God bless him. You know, he went after them. He made them a specially designated terrorist organization.
Look, Trump is getting briefed on this stuff, but there are a small army of advisors and a lot of them out of South Florida that are doing everything possible to stop Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth from moving against the Cartel.
Lara Logan: Name them.
Gary Berntsen: Well, just every, almost every political figure you can imagine down there. The partner of the Cartel has been Chevron. Chevron was the only oil company that didn’t leave. And so they’ve been providing them money. They stayed in Venezuela and been pouring money into their coffers. Shame on you people at Chevron!
Lara Logan: How many people are in Chevron’s payroll?
Gary Berntsen: Oh, there’s lobbyists every place.
Lara Logan: What about leaders, elected officials, journalists?
Gary Berntsen: I don’t know about that, but probably a lot. They’re paying lobbyist companies. They’re paying journalists and they’re paying influencers.
Look, it is Chevron money down there. And it’s the Cartel’s money. And the amount of money is obscene, because they just go buy companies. If they don’t like you and they have a problem with you and you have a $10 billion company, they just buy your company. No problem.
Lara Logan: And get rid of you.
Gary Berntsen: And get rid of you.
Ralph Pezzullo: Let me just say one thing. So one example of how deeply the system has penetrated. After the 2020 election, when the Trump campaign realized something went wrong here, right? They hired a company called Berkeley Research Group to do an audit of the election.
And Berkeley Research Group is one of the, you know, there are a handful of really prestige security companies, very high level Berkeley Research Group, Kroll International, that do these big international investigations.
So they hire a Berkeley Research Group for probably millions of dollars. Who is running Berkeley Research Group is a guy who we know is a Cuban spy, who’s an American, who of course put out a report to the Trump administration and leaked it to the press saying there was “the 2020 election was completely legitimate.”
Lara Logan: “Most secure election in history”.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right.
Gary Berntsen: The Trump campaign hired the Cartel! So they hired them to do the investigation.
Lara Logan: They didn’t know it.
Ralph Pezzullo: They didn’t know it because it’s so, so deeply penetrated in so many areas. It’s like, well, who do you turn to, to get an honest report on what’s going on? And in this case, the only honest report came from Gary and his partner, right? Who are whistleblowers who were just, you know, one of them’s not even an American citizen, but they just were, they saw what was going on and they thought it was wrong and they risked their lives and, you know, spent their savings to investigate this. And nobody helped them except for a handful of people.
Lara Logan: And so, this is why Trump is going after Maduro and Venezuela.
Ralph Pezzullo: Absolutely.
Lara Logan: It’s not just because of the drugs.
Ralph Pezzullo: No, no, not just because of the drugs. It’s much bigger than the drugs.
Gary Berntsen: And they partnered in intelligence operations against us with our major adversaries on the planet.
Lara Logan: Like who?
Gary Berntsen: The Russians. Chinese.
Lara Logan: So when you see Venezuela, actually what you should really see is Venezuela, Iran, Russia, China.
Ralph Pezzullo: These are our enemies. These are our enemies. And they’re all working together. The American people need to understand that we have been attacked by our enemies and they have attacked us from within. Not an invasion, like with armies, but attacked us from within.
Lara Logan: With the help of Americans.
Ralph Pezzullo: Buying-off Americans, buying-off, infiltrating all of our systems, our law firms, our consulting firms, NGOs, everywhere they could. Intelligence agencies. And they have so much money. They have so much money.
Lara Logan: Congress, National Security Council.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. They have so much money.
Lara Logan: How much penetration does the Cuban intelligence, because everybody acknowledges that the Cuban intelligence services are very sophisticated, right?
Gary Berntsen: They play the long game.
Lara Logan: That’s not in dispute. They’re very, very accomplished. They’re formidable. Well-respected throughout the world. So how penetrated is the United States government by the Cuban intelligence services?
Gary Berntsen: Completely.
Ralph Pezzullo: Deeply. Especially in Latin American affairs. Completely.
Lara Logan: Does it go all the way up to Secretary level?
Gary Berntsen: Completely.
Lara Logan: Secretary of State?
Ralph Pezzullo: Could, maybe. Maybe.
Lara Logan: Gary, got anything to me there?
Gary Berntsen: It’s a real problem.
Lara Logan: I mean, I’m just going on what was known for years, like long before, you know, I mean, for years, working in intelligence circles, working on these things, doing investigations. That came up, time and time again: “This guy’s owned by Cuba.”
Gary Berntsen: I’m horrified by what we have uncovered. We have tremendous sources. The President and his senior staff are being briefed on these things.
Lara Logan: And the Cubans are working with the Venezuelans.
Gary Berntsen: Yes, the Cubans control them. They run them.
Lara Logan: They run Venezuelan intelligence.
Gary Berntsen: They run the President, too. Nicolás Maduro was an agent of theirs. They positioned him as the President when Chávez died. He’s their boy.
Lara Logan: Well, then they owned the elections at that point, so they can put whoever they wanted in power.
And OK, so turning to the US. I mean, I don’t know why anyone, these recent elections, I mean, one of the candidates had 125,000 mail-in ballots in the evening. And by the morning, she had over 300,000. And all those that came in overnight were in her favor. I mean, come on.
Gary Berntsen: Members of Congress – I’ll tell you a story. One of our sources, and I don’t want to give up the congressman’s name, knew so much about election theft. And this was over a decade ago. And he went to a congressman, because he lived in New York. He went to a congressman there, knocked on the door and said, “This is what I know about election theft”, and told this whole story.
And the congressman looked and said, “That’s Cuban information! How dare you steal that from Cuba?” And started yelling at the individual.
By the time he got home, leading members of the Cartel had called his house and said, “We know you walked into a congressman today, and your mother and father live down the streets, and we’re going to murder them, the moment we ever get another report on you. So that guy went silent for a decade. And he did wind up contacting us later.
But that’s how bad this is. And he walked into his congressman. There are members of, in every part of our government that have been affected by this.
This is the great plague on America. That they figured out Americans could be bought, because they were not loyal. Something happened after the end of the Cold War, here.
Lara Logan: So it’s really like the last 25 years, where this kind of came into being.
Gary Berntsen: It’s a cultural thing that has occurred in our country. I hate to say it. I hate to say it. But the number of people who are traitors just would shock you. Shocks me.
Lara Logan: I want to see it. I want to see the list.
Gary Berntsen: Shocks me.
Lara Logan: I want to see the list. Come on. I know you’re holding out on me. Both of you.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah, yeah. Well, people are going to get… Hopefully, they’re going to be indicted. They’re going to be brought up on charges. People are gone.
Lara Logan: So you can’t give me the list now, because people will run. OK, but when the time is right, you got to promise me. Do you see that… I mean, if everything that you’ve laid out here is accurate, and I have investigated a lot of it myself independently, and I’ve also worked with other groups who’ve investigated it, so I know it to be accurate. And there’s also a lot of it that’s just out there, like the CFIUS investigation.
But given that, so let’s go with that reality. So then that puts President Trump in a position where, I mean, surely, he has no choice.
Gary Berntsen: Let me say something about that dynamics of the Trump administration, which are fantastic. There’s a lot of people right now that are upset with the fact that Trump is very self-centric in policymaking. The fact that he is so self-centric has actually combated the fact that all these groups have spent all this money to influence all these different committees, and he doesn’t give a damn about those committees. My understanding that Donald Trump is able to take his cell phone and call 25 people around the world and have a view of what’s happened.
