They Secretly Gave Powell "The Kraken." They're Secretly Giving Trump War With Venezuela
As the lies of the right-wing Iraqi "Curveball," let Bush take us into Iraq, Trump is using his own intel feed to do the same in Venezuela
This guest column originally appeared at the Substack of journalist Jonathan Larsen, a veteran of ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, who served as executive producer of Up with Chris Hayes. You can check out and subscribe to Jonathan’s Substack here.
by
When Pres. Donald Trump’s election lawyers released “the kraken” in 2020, they supercharged their claims with a mystery witness who said Venezuela rigged the machines. Now, a previously unreported court filing shows that the two men who delivered that witness are feeding intelligence to Trump that’s brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Venezuela.
It was their information that was Trump’s basis for seeking deportation powers under the Alien Enemies Act. Their narrative provided the premise for Trump asserting the legal right to kill people at sea.
The court filing shows that it was a right-wing Venezuelan expatriate with powerful friends in Washington who first got Trump lawyer Sidney Powell’s star witness out of Venezuela. The expatriate’s partner, a former CIA operative, then took that witness to Trump’s legal team in 2020.
Those same two men have spent the past year feeding info to Trump and his team that’s been refuted by Trump’s own intelligence agencies but still drove the U.S. toward war with Venezuela. The claims of their 2020 witness were also refuted almost immediately but still helped seed the ground for Jan. 6 and election denialism that persists to this day.
The two men are former CIA Senior Operations Officer Gary Berntsen and Martin Rodil, who moved from Venezuela to the U.S. more than a quarter century ago and built a network in U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and politics.
They’re the ones who told Trump that Tren de Aragua is a paramilitary force sent by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to destabilize the United States. They also claim that Maduro heads a global drug cartel and leads an international conspiracy that’s stolen elections in 72 countries.
For years, their work on Venezuela has been secretly bankrolled by another election denier, the former CEO of Overstock.com.
It gets crazier.
Rodil’s court filing shows that his and Berntsen’s witness had ulterior motives to implicate the Maduro regime. When the witness got here in 2015, it was his intelligence-sharing with U.S. officials that transformed the Venezuelan regime, in the eyes of American law enforcement, from complicity with drug dealing, to running it.
However, Rodil’s statement — describing an “agenda” behind providing that witness — didn’t come out until 2023, years later. And it’s not clear whether U.S. officials, then or now, knew about an internal assessment by STRATFOR, the private intelligence firm, cautioning that Rodil was biased against the regime and his information “needs evaluation.”
It’s also not clear whether Trump’s current intelligence leaders know about Berntsen’s and Rodil’s 2020 activities, or that Trump’s own researchers dismissed their witness’s claims.
But Rodil’s 2023 legal filing completes the chain of custody that brought a Venezuelan military hero from his home country to the 2020 Trump witness list. Trump’s legal team brandished his statements to argue that Maduro stole the presidential election, fueling first the legal challenges and then the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
The claim of Venezuelan election-rigging remains a barely concealed subtext of Trump’s current campaign against Venezuela. The still-secret legal justification for his maritime boat attacks reportedly cites Maduro’s ostensible deployment of Tren de Aragua to wage covert war on the U.S., the central allegation pushed by Berntsen and Rodil.
Trump last week issued pardons to anyone, named or not, involved in efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory. Trump listed Powell specifically, along with former Trump counsel Rudolph Giuliani, who also dealt with Berntsen and Rodil.
The two men have been tied to questionable political plots before. Rodil is currently wanted in Spain in a case involving efforts to dig up dirt against the progressive party there.
Their role in Trump’s current Venezuelan intel has gone virtually unscrutinized if only because Democrats and mainstream media remain largely unaware of it. And because the two men speak mostly to fringe outlets.
Some national-security reporters are tracking their crusade. Seth Hetenna reported new details confirming that Berntsen and his team are briefing members of the Trump administration.
One high-profile Jan. 6 instigator, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, has bankrolled Berntsen and Rodil for years, claiming the three made 172 international trips seeking evidence and witnesses to the supposed conspiracy. (Byrne says he has committed international felonies along the way.)
Former CIA official Gary Berntsen, Venezuelan expatriate Martin Rodil, and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne
Byrne was part of the notorious Dec. 18, 2020, White House meeting in which he and Powell fed Trump their conspiracy theories.
