Election Cartel Whistleblowers Revealed: Gary Berntsen & Ralph Pezzullo

NOW YOU KNOW WHY THERE ARE VESSELS OFF THE COAST OF VENEZUELA

VIDEO: "Election Cartel Whistleblowers Revealed: Gary Berntsen & Ralph Pezzullo" - Pub. Sep 26, 2025 by ForbiddenKnowledgeTV.net

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We’ve been hearing about engineers involved in the digital theft of the 2020 election now in US custody under Witness Protection. In this episode of Tina Peters’ The Truth Matters podcast, hosted by Apollo Pappas, we are finally getting the backstory of how this all went down and it sheds a lot of light on a key player in the hybrid war that is being waged against us that we never saw coming.

Gary Berntsen is a US Air Force Veteran and a retired CIA Senior Operations Officer and Chief of Station in Latin America, with a career in the US National Security apparatus spanning over 30 years. Gary has been working with whistleblowers from the Venezuelan government behind the scenes for decades.

Together with Gary’s investigative partner, Martín Rodil over the past five years, the two have recruited engineers from Venezuela’s digital election theft operation that has been stealing elections in more than 70 countries since the early 2000s. The Cartel has bribed governments around the world to use their election theft technology, using $6.9 billion USAID Taxpayer Dollars to do it, as recently explained by Patrick Byrne.

Not that the Cartel doesn’t have plenty money of their own. Many Americans associate Venezuela with extreme poverty but this is because the Venezuelan Cártel de los Soles stole all of the wealth from the people. This criminal organization generates over a trillion dollars a year in proceeds from drug sales. With this tremendous amount of money, they have been able to bribe officials within our government, our intelligence services, our voting districts and in the media to report favorably about their voting technology.

The Venezuelans even built and opened their own vote auditing companies, controlling the whole system. The 2020 Trump campaign hired a security company that was secretly owned by the Cartel. The company that investigated for the Republican Party in 2020 was controlled by the Cartel.

Venezuela not only stole our elections, they planned – and began – a criminal insurgency in 20 US States.

MULTIPLE VIDEOS: “Stories from Aurora, Colorado: ‘You Cannot Tell Me that Our Government Isn’t Involved in the Venezuelan Gang Situation’” - Pub. Sep 3, 2024 by Forbidden.News on Substack

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All of our institutions, including the Fourth Estate have been so corrupted that Gary’s investigation had to be done outside of the US’ trillion-dollar National Security System. It still resulted in him and Martín being attacked and threatened with jail.

As a result of everything that’s happened and everything he’s seen, Gary believes that the US needs a new 10,000-man counterintelligence force to work against all the spies who flooded into the US when the border was opened, which he describes as, “A dream for hostile intelligence services.”

Gary and Ralph Pezzullo have memorialized all of this in their important book, ‘Stolen Elections’, which Ralph, a best-selling author of 20 books was forced to self-publish, because everyone else was too afraid to touch it.

Their investigation revealed that Venezuelans first broke into US elections with their Smartmatic technology in the early 2000s in Cook County, Illinois, which is Chicago, where they stole the election there. Then, they went to New Jersey and stole elections there.

In 2006, New York Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, received a tip about Smartmatic and wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow, which spurred an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which discovered that the Venezuelans had disguised the owners of Smartmatic, leading the Treasury Department to announce they did not trust this software.

As a result, the owners of Smartmatic bought another company called Sequoia, installing their software into Sequoia machines. Then, they tried to get the contract to run elections in the State of California, whose Secretary of State initiated their own investigation of the software with professors from Berkeley and MIT.

They found that it was filled with backdoors and also, that they didn’t know who really owned the software. So it was rejected in California during Governor Schwarzenegger’s tenure. A year later, in 2011, Jerry Brown was elected governor of California and his administration changed the law so that the software didn’t need to be reviewed by this committee and Sequoia promptly landed the contract to run elections in California.

Ralph says, that ever since, every election in California has been run using “Software that was developed in Venezuela and a part of a whole criminal conspiracy that includes Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia and Serbia.”

Having been forced to divest from Sequoia, Antonio Mugica and the two other Venezuelan owners sold Sequoia to a Canadian company called Dominion, under John Poulos. Now, Dominion had the source code and all the election theft software and they were in charge of elections in six or seven swing states of the United States.

Meanwhile, Smartmatic was getting contracts to do elections worldwide and as Gary says, “Two companies come to an agreement. It’s a evil agreement on how they’re going to divide the world up to steal elections globally, make a fortune doing it and move the world Left.”

Gary had been a CIA Chief-of-Station in Latin America for several terms and when he learned of this election theft operation in 2020, he launched an independent investigation, together with Venezuelan DEA consultant, Martín Rodil. Together, they recruited a dozen of Smartmatic’s engineers, both within and outside of Venezuela, which was difficult, complex and very expensive to do, so they required help.

Gary recalls:

“One of the people we went to for help was, was General Mike Flynn and Mike Flynn introduced us to Mr Patrick Byrne. Patrick Byrne was a real hero. He stepped-in, he helped finance us. He became the third leg of the stool, as we were doing this for the next couple of years.