And when the CIA comes in to brief him, he doesn’t give a damn what they’re showing him because he doesn’t think it’s very good. He’s actually got a better informal network and he makes his decisions. So people criticize Trump for the lack of input he’s getting from outside policymaking groups.
Thank God. Keep doing it, Mr. President. Don’t listen to anybody.
I would say this to Donald Trump: Don’t listen to anybody but yourself. Don’t listen to any of your advisors.
Lara Logan: Except Mike Flynn.
Gary Berntsen: Make the decision in your stomach and make the choice, please. Keep it up!
Ralph Pezzullo: When Gary and Martín finished their investigation, they went all over Washington. They went to think tanks. They went to congressmen. They went everywhere that they could possibly think of where they would get a welcome audience. Nobody wanted to look at it!
Lara Logan: And all they can say about it is, I love the articles that say, “Well, they could never penetrate Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence, which is a joke.
Gary Berntsen: Listen, I penetrated intel services for 25 years all over the world, OK? Left and right, I had success against them and different intel services.
The fact that these imbeciles writing these articles would say what I could do or what I couldn’t do in terms of HUMINT is laughable.
Lara Logan: Especially the things that they’re writing because they’re idiots.
Gary Berntsen: I was a case officer a bunch of years. I taught at the Farm. I re-wrote the curriculum in the 1990s.
Lara Logan: Didn’t you have the Distinguished Service Medal?
Gary Berntsen: I have the Intel Star and I have the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. I have two of the three highest medals in the agency, OK?
For them to think that I couldn’t do this is laughable, they’re imbeciles.
Lara Logan: They’re also just liars.
Ralph Pezzullo: And they’re just liars.
Lara Logan: They’re liars. They’re just liars, because they don’t want anyone to look at the evidence. They don’t want anyone to evaluate it and they don’t want anyone to face the truth.
Gary Berntsen: There’s a dozen other people that could have done this. I’m not the Lone Ranger. I happen to be paired with the greatest Latino investigator, in Martín Rodil, ever. He’s so remarkable. And he’s Venezuelan.
Lara Logan: Doesn’t he have a good track record in flipping sources?
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, he flipped so many sources for the DEA. He was the number one productive guy for DEA’s Special Operation Division over a decade. It’s remarkable what he did. The Venezuelans hate him.
Lara Logan: Over a hundred sources that he flipped, right?
Gary Berntsen: Yes, yes. It’s just remarkable what he did. And then, of course, we had resources because Patrick Byrne was the only one with the courage in the Company [?]
Lara Logan: Oh, and then they’ll attack you for that. They’ll say “Patrick Byrne is crazy.”
Gary Berntsen: No, but Patrick Byrne knew that it was wrong. Patrick Byrne put a fortune in. And I must’ve met with two or three dozen millionaires and billionaires who were shallow, non-patriotic, that wouldn’t put a nickel in to help us. And Patrick put everything in. He was in for the fight. Sometimes he and I disagree about stuff. But the guy is a Super Patriot. And without him, we wouldn’t have solved the election piece.
Lara Logan: Now, I want to go back to one important thing about Martín because he’s a Venezuelan citizen born, but what people love to say about him is that he’s Mossad because, of course, that’s the favorite thing, right? If they can’t disprove anything you’re saying, then you must. Apparently half the world works for Mossad!
Gary Berntsen: Let me address that, OK? So I did meet with two FBI officers and they said to me, “Your partner was Mossad. Your partner, Martín Rodil, recruited and ran Jonathan Pollard.
And I, of course, have been around a long time. I’m 58 years old. I remember Jonathan Pollard was captured in 1984. I’d been in the agency two years. Martín was born in 1974. So that means Martín would have recruited Jonathan Pollard when he was 10 years old and living in the mountains of Barquisimeto, Venezuela. And I told the FBI officers that this is the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard.
Lara Logan: And who was Jonathan Pollard?
Gary Berntsen: Jonathan Pollard was an Israeli – I mean, he was a Jewish American that spied for Israel and was arrested in the 1980s for turning over a massive quantity of information to the Israelis.
Because he didn’t think the U.S. government was being cooperative enough with the government of Israel. He went to jail for a bunch of years. He’s been released, OK? And I think he’s living in Israel now.
But they claim that Martin ran that operation. When he was 10. I mean, and the FBI officers said to me, “It’s in the file.” And I said, “You guys are morons!” I mean, what else can I say? I mean, what else can I say?
Lara Logan: You know what Senator Kennedy said once, which makes me think of that. He said, “I’m not saying you’re the dumbest person on Earth. I’m just saying if that person dies, you’re in real trouble.”
Gary Berntsen: No, but here’s what happened, ladies and gentlemen. The Venezuelan regime has paid all sorts of individuals to plant information and to do phony research. The Spanish, they own Spain. Let’s put it this way.
The Cartel de los Soles and their chief of intelligence used to fill a diplomatic bag with cocaine and cash. Tens of million every week, every month, sending it to Spain. They built the political party called “Podemos”, which means we can, which was a coalition partner in Spain.
They own the Spanish intelligence service, the Spanish police, the political guys there, they own them. The Spanish are partners. They’re the whores to the Cartel de los Soles.
That’s the Spanish government, our NATO partner. I hope you guys like hearing this in Spain. I mean, spare me. This is how powerful they are.
Lara Logan: No wonder they don’t want you to be heard!
Gary Berntsen: Oh, they don’t want me to be heard. And so the Spanish took false charges against Martín. They filed them, because what did they wanna do? They wanted to charge Martín with crimes, bring him to Spain, and then send him to Venezuela so they could hurt him.
Lara Logan: So they could kill him. And so, explain the Mossad part because he is an Israeli citizen.
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, he’s an Israeli citizen. But we went, let me just say something. We went to Israel because we were following the money there.
And I met with former security officials there who was the finance chief for the Mossad, because I know him. I mean, I was, you know, it’s, I mean, I was the chief of Hezbollah operations. I kinda know a lot of people around the world. And we told the Israelis, “The Cartel’s money’s in your banks.”
And they said, “Where?” We told them, “Here, here, and here.” They’re like, “Thank you. We’ll go and we’ll start freezing that money.” They were very helpful.
Lara Logan: Wasn’t Martín stripped of his Venezuelan citizenship? So he had to get citizenship somewhere else. He had to have a passport from somebody and he claimed Aliyah.
But look, he’s a, he’s more American than anything else. You know, he is an American. He’s just got the Green Card, he’s a US Person right now.
Lara Logan: Well, I know a lot of people who’ve worked with him.
Gary Berntsen: He is so brave.
Lara Logan: And he is incredibly well -espected and well-liked.
Gary Berntsen: He is one of the greatest men I have ever met or worked with in my life. He’s the most capable and brave person I know. I’m honored to work with him. I really am.
Lara Logan: And he’s 100% not working for the Israeli intelligence service.
Gary Berntsen: No! They try to blame him to be working for the Cubans. They have the Israelis. I’m sure that they’ll say he’s working for the Japanese next week.
He flies to Japan. “He’s a Japanese spy.” They’ll try something, because they’re trying to discredit probably the greatest intel collectors on Latin America. They’ve ever seen.
Ralph Pezzullo: Instead of answering the charges, instead of looking at the evidence, which now can, you can look at, you can read about, they call people names and they say, “Well, oh, he went to Israel or he did this or he did that.” Who cares, right? Look what he did.