On Nov. 13, 2020, Powell famously said that her team was going to “release the kraken” with evidence and legal challenges to overturn Biden’s victory. Earlier that same day, the Venezuelan witness had videotaped a statement for the legal team.
The witness was a former Venezuelan Navy captain named Leamsy Salazar. His story was internally debunked, almost immediately, by Trump’s own researchers. But that debunking didn’t become public until well after Jan. 6.
What has remained unclear until now was how Powell got the witness, the “holy grail” of election denial, in the first place.
It started with a corrupt Venezuelan billionaire.
Coming To America
When questioned by the January 6 committee about her beliefs on election rigging, Powell said in 2022, that “a witness came forward who had been in Venezuela sitting at Hugo Chavez’s right hand for the briefings and discussion of starting it up … and he saw the votes change on election night to make sure Chavez won.”
An Associated Press reporter speculated as early as Nov. 19, 2020, that Powell’s witness was Salazar, but the evidence was circumstantial. Then, in Powell’s 2022 deposition, she was asked, “Mr. Salazar?” Answer: “Yes.”
But Salazar hadn’t just come forward. He was brought forward. By people with motives.
More than once, billionaire Raul Gorrin had turned to Rodil, persona non grata back in his homeland, for help getting fellow Venezuelans out of the country. Official corruption was rampant, but so were suspicion and rivalries among the nation’s elite.
Gorrin, a Venezuelan media mogul, was no fringe figure. A few years later, during the first Trump administration, Gorrin would present himself as a Maduro emissary, meeting with Rubio, Sessions, and then-Vice Pres. Mike Pence, even as U.S. investigators zeroed in on him for money laundering. Gorrin was looking to get the Maduro regime out of the jackpot.
But in 2014, Gorrin was gunning for a Venezuelan leader who would soon become one of Maduro’s top men.
Typically, Gorrin and others turned to Rodil because someone had good reason to flee the country. A powerful enemy had it in for them, for instance.
It wasn’t that getting out was impossible. But with corruption so prevalent, many feared the legal consequences from U.S. prosecutors if they fled. Rodil could help with that.
The typical deal worked like this: A corrupt Venezuelan official wanted out, so they told Rodil what evidence they had about corruption, drugs, or other crimes. In the ideal scenario, Rodil hooked them up with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) or Dept. of Justice (DOJ) and their evidence won them a get-out-of-jail card. They might not even have to forfeit all their assets, ill-gotten or otherwise.
Rodil described this kind of work in his 2023 filing, sharing details on how he got several people out. One of them was Salazar.
But Salazar wasn’t a typical case. Salazar was a tool serving Gorrin’s political agenda.
Gorrin called Rodil about Salazar in late 2014. Rodil explained in his filing:
“Gorrin wanted to know if I could work with Leamsy Salazar regarding potential cooperation with the DEA. … Gorrin wished to have Leamsy Salazar cooperate with the DEA to provide information regarding the narco-trafficking activities of Diosdado Cabello.”
Cabello was a top lieutenant of then-Pres. Chavez. With Chavez’s death, Cabello joined Maduro’s inner circle.
Why did Gorrin, the billionaire, want Salazar, the military hero, singing to the DEA about Cabello? Rodil explains: “Gorrin’s agenda regarding Leamsy Salazar was distinct from his agenda” for getting others out. He wanted Salazar singing because Cabello was Gorrin’s “rival.”
In other words, Gorrin needed Rodil to help him jam up Cabello. Rodil did just that. And by January 2015, Salazar was cooperating with the DEA, elevating Cabello from narco-enabler to druglord.
It’s hard to overstate the potential implications of the previously secret machinations behind Salazar’s activities here.
There’s little doubt that Cabello is one of many corrupt Venezuelan leaders. And he’s a central figure in the U.S. case — legal and public-relations — against the regime. But while delivering anti-Cabello witnesses to the U.S., Rodil, was also being paid by a billionaire who had it out for Cabello and wanted the DEA’s help.
Salazar’s 2020 declaration for Powell isn’t questionable just because of the agenda behind it. Or just because Gorrin paid Rodil and paid for Salazar’s flight from Venezuela.
Testimony in another case suggests that Rodil pushes his dissident clients to give the U.S. government good stuff, juicy stuff, on Venezuelan officials.
In a 2017 text exchange revealed in that case, Rodil used the Spanish word “gordo,” meaning fat. He wrote, “[S]o that the ice creams talk to us again we need to bring something very big to him.”
