Donald Trump’s justice department has plunged headfirst into one of the most bizarre plotlines of the 2020 election aftermath: the long‑debunked claim that Venezuela helped steal the race for Joe Biden. And despite years of court rulings, retractions, and massive defamation payouts over the same allegations, federal investigators are once again knocking on doors.
According to The Guardian, investigators have been interviewing multiple promoters of the conspiracy theory, and two of its loudest champions have spent months briefing W Stephen Muldrow, the US attorney for the district of Puerto Rico. These briefings, sources say, came with documents, witnesses, and plenty of sensational claims. Muldrow isn’t talking. Tampa’s US attorney’s office isn’t talking either. But four sources say the same thing: people pushing the Venezuela theory have also been questioned by a federal taskforce in Tampa known for targeting Venezuelan drug money.
It’s the kind of investigation that puts into sharp focus how Trump’s DOJ is being used — not subtly — to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss and, potentially, to bolster the administration’s escalating case for military action against Venezuela.
A Conspiracy That Never Dies
Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement was built on a grab bag of conspiracies — dead voters, stolen ballots, secret servers in Germany. But the Venezuela angle was always the wildest. The theory held that US elections were secretly controlled by Nicolás Maduro and even Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), operating through companies like Smartmatic and Dominion. A judge in Delaware ruled the claims false in 2023, and media giants paid hundreds of millions for amplifying them.
Yet here they are again — resuscitated at the highest levels of federal law enforcement.
This revival ties neatly into Trump’s two favorite refrains: the “rigged” election and the menace of Venezuela’s socialist regime. And with a military buildup already visible in the Caribbean, leaning on a foreign‑interference storyline gives the administration another excuse for saber‑rattling.
The Two Men Behind the Curtain
To understand how this zombie claim marched its way back into the DOJ, look toward two men: former CIA officer Gary Berntsen and Venezuelan consultant Martin Rodil. Both have spent years pushing these election allegations, and both are now feeding them directly to federal investigators.
Berntsen insists he’s no conspiracy peddler. “I don’t dabble in conspiracy theories,” he told the Guardian. “I spent my life defending our country and constitution. I led many major operations and investigations and saved many lives.”
He doubled down: “The Department of Justice and FBI and key White House Staff are investigating and coordinating efforts to defend our system and charge those guilty of Stealing Elections and violating other laws accountable for their actions.”
Rodil, meanwhile, has long worked with US law enforcement on Venezuelan crime. He’s also faced allegations himself — a 2022 report said he was under investigation in Spain for extortion, which he flatly denied, insisting his accusers were the ones later charged in the US.
Despite all that baggage, both men have become key suppliers of evidence — or “evidence” — for the DOJ. Sources say they’ve been in extensive, repeated communication with Muldrow in Puerto Rico and with the Panama Express drug‑trafficking taskforce in Tampa. One source was blunt: “They work together. Muldrow has been very receptive.”
A US Attorney at the Center of It All
Muldrow is one of the only Trump‑appointed US attorneys who kept his job through the Biden administration. Two people who know him describe him as a staunch Republican and firm Trump supporter with deep ties to Tampa’s legal circles — including Pam Bondi, now Trump’s attorney general.
Multiple sources say Muldrow has passed information from Berntsen and Rodil to the Tampa taskforce, which historically targeted Colombian cartels but is suddenly shifting its sights toward Venezuela.
Rodil downplayed the election angle, insisting it came up only incidentally. But Berntsen is promising action: “indictments are going to be released in the near future,” he wrote, claiming critics are simply trying to protect “Smartmatic and Dominion, the entities linked to a massive criminal cartel that stole US elections and elections worldwide.”
The True Believers
One of Berntsen’s old collaborators, author Ralph Pezzullo, is fully convinced. He recently published Stolen Elections: the Takedown of Democracies Worldwide, based largely on accounts from Berntsen, Rodil, and witnesses they introduced. The book lays out his view of the US voting system as a “system created in Venezuela – and still electronically linked to Venezuela – that is designed to steal elections by remotely altering results.”
Pezzullo says he spoke directly with Muldrow as well — a call arranged by Berntsen — and claims Muldrow backed the fraud allegations. And his takeaway is stark: “They’ve been attacking the US with the election machines and with the drugs… Trump knows they need to be stopped.”
So now, five years after courts, tech experts, and major news networks stamped this theory into the ground, Trump’s DOJ is giving it oxygen again — and giving its promoters access to federal investigators. Whether this leads to indictments, as Berntsen insists, or just deepens the administration’s case against Maduro, the message is already clear: Trump’s justice department is willing to chase ghosts if those ghosts serve the White House narrative.
And with Trump leaning harder than ever on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, Venezuela — a country already in the administration’s crosshairs — is once again being cast as the villain. The conspiracy may be baseless, but politically, it’s becoming very useful.