Lara Logan: Well, if they can, if they can’t discredit the evidence, they go after the messenger. That’s it. I mean, we’ve seen this tactic over and over and over again.
Ralph Pezzullo: Exactly.
Lara Logan: That’s what they do to Gary. That’s what they do to Martín. Right. So I want to know from you, working with Gary, writing his stories, this is like being handcuffed to a hurricane. You’re a brave man, yourself.
Ralph Pezzullo: No, not really.
Gary Berntsen: They knew it was him. He knew early. He knew everything. He knew everything.
Ralph Pezzullo: I mean, actually I was approached by Martín. So Martín, I didn’t know Gary was involved. So I met Martine, a DEA agent was a friend of mine was visiting Los Angeles, where I live. And one day he said, “I want you to meet this friend of mine. He’s the most amazing person I know. And we’re going to have lunch with him.” I’m like, “Great.”
So I go to lunch and I’m sitting next to Martín. I talked to Martín. He’s Latin American. I grew up in Latin America. We relate very easily.
Lara Logan: Well, your father was a diplomat.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, yes. And I said, “What are you working on?” And he says, “Election fraud. I’ve been working on it for three years.” And I was like, “Wow”.
And he goes, “What are you doing tomorrow? I want to show you a presentation, the evidence that we’ve gathered.”
And I said, “OK”. And I go out to a house in Pacific Palisades, which is now burned down and I sit for this presentation, three and a half hours at the end of which I’m like, “Oh my God! We’re – this is it!” You know, cause I’m like you and other people. I looked at the elections and I’m like, “Something weird definitely is going on here.”
Well, here, it explains everything. They did all the work. They went through all the corporate shenanigans that these people have done.
They went through the company that they laundered money through, from China. It’s all there, right? And at the end of it, I said, Martín, you know, “I’m floored. What do you want? How can I help you?”
And he said, “Write a book.”
I said, “OK, here we go.”
We go outside and he gets a call and it was from Gary. And he says, “Oh, I’m talking to Gary, a friend of yours.”
And I said, “Say hello to Gary.” And that’s when I started to put it together. “Well, these two guys are working together.”
I figured it was a bigger team of people, but it was only the two of them.
Lara Logan: And that’s when you realized that, well, that’s the Gary who I know, my friend. Whose book I wrote, ‘Jawbreaker’.
Gary Berntsen: A couple of books. We wrote a novel together called ‘The Walk-In’.
Ralph Pezzullo: ‘The Walk-In’. Gary’s the real deal. I mean, we did ‘Jawbreaker’, we didn’t get one person coming forward saying anything in it was inaccurate.
Lara Logan: Well, you’ve never been sued.
Ralph Pezzullo: Never been sued. Gary is for real. He can get boisterous. He can get excited, which is fine.
Lara Logan: Personally, I love that.Yeah. I mean, I got a little Italian-Sicilian in me, that’s my style.
Ralph Pezzullo: It’s OK. It’s OK. You’re passionate, right?
Gary Berntsen: So Ralph became part of the team.
Lara Logan: That makes us the most dangerous thing of all, Gary. It’s uncontrollable. That’s what they hate more than anything else.
That’s right. It’s one thing. If you’re left or you’re right, they’ll figure out a way to play you. But the thing they don’t want more than anything else in the world is someone they cannot control. That’s right.
Gary Berntsen: Let me add one other thing. One other person we have, well, there’s a couple of people to mention. First off, Blues Buchholz is a guy that works with me, an army officer. You know, he’s an IED guy, did eight years in Afghanistan.
So he’s like right next to me on all this stuff. And when I did the videos, he helped me make them. He wrote them. We did this. We did all of this together because he’s a Staff Army Officer. He was an enlisted guy first. He’s got two master’s degrees. So he’s part of the team, you know.
Another person who was very important to us was Barbara Ledeen. Barbara Ledeen was a staff member of the Judicial Committee. She has been a hero. She was our Sherpa that dragged us around Washington to every one of those congressmen that would see us and has helped us and gave us great advice.
And she was married to the great Michael Ledeen, you know. But Barbara Ledeen was really a hero to us and was always telling us-
Lara Logan: Another family, by the way, that’s been relentlessly attacked.
Gary Berntsen: She was always, “Don’t give up, stand up!” I mean, when we needed a pep talk, if we needed one, she would give it to us. And she would tell us, you’re going to do this, you know. We always listened to her. She provided great advice.
Lara Logan: I want you to, Ralph, can you take me back to something you just mentioned? You went right past it, talking about the Chinese company that funnels the money. Can you explain the role of the Chinese?
I know the Venezuelans created this and set it up with Castro and the Cubans, but at which point do the Chinese come into it?
Ralph Pezzullo: I think they came in quite early with money. They saw this as an opportunity to fulfill what they call hybrid warfare. Unrestricted warfare, which is their philosophy of how you don’t confront an enemy. You undermine them through these different methods.
Lara Logan: Slowly, you play the long game. That’s right. In a sense, they have multiple lines of operation. That’s right. And election fraud is one line of operation. Drug warfare is another line of operation.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. And you look for the vulnerabilities. When you look at the United States, there are a lot of vulnerabilities, because we’re an open society. The key, here is the fact that our intelligence services have become so corrupted and weak. We depend on that because we are-
Lara Logan: Even our counterintelligence.
Ralph Pezzullo: Even our counterintelligence.
Lara Logan: Even our military counterintelligence?
Gary Berntsen: No, I haven’t seen penetrations of military counterintelligence. Civilian, yes.
Lara Logan: No one talks about them.
Gary Berntsen: And I think that that’s where we should build… Most of the CI service should come out of the military. I’m not kidding. But on the Chinese, hardware. You got to mention that.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah, yeah. So they manufactured the machines.
Lara Logan: Oh, yes, of course.
Ralph Pezzullo: So they would manufacture them in China.
Lara Logan: With the modems, the things that connect to the internet that they say are not connected.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right.
Lara Logan: And with all the back doors.
Ralph Pezzullo: They’d ship them to Taiwan, slap a “Made in Taiwan” label on them, and then ship them here, to the United States, load them with Venezuelan software, and there you got it.
Lara Logan: And what about the Serbs? I know there’s a Serbian component to this.
Ralph Pezzullo: They were important because the Chinese have these big Huawei servers in Serbia. And all of these machines are connected to those servers. So what happens is that when there’s an election, the machines are sending the data to the servers.
And the steal happens in Serbia, using those servers. And they have all kinds of engineers. They have Venezuelan engineers. They have Iranian engineers, Chinese engineers. And they’re sitting there manipulating all this information. And then, they ship over through the same system the results. And that’s what we’re shown are the results. You never see what goes on behind the wall.
Gary Berntsen: John Poulos, the owner and CEO of Dominion, went to college with a Serb by the name of Goran Obradovic.
They opened up an office in Belgrade, which was their research office. That research office, as Ralph had stated, had Serbian, Venezuelan, Chinese system administrators, up to 98 of them. And they were connected to the Swing States in the United States using Huawei servers from China. And we could see the links from there. And they were reporting back to Hong Kong.
Now, you have this other imbecile, Mr Krebs –
Lara Logan: Yes, Chris Krebs from CISA.