“Helados” is Spanish for ice cream. It’s also slang for agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and affiliated agencies, such as, in this case, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
If you want to talk to the ice creams, Rodil was saying, you gotta bring the gordo.
Rodil said something similar in a book that came out last month, “Stolen Elections,” discussing his partnership with Berntsen. The mountain of assets held by their clients, Venezuelan dissidents, meant the partners would make more money the more valuable their clients’s evidence was to the U.S. The book explained:
The basic concept is that if you provide significant and relevant information to the US that leads to them recovering money earned in the course of a criminal enterprise—like sales of illegal narcotics by the Mexican drug cartels—you, as a whistleblower can apply for a percentage of the money recovered.
So both U.S. officials and Rodil/Berntsen pushed witnesses to serve up something juicy.
By Jan. 5, 2015, Salazar was in Spain, one leg of his journey to the U.S., according to another book, “Boomerang Chavez,” produced with Rodil’s cooperation. Salazar arrived in Washington, DC, on Jan. 26, 2015. Somehow, word got out that same night.
A journalist who later reported on Berntsen and Rodil cited unnamed sources claiming Salazar was telling investigators that Cabello was the head of the Cartel de los Soles. The Miami Herald referred to Salazar as America’s “star witness” against the regime:
Venezuelan military officials have long been accused of helping run drugs under the so-called Cartel de los Soles or the “Cartel of the Suns” — a reference to military insignia — but according to the reports, Salazar will make the case that Cabello is at the head of the organization.
It was Salazar’s testimony — not yet tied yet to Gorrin and Rodil — that helped rewrite Venezuela’s narrative from complicity with drug trafficking to running it. Five years later, Salazar would be instrumental in supercharging Trump’s election narrative, as well.
The Kraken
When Giuliani held his notorious Four Seasons Landscaping press conference on Nov. 7, 2020, the day Biden was projected as the winner, Venezuela and Dominion’s voting machines didn’t even come up.
Even as late as Nov. 12, an internal campaign report on Dominion didn’t mention Venezuela.
The next day, though, Venezuela was the prime suspect, Dominion the weapon, and Powell had the smoking gun.
She appeared on Fox Business and told Lou Dobbs she had cracked the case:
“I can hardly wait to put forward all the evidence we have collected on Dominion, starting with the fact it was created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez and then shipped internationally to manipulate votes for purchase in other countries, including this one…
“We have staggering testimony from witnesses, including one who was personally in briefings when all of this was discussed and planned … and then saw it happening in this country.”
In a moment that went viral, Powell promised that she would “release the kraken.” A mythical beast.
What had changed between Nov. 12 and 13? Fox’s viewers didn’t know it yet, but Powell had found her holy grail witness. Leamsy Salazar had taped a statement for the Trump team that morning.
Tomotley Crew
According to a 2022 report by ProPublica, on the morning of Nov. 13, 2020, lawyer Lewis Sessions — brother of Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) — led the videotaping of a statement by Salazar about the Maduro regime and election rigging. Sessions told ProPublica he interviewed Salazar “at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.”
At some point in November, both Rodil and Berntsen began working with Powell. And ProPublica reports that before Salazar taped his statement, his story “reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics.” Berntsen was ex-CIA, had mounted a Senate campaign in New York, and worked at Concerned Veterans for America under its CEO at the time: Pete Hegseth, now the defense secretary.
So it’s not crazy to wonder whether it was Berntsen who arranged the taping. Especially because a new book last year — “Find Me the Votes” by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman — revealed who brought Salazar’s tape to Powell and her team at the Tomotley estate of Trump lawyer Lin Wood in South Carolina. Tomotley was an ad hoc nerve center for their work.
The people who brought them the Salazar tape were Berntsen and an unnamed “colleague,” the book revealed.
As I wrote previously, Berntsen was a past Fox News guest who had got host Jeanine Pirro — now U.S. attorney in Washington — to connect him with Eric Trump, who then got Berntsen to Powell and Giuliani.
“Stolen Elections,” the book published last month, recounts Berntsen’s and Rodil’s first meeting with Powell and Giuliani. At Giuliani’s hotel suite — “empty liquor bottles lying around” — Berntsen and Rodil laid out Venezuela’s election-rigging:
Giuliani and Powell were gob-smacked. They retired to an inner office, and Gary and Martin overheard them talking to President Trump. They said, “We have people here we believe are credible, and they’re saying the theft is coming from Venezuela.”