“And so, we went after these guys and recruited one after the next, after the next, after the next, and built this out, to the point where we understood how they did it. We understood that, in the engineering, there were 14 different ways, technically, that you could attack the tabulator, you could attack the scanner.

“We found out where they manufactured the machines. The machines were manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, OK? The software and the source code in Venezuela. I mean, what could possibly go wrong, with that combination for the American People?

“But, you know, you had CISA, the Cyber Infrastructure and Security Agency, when it was raised in 2020 that the election was stolen, CISA was on the phone with Smartmatic and Dominion coordinating responses! They were calling the criminals to help them message, in response. This was a – listen – this is one of the most important crimes in American history!

“I handled East Africa bombings. I handled the Khobar Tower bombings for CIA. I led the invasion of Afghanistan. All of that was a warm-up for this.

“This was a real threat to America, because what these people were doing was trying to empower the Left to have a Left-Socialist-type takeover in the United States, using these machines. And you have a combination of the Venezuelan Cartel, the Soros organization, and the Democratic Party leadership coordinating together, working on this, and essentially, they almost succeeded in taking over the country.”

Ralph points out, “Venezuelans – which I think a lot of people don’t understand – have tremendous wealth, OK? Not only do they have the highest oil reserves in the world, they also have this criminal organization called the Cártel de los Soles, which generates over a trillion dollars a year in proceeds from drug sales. They control all the drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. And the Sinaloa Cartel, the other cartels work for the Cártel de los Soles!”

The Cartel is estimated to be worth between $2.7-$4 trillion – and they use that money, as Gary recounts:

“They were teamed with the Cuban DGI, Director General of Intelligence, and they were recruiting American officials, American officials in the National Security Council, National Security apparatus and they recruited people in the Central Intelligence Agency, my old organization. What a disgrace this is! So, people are going to go to prison.”

Earlier this year, when DOGE went into the USAID budget, they found an organization called CEPPS, the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, which spent $6.9 billion of US Taxpayer Money over the past 15 years to market this software across the globe and to pay for the construction and the manning of the machines in those contracts.

Ralph says, “We have evidence that that our State Department in these countries was was actually working as marketers, in a sense, and putting pressure on other countries to accept this software system, which, whether or not they knew it was corrupt.”

Another thing that Gary and Martín discovered was the involvement of Serbia. Ralph explains, “In Serbia, China maintains huge Huawei servers. And this is where these election companies store their data and do all their manipulation of data. So, they [the Serbians] play a large part in this conspiracy, as well.”

Gary adds, “Dominion had a research office [in Serbia]. Inside that research office, there were 98 engineers. They were Serbians, Venezuelans and a couple of Chinese. They were literally controlling the swing states of the United States and had the ability to intervene.

Ralph continues, “With engineers from Venezuela, from Iran, from Serbia, from China, you’re talking about hundreds of people. They have big stations in Venezuela and also in Serbia. So this is very coordinated...In talking to the engineers...the steal is planned a year ahead of time.”

Gary continues, “They have engineers and statisticians. They’ll go into a into a specific state and steal a state by attacking maybe three counties, that will use different techniques in every county. They’ll never use the same techniques in adjacent counties. They know what they’re doing.”

When Gary and Martín went to the FBI with their findings in 2022, they were told to flee Washington.

Gary reveals:

“That FBI officer was a very senior officer. And that officer told us to flee the city, because they – and this was during the Biden administration – they said, ‘Because if the FBI finds out what you’re doing, they’ll destroy your investigation and find a way to charge you.’

“And so, that FBI officer said, ‘Go to the media and go to the Congress.’ Well, we went to the Congress and the people there didn’t want to see us. They were afraid. They were intimidated by the investigations. We went to half a dozen senior people in the media, showed them our presentations. They were too afraid. [The Cartel] had everyone cowed.

“They didn’t have us cowed. We don’t back down. We had the intelligence. We had the information. It was a very brave prosecutor – one prosecutor in the United States did help us. He wrote a letter. He saw the information. He sent it to the Office of Public Integrity in the Department of Justice. He told us FBI people would contact us to talk to us.

“Instead, they investigated us! They pursued us! I literally moved out of the United States for one year and lived in Switzerland, so I wouldn’t be covered or detained in this process...

“My business partner, Martín Rodil. They made up phony charges against him. They paid people in Spain, OK? They paid the government of Spain to charge him. He’d been working with the Drug Enforcement Agency for years against the Cartel. They poured in millions and millions and paid Spanish officials and judges and prosecutors.

“Spain, a NATO ally, is owned lock, stock and barrel by the Cartel! They paid for their campaigns. They snuck money into them.

“I mean, it’s such a disgrace! From the President, their leadership there in Spain; their congressmen, their security forces, their intelligence service, they’re all on the tit of the of the Cartel! They are! And it is horrible!...

“They sued people like Fox and they sued Newsmax. They sued a lot of people. Nobody’s suing me. You know why? Because I went public and said, ‘Guess what? I’ve got your source code! I’ve got your engineers!’