Gary Berntsen: From CISA stating, you know, after 2020, when there were claims of election theft, he literally called Dominion and Smartmatic on the phone. We’re paying our tax dollars to a head who’s in Homeland Security who’s colluding with the responses with the criminals to respond to American questions about election theft.
Lara Logan: Yeah, well, CISA itself has those criminals have a seat at the table.
Gary Berntsen: Yes, they did.
Lara Logan: That’s what it’s founded on.
Gary Berntsen: And so, I think that Donald Trump removed like 1,800 people out of the 3,000 in the first week over there at CISA. But the Serb part in this was very, very large.
Lara Logan: Is it Serbian government or Serbian individuals?
Gary Berntsen: Look, the Serbian government, their counterintelligence service was protecting them. They were involved. The counterintelligence service providing cover for them and protection for them. And, you know, that Serbian government was very, very close to the Chinese, because the Chinese have replaced the Russians in Serbia as the largest investors.
Lara Logan: So money, always.
Gary Berntsen: Look, and there are some people are investigative services, you know, in the FBI and Homeland Security. There are some really great people there. And I know I’ve been harsh. There are still great people in our services. The problem is the leaderships have been corrupted.
Lara Logan: I’m sorry. There’s over 1,500 American citizens were tortured over January 6th. So my patience –
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, I know, I know, I know. I’m mad at them, too.
Lara Logan: My patience for them is very thin.
Gary Berntsen: But I have some of them I’m working with right now.
Lara Logan: I know there’s some good people there. Not enough!
Gary Berntsen: There’s some of them right now on our team going after the machines, going after the criminals. So I don’t want them to feel bad.
But the problem was, was the coverage, then the dominance of the United States diplomatic and intelligence apparatus was so great. What they did was they turned off collection.
So what does that mean? If you looked at the DEA at the end of the Trump administration, when the Biden people came in, in 2020, there were 11 or 12 people in DEA SODs, a Special Operation Divisions team that were doing in Venezuela. Within three months, there was only one.
So during the period of the Biden presidency from 2020 to 2024, the single greatest narco unit and cartel on the planet with $2.7 billion worth of drug trafficking, thousands and thousands of tons, only had one DEA officer working against it. Isn’t that amazing? What a disgrace those people are!
Lara Logan: You know, that’s exactly the same thing. They set the conditions.
Gary Berntsen: But CIA turned off collection too.
Lara Logan: They willfully blind you.
Gary Berntsen: 20 years ago, and I’m just going to make a comment. I don’t want to go further into specificity. I sat in a meeting in the CIA where a very senior US political official came in and told us all to stand down on Cuban operations.
And I was in Bolivia in a knife fight with the Cubans trying to keep democracy alive and stop the MAS, the Movimento Socialismo from taking over. And I knew, at that moment that something horribly wrong. But the majority of the people in that room, only one other man looked at me and we talked afterwards. Because he had been COS in Havana and he was in another place. And he was fighting –
Lara Logan: Chief of station in Havana.
Gary Berntsen: He was chief of station. And we both said, “This is bullshit. This is wrong.” And so the two of us refused to stand down. And so I left the agency. I retired, at that point.
That other chief of station was pitched by the Cubans, right? They tried to, they made it look like, you know, they’re going to try to recruit them. And then they, and then the Agency investigated them.
Lara Logan: Wow. And destroyed his career.
Gary Berntsen: Tried to destroy him, you know? And so, these are the types of things that go on. And there were other people in Latin America division who were trying to fight the Cubans. And there was only a small number of people that would stand up to this stuff. But they knew what they were doing.
The Agency knew what it was doing. And its leadership had been compromised and is compromised.
And so, I would ask President Trump, as early as possible, convene a commission and create a new intelligence organization.
Sam Faddis was a very capable former CIA officer, wrote a book called ‘Beyond Repair’ over a decade ago. I would use that book as the model, but you must create a counterintelligence service, like Britain’s MI5. And to do that, you have to save the country.
I know, the problem for president Trump is, he comes in and there’s so many problems. There were so many things he had to deal with. He had to deal with the economy. He had to deal with hundreds of thousands of people that were put in here, you know, illegally.
They’ll close the border. He had to deal with all sorts of illegal investigations against him. You know, I’m not angry at the President for not getting to this yet, but he has to get to it, now.
He has to get to the intelligence threats to this country, now.
Lara Logan: If he doesn’t get to elections before the midterms, what’s…
Gary Berntsen: He’s got to get to it all now. It’s going to be a massacre. He’s out of time. You’re out of time, Mr President.
Lara Logan: And people want him to wait. And then, you know, in a blink of an eye, it’s going to be, “Well, you can’t do that because you’ve got the midterms.”
Gary Berntsen: Anyone who allows, anyone who recommends that the regime in Venezuela be allowed to remain for three months or six months or a transition is a traitor. They’re giving them time to survive. And any one of them.
Lara Logan: So do you think… Do you see, I mean, you know, on the cards, increased US involvement in Venezuela land operations, airstrikes?
Gary Berntsen: I hope so. This has been the worst attack on the United States in – Look, 9/11 was bad because in 9/11, they killed 3,000 of our people, but they weren’t on the verge of taking over our country. They almost took over the country!
Listen, had Kamala Harris won that election, they would have put 24 – They would use the Wyden plan, where it’s going to expand the Supreme Court up to 24, have multiple mini courts.
They’re determined, the people on the Left are determined to change the nature of America. And they’ve teamed-up with our enemies and the Soros people for financing. That’s what this is. That’s who conservatives are lined up against.
Lara Logan: Why does nobody do anything about George Soros? Why?
Ralph Pezzullo: Good question.
Gary Berntsen: It’s a really good question.
Ralph Pezzullo: He’s practically half-dead.
Lara Logan: His son now has taken his place. His son used to have an office in the White House during the Biden administration. And he’s been left in operation to proliferate his tactics.
He’s now the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation. You know, he’s got… The Open Society Foundation has its own university. They have global networks. They have policy foundations.
Gary Berntsen: They are determined to change the nature of America. They are determined to do that. And we have to be here to ensure that democracy and our Republic survive.
Lara Logan: Well, and especially the Republic, right? Because democracy without the republic is a tyranny of the majority, in any country. That’s why democracy without the republic fails time and time and time again.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes. Well, they’re attacking it all over the world. That’s why they control elections in 72 countries. And they’re using the same tactics in democracies all over the world.
Lara Logan: So, 72 countries, the UK?
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah.
Lara Logan: France?
Gary Berntsen: Well, look, it’s headquartered in the UK. They used it against the Commonwealth. It’s sitting in London. It’s headquarters, SGO, Smartmatic. It’s sitting in London.
Lara Logan: Oh, because Lord Malloch Brown –
Ralph Pezzullo: Oh, he’s part of the problem. He was the head of Smartmatic.
Gary Berntsen: Lord Malloch Brown, who was Kofi Annan‘s deputy at the United Nations years ago, was their guy to give their brand acceptance globally. He knows what it was doing.
Lara Logan: Well, of course he knows, because he was on the board of Open Society Foundations.
Gary Berntsen: That’s exactly right.
Lara Logan: And then after they successfully stole the 2020 election, Soros brought him over from London and made him president of Open Society.
Gary Berntsen: Got a promotion. That’s right.
Lara Logan: Yeah, he rewarded him for that. So, OK, take me to election night 2020, because I’ve investigated that. I have some ideas of what was going on. But, I mean, are these masterminds of election fraud? Where’s Maduro? Where are the Iranians?