When Powell got the Salazar tape from Berntsen, she was “pumped,” according to “Find Me the Votes.” Powell and Wood called it “the holy grail of evidence.”
Powell called Trump, who called her back. Powell shared the news:
Hey, the guys came through, they got the stuff, we need to send it to you, Powell told the president about the hot new videotape, according to a source at Tomotley who monitored the conversation. Good job, said Trump, who “seemed excited,” according to the source…
A jet was chartered—and the flash drive with the Venezuelan defector’s account was flown straight to Washington for delivery to the White House. 1
At 3:38am on Nov. 14, the day after Salazar’s taping, the Trump campaign got a memo from the research team shooting down the claims about Venezuela’s current ties to Dominion and Smartmatic. It didn’t stop the kraken.
In Giuliani’s 11am messaging call later that day, the message was still Venezuela. An email from Jason Miller, a campaign senior advisor, summarized the call:
Messaging from the Mayor [Giuliani] was to call the Dems crooks and to go hard on Dominion/Smartmatic, bringing up Chavez and Maduro…
Miller later told the Jan. 6 committee that, yes, he did get the internal memo earlier that morning, debunking the Venezuela stuff. “[M]y broader memory,” he said, “was that the international claims were unfounded.”
The very next day, Nov. 15, 2020, Salazar gave the campaign a written declaration. Instead of backing off claims from his debunked video two days before, Salazar doubled down, ProPublica reported. The declaration read,
This conspiracy began more than a decade ago in Venezuela and has spread to countries all over the world. It is a conspiracy to wrongfully gain and keep power and wealth. It involves political leaders, powerful companies, and other persons whose purpose is to gain and keep power by changing the free will of the people…
The declaration was quickly filed as part of the Trump team’s state election challenges. Salazar’s name and some text were redacted.
The Georgia case was dismissed within a week, the judge deeming it baseless “in fact or in law.” Factcheck.org debunked the Venezuela claims by Nov. 20.
None of that stopped Powell and Giuliani from wielding their witness, inciting Trump’s supporters against foreign election theft.
Giuliani and Powell held a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Convention on Nov. 19, 2020. She told an anxious nation that a witness had come forward to reveal how Venezuela stole the election for Biden.
Dominion, Smartmatic, and related software allegedly found in other machines, Powell said,
…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia.
That would be the Nov. 17 emergency motion filed two days before and just two days after Powell’s mystery witness signed his written declaration, signature redacted. Hoping it would justify blocking the certification of Georgia’s presidential votes, Powell at the RNC press conference sold the declaration as damning evidence of an astonishing scheme:
It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he [the witness] … was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the [2006] election came out his way. … He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the [2020] election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.
Never mind that the declaration says the 2006 election was rigged using a system first proposed in 2009.
It came out later that Trump seized on this stuff behind the scenes. His advisors were uniformly dismissive of it, though. And in public he didn’t name Venezuela, but hinted strongly enough to endorse Powell’s narrative.
“When you look at who’s running the company,” Trump said in early December, referring to Dominion, “who’s in charge, who owns it, which we don’t know, where are the votes counted, which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States.”
He told Fox on Dec. 13, “Dominion, nobody knows who even owns it. These machines are controlling our country. So it was a rigged election.”
The notorious impromptu meeting at the White House came on Dec. 18. Powell and Byrne and Giuliani and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn were all there.
So was Eric Herschmann, senior White House advisor to Trump at the time. He told the Jan. 6 committee later that Powell “had affidavits that reflected foreign government interference. And, you know, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and who knows what other stuff she was saying.”
Again, Herschmann was Trump’s own advisor. And this is how he recalled Powell’s pitch:
I just remember it being what I thought was a far-fetched, you know, ridiculous, you know, position that they were taking. Just, you know, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, the Italians, the Germans. Various other countries that would have taken an historical cooperation, you know, amongst countries to do this, supposedly with the Democrats…
Derek Lyons, counselor to the president, was in the meeting, too, also dismissive of the claims of Byrne, Powell, and Flynn. They had no evidence. Lyons told the committee “there was discussion of, ‘Well, we don’t have it now, but we will have it,’ or whatever.”
They didn’t say where they’d get it. And no one in the meeting said where Powell’s information came from.