When Newsmax and Fox News settled with Dominion, it made them appear guilty. Gary and Martín had offered to share their evidence with both of them before trial but they didn’t want to see it. Something odd was going on.

In a video Gary posted last October, before the 2024 election, he said, “In FoxNews’ against Dominion, we briefed Fox News trial attorneys. Our lawyers were present when we did that. FoxNews corporate officers refused to be briefed directly for that case. They wanted plausible deniability. FoxNews corporate knew we had significant evidence – and, more importantly, witnesses. When all the facts are known, Fox News executives and Board will have to explain why they went down on their knees for enemies of the US.

“We briefed Newsmax’s corporate attorney, as well. Though their settlement with Smartmatic is not public, any settlement with either company and their masters, the Cártel de los Soles, the Cuban DGI, and CCP, makes it more difficult for those of us trying to defend the country and our democracy.”

The effect of those two lawsuits was to effectively shut down all of the media and to scare everybody off publishing anything about Dominion Voting Systems. (Not me, which is why I’ve been de-platformed everywhere!)

Gary says:

“Something else I’d like to add is that we also are the original sources of the information on Tren de Aragua. Over two years ago, I and one of my associates, Blues Buckles, were down in Miami met a source and he turned over two thousand files of of gang members that were that were in Venezuela. Some of them had been trained by the Venezuelan Regime and deployed into the United States.

“[Tren de Aragua members] got a six-week training course on how to fire weapons, how to set fires, how to do riots, crypto, all of that, essentially to conduct a criminal insurgency. And these first three hundred were trained, sent in the United States, and then another five thousand members of Tren de Aragua were deployed into the United States to fall in under those 20 offices. So that information was in the hands of the Biden administration 18 months before President Trump was elected.

“I had shared that information with some some Homeland Security guys. The day after the election, they called me on the phone and said, ‘Now, we have a new president. We can investigate this. Can we meet the source that gave you that information?’

“It was actually the first file. It was called Tren de Aragua and has a description of the criminal organization; what it did, how it functioned and the fact that they wanted a criminal insurgency in the United States in 20 states, where they could turn up the heat or turn down the heat on the United States with massive criminality and understand that in Venezuela, these gang members are inside of these giant prisons and they were letting them out to murder.

“There were assassins for hire for the [Venezuelan] government that would come out of the prisons, kill people and go back. And the Tren de Aragua guys went into the prisons with them, as well. They would withdraw the police from around those areas. And these prisons would become the center of gravity in these communities for political power and security power. And this was the thing they were trying to do to us, in the United States.

“When the President of the United States, Donald Trump, found out about this, he was outraged. And now, you can see vessels off the coast of Venezuela, because he understands that the Cártel de los Soles did massive drug trafficking into the United States, election theft, Tren de Aragua and it was partnered with the Cuban intelligence agency and penetrating the United States national security apparatus.

“These guys are evil in Venezuela. They are criminals. Nicolás Maduro and his entire cabinet are indicted as criminals. And Donald Trump, a couple of weeks ago, gave them special designation as a terrorist group. So this is where we are with Venezuela.

“There are people out there that want to doubt this. Please read the book and you will watch the people go to prison. Watch the cases that are going to be closed in the coming months.

“And it is a it is a shame, on one hand. But on the other hand, we were fortunate that we and others fought back and have fought to save our Constitutional Republic.”

With the end of the Biden administration, federal law enforcement has stopped pursuing Gary and Martín and instead, they’re pursuing the criminals, so Gary’s optimistic about this and he has confidence in the people chosen by the President and by Pam Bondi.

But the country is still left with the tremendous problem, which is the years of propaganda, censorship and the inversion of reality perpetrated by the media that has not let up and which Ralph says will require a huge amount of education to bring the American public up to speed, which is why they published ‘Stolen Elections’, which takes the reader step-by-step, how they accomplished this.

BOOK: ‘Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Elections Worldwide’ - Pub. Sep 3, 2025 by Ralph Pezzullo

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Ralph says, “The key are the engineers that Gary and Martín recruited, because these men and women, they know how each election was stolen. They use different techniques. It’s a very complicated scientific process. It’s not just a one-dimensional thing and within the book, it’s all broken down and documented.”

Gary adds, “They explained how they built the source code. They explained to us how they steal elections. And they are in front of federal officials, right now; law enforcement and DOJ, explaining how this is all done.”

Sworn Testimony of the Venezuela Smartmatic Whistleblower Short - Full Testimony HERE.

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So if anyone reading this knows anybody who’s behind the curve on all of this, you may want to forward this article to them and/or buy them a copy of their book!

This episode of Tina Peters’ The Truth Matters podcast was hosted by Apollo Pappas, because Tina Peters has been wrongfully imprisoned by corrupt officials in the State of Colorado since October 2024. Tina was the County Clerk for Mesa County, Colorado who backed-up the Dominion voting system in 2020 – which was her job – and she was convicted on 7 charges of Election Interference and sentenced to 9 years in prison, where she remains.

You can donate to TinaPeters.US to help her appeal her case. The testimony of these defecting election theft engineers will be used in her appeal.

A full transcript of this The Truth Matters podcast appears beneath the video and article linked HERE.