Gary Berntsen: The Iranian Foreign Minister was actually in 2020 in Havana. Not, excuse me, not in Havana, in Caracas.
Lara Logan: Which is the capital of Venezuela.
Gary Berntsen: Was in Caracas with Maduro, watching them steal the election from Donald Trump and having a great time.
Lara Logan: Who else was there?
Gary Berntsen: Just him is all we know. We just know he was the only foreign leader that was brought there. The Iranians provided some engineers, too. There were Iranian engineers inside the CNE.
So he was brought over to watch it there. Watch it steal it from Trump. “Watch us punish the Americans.” Very interesting.
Lara Logan: Do you seriously think that the Trump administration is going to do anything about it? There’s a lot of concern among millions of Trump voters that it’s taken too long.
At this point, over 700 people had been arrested by Biden. People question Pam Bondi. People question Susie Wiles. People question Kash Patel, Dan Bongino.
And they’re frustrated that there haven’t been any indictments. And the clock is ticking.
Gary Berntsen: We started off by interacting with the DNI’s office. And there was one lawyer. They were trying to get into the thing. I don’t want to say his name. Making efforts.
And he eventually, after eight months, became the key guy in the White House now. But there were eight months of blockers. For eight months, people in the DNI and in the White House block the individual that is now in place to lead the effort on election integrity.
But at the same time, the FBI has engaged with a very large team on all of these things on Cartel de los Soles. On all of the election fraud, the narco-trafficking, the money-laundering.
Lara Logan: They put a bounty on Maduro’s head. They declared Cartel de los Soles an FTO.
Ralph Pezzullo: They’ve done their own investigation. They’ve gone through all of the evidence that was presented by Martín and Gary. And they had to look at it themselves. It took them months, which they’ve done.
Gary Berntsen: The intelligence community didn’t report our information. It had to go in there privately to the President. He has seen it all, but not because of the intelligence community.
They did not want to provide the information that we provided. They did everything possible to block it.
Lara Logan: If they do not act on this information and secure our elections, what chance do we have?
Ralph Pezzullo: Not much. That’s why people need to become aware of what’s going on, and they need to put pressure on the administration to act. That’s one of the purposes of the book, right? Now you see the evidence. “You try to pick a hole in it.” This is how the whole thing was engineered.
Gary has told you how much penetration that they have made into our National Security apparatus. And the President is trying to fight this on his own.
The trouble with Kash Patel and these other people, they come into these departments. They’re spending half of their time or more trying to figure out who within their organization they can trust.
Lara Logan: Who’s undermining them.
Ralph Pezzullo: Who’s working against them.
Lara Logan: Who all the traitors are.
Ralph Pezzullo: Who’s dragging their feet. So it’s the job of the American people. If you want a democracy, if you want to preserve it.
Lara Logan: If you want a republic.
Ralph Pezzullo: If you want a republic. If you want your vote to count, you better raise your voice. And you better pressure this administration to act. Say “We know, we’ve seen the evidence. We want action.”
Lara Logan: OK, arresting people and charging them. I mean, that goes a long way. But if you leave those machines in place. If you leave that software in place.
Gary Berntsen: We need to be doing paper ballots. We need to be doing paper ballots. We need to be doing an Executive Order. The whole country should be on paper ballots. Machines are designed to steal elections.
Lara Logan: I just heard a candidate running for governor in California say, “We’re not going back to the Stone Age, we need blockchain.”
I know Pat Byrne has been a fan in the past of blockchain. I mean, I’m not a fan of anything digital.
Gary Berntsen: Paper ballots. If the Indians can have, if a nation with 1.5 billion people can vote on paper, we can vote on paper. And you know, the French had been voting on paper for years. You know why? Because you could steal elections with machines. They knew that.
But in Europe, look, you know, it was when I had done the video, when I had done the video, 10 days before the election, first thing I got was a phone call, like right after our election, because they stole the election in Georgia. They use those machines.
And I spoke to a former minister of interior and a former national security advisor. And that president, that woman was bravely trying to fight back on that because the Russians, they used the machine there. It was clear. And they’ll keep using it until we stop them.
Lara Logan: Well, of course they will. And then, that’s why you see these ballot dumps, right? Because they manipulate the results on the computer. That also explains these graphs when, you know, you’ve got sort of Trump, you know, ahead of Biden, all the way, all the way, all the way. And then suddenly it dips and it’s too uniform to mirror reality because votes just never come in those kind of numbers. So you see things like that.
But then that’s also when you see people bringing in physical boxes of ballots, because they have to make sure that the count of physical ballots in the audit matches the number of votes, right? It’s also why they do automatic voter registration, because if then that means when you turn 18, you’re registered to vote and they got three years to vote in your name before you get to 21.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s why, when they take over these contracts, they get the voter, the voter log.
Gary Berntsen: For 30 years, they get the data.
Ralph Pezzullo: They know everybody’s data. They know where they can find the dead people that they need to get certain votes. They plan this, as Gary said before.
Lara Logan: It’s meticulous.
Gary Berntsen: A year in advance.
Ralph Pezzullo: These guys are experts at this. It’s not just a few guys in a back room. You’re talking about hundreds of statisticians and engineers and they work it, you know, for a year.
Lara Logan: And mathematicians and hackers.
Ralph Pezzullo: Right, right, right.
Gary Berntsen: When we were, we had a map out of Colorado, when we were talking to our engineers, the guys that designed it and stole the elections. And we looked at it and we said, “Look, you know, it’s Denver here and Colorado Springs, all the Democrats”.
And they looked at us in pity, you know, like, here’s a, they said, “No, we just go to every one place where Trump went 70, 30, and he went in 68 or he’s, we shave in every other place. We don’t go near a Democratic place, because when they want to do recounts, they’re going to go to the Democratic places. They don’t realize we shaved in every other county. We know how to do this.”
And then, and then in each of those things where they shave, they shave with a different technique in each one of those. So if you found something in one county, there’s no continuity around the state that way.
Lara Logan: So this is why the Republicans are so much at fault. Because they have the power and the ability to show in their areas, they can allow access to the machines. They can allow access to the source code. They can allow the –
Gary Berntsen: We just won by 35%. OK, we didn’t win by 38. We won by 35. So no one’s going to call to – they should have, right?
Lara Logan: Because everyone says, “Well, we expected the Republicans to win by a majority. Well, it was a little less than we thought it was going to be, but they still won. So, you know, no harm, no foul.”
But the evidence of the fraud is right there. And they could show it. They never looked at it. Well, they’ve been asked. There are Republicans who’ve been asked and they’ve declined. So it makes you wonder, you know, who they really are. Maybe they’re on the payroll too.
Gary Berntsen: The money’s so gigantic.
Lara Logan: OK, so when you started out though, Gary, you didn’t start out investigating election fraud, right?
Gary Berntsen: We started out investigating money-laundering by the Cartel in the billions. I thought…You collect money on drug traffickers and you build cases. You file them with the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury and you get paid 30% on the bank fines.
Lara Logan: That’s pretty good.
Gary Berntsen: That was the business model, right? But it takes a long time to get paid, you know? And then the Biden administration wouldn’t investigate anybody. We had four years. There’s a dry hole, you know, where we’re borrowing money to survive.