But the Jan. 6 House investigators tried to find out, asking Lyons, “Do you recall anything that Ms. Powell said about this affidavit, such as where she found this witness or this whistleblower?” He didn’t.
So even the Jan. 6 House investigators got no further than Salazar. Berntsen’s and Rodil’s fingerprints remained invisible.
When the committee asked how Trump responded to the Venezuela story, despite not knowing its origins, Lyons exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to respond. So did Flynn, who took the Fifth on pretty much everything.
A couple hours after that meeting, though, Trump Tweeted his now-infamous invitation: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
And when Trump pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, to “find me the votes,” the subtext was still Venezuela. Trump told Raffensperger, “We think we found tremendous corruption with Dominion machines.”
On the day itself, Jan. 6, 2021, before he fled the House, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) referred to “Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.”
At the rally that day, before the crowd headed to the Capitol Building, Trump told them: “There is the highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems.”
Since Trump’s return to office, the narrative pushed by Berntsen and Rodil has re-emerged. Byrne claims that during an April cabinet meeting, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered a reheated serving of a briefing Rodil had just given her office.
Specifically, Gabbard told Trump, “We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time and vulnerable to exploitation, to manipulate the results of the votes being cast.”
Election denial, in other words, still lives. It’s at the secret heart of the administration’s case against Venezuela.
Trump himself offered a watered-down version of the Berntsen/Rodil narrative in his public justification to Congress for the first maritime strike in the Caribbean:
Extraordinarily violent drug trafficking
cartels … have evolved into complex structures with the financial means and paramilitary capabilities needed to operate with impunity, engaging in violence
and terrorism that threaten the United States and destabilize other nations in our own Hemisphere.
And, reportedly, a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo declared the maritime strikes legal based on Trump’s Venezuela narrative, the unsubstantiated narrative that originated with Berntsen and Rodil. According to the New York Times,
The memo, which was completed in late summer, is said to open with a lengthy recitation of claims submitted by the White House, including that drug cartels are intentionally trying to kill Americans and destabilize the Western Hemisphere. The groups are presented not as unscrupulous businesses trying to profit from drug trafficking, but as terrorists who sell narcotics as a means of financing violence.
There’s a reason Trump can’t mount a legitimate legal defense of what even some Republicans recognize as “extrajudicial” killing. You can’t offer evidence you don’t have, no matter how compelling a story you were told.
My previous reporting has covered some of the wildest claims from Berntsen and Rodil. Fox News and Newsmax are in on it. Biden and George Soros, of course. High-ranking U.S. politicians and intelligence officials.
The difference between now and 2020, the two men say, is that Powell and Giuliani jumped the gun. Berntsen and Rodil didn’t have the evidence they’ve now spent years locking down.
And now, they say, Trump’s team is buying what they’re selling.
In a podcast just after the first Caribbean strike, the author of “Stolen Elections” said that the new U.S. military activity is tied to what Berntsen and Rodil have been sharing with the administration. That author, Ralph Pezzullo, co-wrote a previous book with Berntsen about his time in Afghanistan.
Berntsen appeared on the same podcast, telling host Adam Carolla that Trump’s 2020 campaign had hired an election-auditor controlled by the cartel.
Berntsen: [T]hey hired the cartel to do the review. And, of course, “There’s nothing here.” And they know that now, by the way. They’re aware. We’re briefing them directly.
Carolla: The Trump people? Administration?
Berntsen: They are aware.
Pezzullo: This is all linked, by the way — we can’t get into that — but the reason that there are warships off the coast of Venezuela is all linked to this.
They told a similar story a week and a half later, in another interview. Unlike 2020, Berntsen said, “We have the engineers to describe it and to prove it. And so that is what is ongoing right now.” Pezzullo responded, “This is what Sidney Powell was talking about when she said ‘release the kraken.’”
Back then, the kraken was stillborn, Powell’s claims debunked almost immediately. Even Berntsen and Rodil, Pezzullo wrote, “cringed” at Powell’s and Giuliani’s public claims.
But the narrative that Berntsen and Rodil are now feeding Trump — and say they can prove — is even wilder than the one thoroughly debunked five years ago.
“Bullshit”
Not only did a judge toss out the Georgia case built on Salazar’s testimony, the Trump White House and campaign alike considered the story told publicly by Powell and Giuliani laughable.