So that’s what we were doing. And then the election got stolen. And then my business partner, Martín, says, “I investigated Smartmatic years ago and I saw something.” And then we said, “OK, let’s take a look at this.” And then we met our first source. And then the second source. And then the third source. And then, we were spending all our money. Look, we paid all our own money.
Patrick helped us, too. But we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, ourselves. I don’t want my wife to look in the bank account, you know? It’s like, you know, it’s like we spent all our own money because we were concerned that the country was being lost!
And I went through my entire retirement, my 401. I wiped it out and borrowed here and there. And we just kept going because we…
Ralph Pezzullo: But you didn’t expect that you would hear silence.
Gary Berntsen: But I expected to get help. When you went to the house or when you went to the FBI. I thought other Americans would help us. And so few did. Only a small team, you know? I mean, like I said, I could name them. Patrick, Barbara Ledeen, Blues, Ralph. The number’s small.
Lara Logan: How do you protect your sources? Because, I mean, all of them are at risk.
Gary Berntsen: We moved them into the United States. They’ve all become Witnesses of the Federal Government.
Lara Logan: Yeah, but there are Enemies Within, here.
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, I know. It’s hard. We have confidence in the FBI people we’re working with right now. We have confidence they’re good people.
Lara Logan: Have you lost any of them?
Gary Berntsen: No, but some of them have left, because no one would finance us. We tried to get the DNI to give us a contract. They refused. Thank you to the DNI.
Lara Logan: When was that? Which DNI?
Gary Berntsen: This DNI – Tulsi! We went to her people. They wouldn’t help us.
Lara Logan: Can you get to Tulsi? Have you sat with her?
Gary Berntsen: I never sat with her. We’ve sat with the imbeciles that she sent to speak to us. And the head of the DIG, the Director’s Initiative Group. They wouldn’t help us. It’s shameful! It’s so shameful.
Lara Logan: It’s depressing for the American People to hear that even under the Trump administration, you’re getting blocked and so forth.
Gary Berntsen: We paid for all of this to defend the United States. And officers in the DNI and the CIA, they wouldn’t help us. I mean, I’m so upset about it, because I spent my life doing that. I understood if someone was doing something to defend the country, you want to help them, but not these people.
Lara Logan: How many years in the CIA?
Gary Berntsen: Almost 24. It’s 23 and then four years in the Air Force before that. And then, I went back to Afghanistan and worked for JIDO.
Lara Logan: JIDO, which is the counter IED program.
Gary Berntsen: The Joint IED Defeat Organization. I did a year with them in uniform when I was 50.
Lara Logan: My husband was a plank holder.
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, I know. I know. All of us that were in Afghanistan and Iraq know each other. You know, the circle of people that did tour after tour in the National Security sort of apparatus out there.
Lara Logan: What were you like as a kid, Gary? I mean, were you always like this?
Gary Berntsen: I wasn’t a very good student, you know? And I was, but I went in the Air Force at 18. I became a crash firefighter.
Lara Logan: Where were you born?
Gary Berntsen: I was born in July, 1957.
Lara Logan: Where?
Gary Berntsen: In Long Island, New York. And I joined the Air Force.
Lara Logan: Islip?
Gary Berntsen: No, Hauppauge, very close. And I was a crash firefighter. So I was working plane crashes. And I was in Korea for a year. I was in Alaska, up in the Arctic for a year. I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was a skydiver. I started studying Russian. I had a minor in Russian studies.
Lara Logan: Oh, you got to be careful. You know, that’ll make you a Russian Collusion spy.
Gary Berntsen: I was going to be an infantry officer in the Marine Corps. I went through the full PLC program. I was an Honor Grad in that program. Graduated at the top of my class. And then a CIA case officer, or recruiter met me on the University of New Mexico, tested me. And they got me to go into the agency. And I became both a case officer and a PM reserve officer.
And then, served in the Middle East for many, many years. And was blessed to work with some of the greatest heroes of the country, you know?
Lara Logan: You didn’t just serve in the Middle East. You were in the field. You were in operations. And you were in very senior positions.
Gary Berntsen: Yeah, but you start off as a Case Officer, you know? You start off and I worked for some of the legends in the Middle East. And I learned a lot from them. They were very kind to me and helpful. And then I wound up as the chief of Hezbollah operations.
And began the hunt for Mugnia, which eventually would get him. And then I wound up in Afghanistan on a couple of occasions. And was the guy that led the entry. Gary Strong went out for the initial talks with General Fahim. And then I replaced him for the combat phase.
Lara Logan: Marshall Fahim, who was the top defense guy.
Gary Berntsen: It was General Fahim then, you know? Yeah. And I had to give him the bad news that he wasn’t going to be the President. That it was going to be Karzai. He didn’t like that very much.
Lara Logan: I’m sure he didn’t, yeah.
Gary Berntsen: But it was, and I worked with Amrullah Saleh when he was the vice president.
Lara Logan: Great man.
Gary Berntsen: I was 43 and he was 26 during that period of time, you know?
Lara Logan: I put him on 60 Minutes twice, which is very rare.
Gary Berntsen: He and I would have regular screaming matches with each other. But he is a great guy.
Lara Logan: Still fighting, by the way. Still fighting for Afghanistan. Never, ever quit.
Gary Berntsen: I think about him.
Lara Logan: Betrayed by the United States.
Gary Berntsen: Yes. I think about him frequently. You know, he had done everything for America. He was on the ground and helped lead our fight, right next to me, into seizing Kabul and all of the work we did in the east. And when Afghanistan was collapsing, after he had been the chief of the NDS, the Minister of Interior, the vice president, he was America’s guy on the ground. He didn’t steal money. He was the one honest guy there. He called my former organization, the CIA, for help and they wouldn’t send him four rifles and ammunition to exit the city.
Then, he called the US Army and he asked them to keep a weapons depot out by the Panjshir Valley, not to take it away, so he could take it in and defend his people. And the U.S. Army blew it up. So he went in and ultimately, the Taliban fought their way in and they murdered all the boys in his village and took all the girls as sex slaves.
Lara Logan: Murdered his brother, yeah.
Gary Berntsen: So this was the Biden administration’s “retrograde from Afghanistan”.
Lara Logan: Sent 12-year-old boys into the minefields to do mine detection.
Gary Berntsen: So yeah, I know people are going to see this and think, “Yeah, Gary Bernstein’s an angry man.” But the point is, I understand our history. I’ve gotten to live our history and I’ve seen some great moments and some very dark moments. And if the Republic is going to survive, we all got to put our shoulder into this thing and continue the fight. And we’re grateful for the time you give us.
Lara Logan: What about you? Were you always a writer?
Ralph Pezzullo: My friends in high school said I always was, but I don’t remember that, yeah.
Lara Logan: Why, what were you doing in high school?
Ralph Pezzullo: Well, a lot of things, but they were like, “Oh, we knew you were going to be a writer.” And I’m like, “Really, you did?”
Lara Logan: Where were you born?
Ralph Pezzullo: I was born in New York, in the Bronx. And my parents were Italian, sons of Italian immigrants.
Lara Logan: Pazullo.
Ralph Pezzullo: Pazullo. And my dad joined the Foreign Service. He was a high school teacher in Levittown. And he joined the Foreign Service when I was five. And then none of us knew what we were getting into. I don’t think he knew what he was getting into. And from there, he served in first Mexico, then Vietnam during the war, then Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala. He ended up being Ambassador to Uruguay and Nicaragua.
Lara Logan: And you went with him to all these places?
Ralph Pezzullo: We went. So it was like an education, right?
Lara Logan: Right.
Ralph Pezzullo: And my father was the kind of person who, every time he’d come home from work, he would pull me in, because everybody had had dinner. And he would download to me, right?
Lara Logan: Interesting.
Ralph Pezzullo: And after a while, I would start offering him little bits of advice. And we had a really interesting relationship. So even though my father was a diplomat and he was a great guy, he didn’t really understand other people’s points of view, right?
I remember when we were in Bolivia, he had this boss. And he was fighting with this guy all the time. And one night I said, “Hey, dad, did you ever consider what he’s dealing with, with the ambassador and the DCM and other things at the Embassy? And he’s like, “What are you talking about?” Old school. It was like a revolutionary idea.
Lara Logan: To think about someone else’s position.
Ralph Pezzullo: I said, that’s how you win people over, right? You understand where they’re coming from, right? And that was a huge moment. So we had a really interesting relationship. And I learned a lot from him. And he was a great guy, great guy.
Lara Logan: Interesting that the two of you kind of found each other like that.
Gary Berntsen: Yes. Ralph’s father, I went and stayed a night with Ralph’s father when we wrote ‘Jawbreaker’. He was teaching at a university. And I slept at the house with him and his dad and his mom. And his father was wonderful. He was so kind and so insightful and deep. And he took me to meet all of his students when I spoke at his college class. It was really a fun day. It was a day I’ll remember my whole life.
Lara Logan: Have you been punished for doing this work? I mean, have you been targeted?
Ralph eazzullo: Of course, of course. I mean, if you don’t play the system, you suffer for it. So you just have to find ways to kind of find the cracks. I wrote a book a couple of years ago with a guy who was former SAS, who was in Benghazi and running the operation there. And I got it published by Little Brown – which is a big publisher. The way I did it, as I said, I’m going to do a book about this guy’s career, right? And I told him about all the things that he had done. I didn’t tell him the Benghazi part, right? Yeah.
Lara Logan: (Laughs) You just slipped that in there!
Ralph Pezzullo: When the book was coming out, right before the 2016 election, they called me to New York and they were like, and at this point, it had already been proofread and proofread and their lawyers had been through it. And they were like, “There’s the three chapters in there about Benghazi. Secretary Clinton is very upset about this.” I said, “Well, her name isn’t mentioned. It’s just how the operation was run out of the State Department and so on and so forth.” They were like, you know, “We’re going to get killed.”
Lara Logan: Amazing, isn’t it?
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah. So they monitor everything. But if you’re clever, you can slip things past them.
Gary Berntsen: What they did with that, their State Department, normally, if you’re doing in the intelligence world, 90% of the work is FI, producing Foreign Intelligence for policymakers to consume.
Lara Logan: Well, that’s Title 50, right?
Gary Berntsen: And 10% of it is Covert Action. And for Covert Action, you have to have a Presidential Finding. It has to be written, usually at the National Security Council, usually written by the Deputy at the deputy’s level and approved. And the President signs it. It has to be briefed to the Committees. But if you have the State Department doing the Covert Action, there ain’t no Finding.
Ralph Pezzullo: That’s right. That’s how they sneak around it.
Gary Berntsen: And they were clever, the Democrats, doing that. No one had figured that out yet.
Ralph Pezzullo: I had a friend who was the head of the Syrian Desk at the CIA. And I told him about this. And he goes, “No, no, no, we’re not doing that.” Because they were actually, they had a system. They were trying to arm the rebels in Syria. So they were buying guns from Al-Qaeda, an Al-Qaeda chieftain in Benghazi, who had swept-up all the weapons that NATO had left behind, when they invaded Libya. And they were shipping them through Erbil and all these different cities.
Lara Logan: In Northern Iraq.
Gary Berntsen: From Kurdistan.
Lara Logan: I sat with rebels from Benghazi and they mapped, in Turkey, I went and met with them in Istanbul. They mapped out all the rat lines. I mean, I did a whole bunch of work on this. And because we couldn’t, we didn’t have, you know, other firsthand sources and we couldn’t quite prove it. I mean, we had these guys mapping it all out for us. And we had other Agency sources. And we wanted to be extra cautious. So we didn’t include that in our story. And we still got slammed.
Ralph Pezzullo: I wrote a book with the British guy who was running the whole operation. And they were getting their money through, from the State Department.
Gary Berntsen: If the Ambassador does it, it’s not Covert Action, it’s policy.
Ralph Pezzullo: Right, right, right. Brilliant.
Lara Logan: Which is why, when the attack happened, who ran the operation? It was State Department. It was not DOD, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Which is how they didn’t have to call up the FES team, right? The Fast Emergency Response Team, that was designed to protect US soil in any part of the globe.
Gary Berntsen: But let me just say this. With the FES teams, the Foreign Emergency Situation teams, if you’re an Ambassador, you never want to call them. Why? Because another ambassador is showing up on the plane. You want the CIA’s team to come.
Lara Logan: The Ambassador was dead, at that point.
Gary Berntsen: I know. But what I’m just saying is most people don’t want a FES team in an emergency, because a second ambassador comes. They want a smaller team.
Lara Logan: In that situation, though, different.
Ralph Pezzullo: Take whoever I could get.
Lara Logan: At that point, they would take whoever they could get. And let’s not forget, Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty died because they didn’t call a FES team. And in fact, there were two Delta guys who went down in a plane that they hired, they went around the Embassy collecting money from everybody, got a plane, flew down to Benghazi, got a local militia they were working with, and they fought their way into that Annex. Otherwise, those guys would have been dead hostages and then killed.
Gary Berntsen: There’s 25 other ways they could have supported those guys and they didn’t.
Lara Logan: No, because the decision was made 10 minutes in, that they weren’t going to do it. Because the Deputy Ambassador, Greg Hicks, told me on camera, same thing he said under oath on the Hill. He said, 10 minutes into the attack, because Chris Stevens called him when he was under attack, said “It’s a terrorist attack.” And he said to the Defense Attaché, who’s your top spy in the Embassy for the military, right? And the Defense Attaché looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Greg, cavalry ain’t coming.” And he said, and that decision never changed.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah. Well, this guy, this SAS guy who was running the operation, so basically they would get a list from the State Department of the kind of all the weapons that they wanted. He would drive out to this compound, give it to this guy. A State Department guy would show up with a briefcase full of cash. They’d transfer it to the Al-Qaeda leader. They’d ship the weapons to, I think, Turkey, first. And then it went up to Turkestan.
And they had this whole thing set up. Yes. But what happened was there were nine different teams in Benghazi, all contractors working different programs. And none of them communicated with one another, except they had an agreement that if we’re attacked, we’ll all pitch in. We’ll all help each other.
So a different team picked up this Al-Qaeda guy’s nephew. And they had him in the Annex. And they were working him over, because he was causing trouble in the city. And they were trying to find out who he was connected to. So the next time they got a list from the State Department and they went out to the compound, the guy put knives up to their heads and said, “You betrayed us, we’re going to kill you.” And they’re going like, “No, no, no, we’re not Americans, we’re Brits. We don’t know what the Hell you’re talking about, but we’ll find out.”
And he went, “OK, here are my conditions. The price is doubled for everything. And I want a visit from the Ambassador to apologize.” And he told the State Department, “Don’t send Ambassador Stevens to Benghazi, because we don’t trust this guy.” And they sent Ambassador Stevens to apologize to this guy. And that night, the compound was attacked.
Lara Logan: And Al-Qaeda had said publicly, they were going to attack the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. They had said they were going to attack the British Ambassador. They did. They said they were going to attack the Red Cross. They did. And then, they said they were going to attack the Americans.
Ralph Pezzullo: So they sacrificed, they sacrificed. It was a sacrifice. And he didn’t want to go. He knew it was dangerous.
Lara Logan: And then they leaked rumors that he was gay and he was meeting some lover. All the other disinformation that they did to disgrace the first American ambassador killed in more than half a century.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah, disgusting.
Lara Logan: Disgusting. And you know what else that was? That was the beginning of their policy of leaving Americans behind. Because they left them behind in Afghanistan. They left them behind in Gaza. They left them behind in Benghazi. And you know, the one defining principle of the United States military and Armed Forces is “No man left behind”, which they took from the French Foreign Legion, except until those guys got into office. Until recently. And then they specialize in leaving Americans behind, betraying their people. It’s disgusting.
Ralph Pezzullo: Disgusting is right.
Lara Logan: I’m sure you’ve missed your flight by now, Gary. I’m not apologizing. I’ve been waiting to pin you down for years!
Gary Berntsen: It was a cheap ticket.
Lara Logan: I’m a cheap date.
Gary Berntsen: I had a ticket from Austin to Orlando for $90. I can lose the ticket.
Lara Logan: Well, hopefully you’ve got time to change it. I just want to thank you both. I’m not a very good salesperson. So this is not a sales pitch. This is something I can honestly tell people. (Holds up ‘Stolen Elections’ book). This is one of the most important books that you will ever read in your life. You don’t have to take Gary’s word for it or your word for it, Ralph. Read the book and make up your own mind.
Because if we don’t fix this, then we’re in real, real trouble. And it’s the same if there’s no accountability. If you read this and you decide that you want to see these people held accountable and you raise your voice, maybe, maybe we’ll get what is needed.
But midterms are coming up. 47 congressional seats up for grabs. Democrats only need six to flip the House.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah. Look at what just happened in New York City. We don’t want that happening in other cities and counties across the country.
Lara Logan: I mean, seriously. Yeah, seriously. Yeah. We’ve got a lunatic jihadist, a Marxist running it. You know, New York, less than 25 years after almost 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11.
Ralph Pezzullo: If you had told people back then that this would happen, they would go, “Get out of here! You’re crazy!”
Lara Logan: Yeah. And 38% of Jewish New Yorkers voted for him. Are you kidding me?
Gary Berntsen: It’s stunning.
Lara Logan: It’s beyond belief. It’s like Lambs to the Slaughter and then saying, “Would you like us to gas ourselves?” I mean, “Would that make it easier for you, so you don’t have to do it?”
Ralph Pezzullo: Well, that we will, if we don’t act now, we will be living in a country and in a world that we don’t recognize.
Lara Logan: A world, by the way, where white people don’t have a very good spot, you know, because that’s been made very clear. Well, I want to thank both of you. I know it’s not easy what you’ve been doing. I really hope and wish you success in getting the word out so that people can learn about this and make up their own minds. And I mean, I can’t imagine that anyone could read this and not be compelled, unless you’re ideologically-blinded like some of the idiots that are writing hit pieces on you, repeating the old conspiracy theories about you, especially Gary and you and your team. And I know how hard it’s been.
I’ve witnessed that, over the years of working on this. I know a lot of the people that you’ve been working with. And I just want, I would love people to understand that when you’re planning your weekend and your vacation, and what movie you’re going to go and see and all of these things, that there are people like the two of you that are working day and night, day and night, day and night to save this country.
And every single one of us is gifted a place on this battlefield when we’re born, right? We’re gifted a place. We have a voice. We have a say. We have a patch of this hallowed ground. I really do think this is sacred ground. And we can choose to fight for it, or we can choose to surrender it.
And I would never tell anyone what they have to do. That’s up to everybody to decide for themselves. If they want to fight and how they can fight and whatever it is that they can do. But I just always try to urge people to understand that if you choose not to fight. You’ve given your ground to the enemy.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yeah. The stakes are big and people need to understand how big they are and how clever our enemies have been. And we need to be smarter than them.
Lara Logan: And they have a plan. Right. And that plan is not ended.
Ralph Pezzullo: It’s not good. They’re not our friends.
Gary Berntsen: It didn’t end with the publication of this book. They continue to fight back. But, you know, we’re grateful to be citizens of a great country. And we will continue the fight. And we will expand the number of people on our team. We go forward.
Lara Logan: Number One single most important thing that Trump needs to do next, in your opinion. Each of you.
Gary Berntsen: End the regime in Venezuela immediately. They will be great partners. I know he’s already communicated. He’s had communication with Maria Corina Machado. But there is a team he should recognize. She has competent people around her that we have to use. Let these Venezuelans help us in the fight. Don’t compromise. Please, Mr President, don’t compromise for Cartel Lite. See this through. End the Cartel there.
That’s the most important thing you can do. And that’s the first thing. The second thing is build a new OSS and build a counterintelligence service. Because if you don’t, we will lose the country.
Lara Logan: Ralph?
Ralph Pezzullo: Dismantle the whole system that our enemies have been using to steal elections from us. So that we have a fighting chance. And the American people, the system was designed for people to express their opinions through the vote and not the opinions of Venezuelans or Chinese or Cubans, not their will. Let’s honestly express our own will. And the system will work the way it’s supposed to.
Lara Logan: What about accountability?
Ralph Pezzullo: And accountability along the way, as well. I mean, that has to be part of dismantling. Dismantling the system means rooting-out all the corruption, as well. That’s a bigger problem. I think it’s going to take over a decade to do it.
Lara Logan: And by corruption, let’s be clear. We are still talking about treason and sedition.
Ralph Pezzullo: Yes, absolutely. It’s more than just corruption.
Lara Logan: Yeah, it’s more than just failure. It’s more than just corruption.
Gary Berntsen: It’s treason.
Lara Logan: It is actual willful betrayal.
Ralph Pezzullo: And do a better job of educating our citizens and our youth. We need a strong press, a strong, honest press. The system depends on that. And we don’t have it, now.
Lara Logan: Well, thank you both very, very much. You made me a promise. And you’re ready to share that list of all the people on the payroll of foreign governments and Foreign Terrorist Organizations and so on. Cartel de los Soles, just so people know, Venezuela is really basically a narco terrorist state with diplomatic ties and immunity, right?
And OK, so well, I thank you both for being here very, very much.
Thank you. I look forward to speaking to you again. Thank you.
And once again, that ‘Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide’ by Ralph Pazullo, New York Times Bestselling Author and who has patiently, painstakingly told the spectacular story of the work that Gary Berntsen and Martín Rodil and others have done. Thank you both so much.
Thank you for watching Going Rogue with Laura Logan.
You know what to do. This is the part I suck at, but I really can’t do it without you. So please like and share and subscribe. And if you want to support the show and support independent journalism, go to lauralogan.com. And as always, most importantly, thank you for being bold enough to go rogue with Laura Logan.
Wedgewood, assuming you are not a troll, respectfully what are your sources? These sex-obsessed internet tabloids trafficking in conspiracy speculations while bathing viewers in sex loaded visuals?