The internal campaign memo produced within 24 hours after Salazar’s taping concluded that “Dominion Has Not [sic] Ties to Venezuela.” (That conclusion didn’t become public until after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.)
Trump’s own White House legal team shot down the Venezuela story in the raucous Dec. 18, 2020, meeting. But multiple participants said afterward that Trump appreciated the attempt to defend him, speciousness be damned. Regardless of the merits, Trump scolded his own lawyers, who were seeking to protect him from wild, unproven claims.
“These people,” Trump said, referring to Powell, Flynn, and Byrne, “at least want to fight for me.”2
Their biggest weapon, Salazar, had figured prominently in the 2016 book “Boomerang Chavez,” which Rodil helped with and was produced in “collaboration” with his organization, the Venezuelan American Leadership Council.
But as Dominion asked in a lawsuit just two days after Jan. 6, if Salazar really was Powell’s mystery witness, how come “Boomerang Chavez” — featuring Salazar’s tales of election conspiracies — “makes no mention of Dominion”? That’s just one of many points the suit raised:
…if Salazar was already identified by name in a book alleging Venezuelan election-rigging, why was his identity redacted from the declaration attached to Powell’s court filings? And if Salazar actually believed the Smartmatic software is “in the DNA” of Dominion and every other American voting machine company, why is that explosive accusation not mentioned anywhere in the book for which he was a source? If Salazar is now a pure-hearted whistleblower with the best interests of American democracy at heart, why did he wait more than five years after arriving in the United States—until after Trump had lost the presidential election— to tell anyone that U.S. elections were being rigged through the use of decades-old Venezuelan vote-flipping software allegedly “in the DNA” of the software of all companies servicing U.S. elections? And, especially given his prior cooperation with the U.S. federal government, why did he take his allegation to Sidney Powell, rather than to Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr or Trump’s Justice Department…
Dominion’s lawyers alleged that Salazar’s written declaration included a “near-verbatim recitation from another declaration put forward by Powell … raising serious questions about the role that Powell and her team played in drafting the declarations attached to Powell’s court filings and touted as ‘evidence’…”
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that Salazar is absent from Pezzullo’s “Stolen Elections” book. No mention of Berntsen or Rodil bringing him here and then to Powell.
And the U.S. isn’t the only country where Berntsen and Rodil have been tied to political schemes.
In 2017, the Associated Press obtained email exchanges with Berntsen about a plan to gin up regime change in Kuwait.
Rodil is accused of political dirty tricks in Spain — the difference there being that authorities found about it.
According to prosecutors and Spanish media, Rodil figures into a years-long scheme in which dissident Venezuelans were extorted out of millions. Rodil, they say, positioned himself as their savior — protecting them from prosecution — or their curse if they didn’t play along.
The scheme was ideological, too, Spanish officials say. Rodil was looking for dirt not only against Maduro deputies, but against Spain’s progressive party, Podemos.
One former Venezuelan deputy minister told the newspaper El Mundo in 2019 that Rodil had set up a meeting with police who wanted dirt on Podemos. In 2022, another former deputy minister testified to hearing Rodil himself say that police “are looking for [something] from the Podemos party.”
Reportedly, Rodil was part of a 2016 meeting in New York with Spanish police and yet another former Venezuelan official. That time, Rodil was pursuing information about Venezuela funding the CEPS Foundation, a pro-democracy non-profit that figures into his and Berntsen’s and Byrne’s election-denial conspiracy theories.
Spanish courts investigating all of this sought Rodil’s testimony last year but the U.S. government said the timing was off. Correspondence from U.S. officials obtained by El Independiente said that letting Rodil testify “would interfere with an ongoing U.S. investigation.”
A leaked spreadsheet created by STRATFOR, the corporate intelligence and risk-analysis firm, and posted online years ago by Wikileaks, listed Rodil as a STRATFOR source. He’s described as “Well connected with opposition bias,” meaning, bias against Chavez.
The spreadsheet assigns letter grades to STRATFOR sources, including Rodil, on qualities such as reliability (“B/C”) and insight credibility (“B/C has strong biases.”)
On insight uniqueness, Rodil rates an “A” for providing “often very accurate insider info, but it needs evaluation.”
The notes on him read:
Opposition bias. Lives in DC but travels all over the region. He’s not allowed in Venezuela. Met through sanctions lobby people in DC. Working with Israeli special forces, in league with [Roger] Noreiga 3[sic]. They have an anti-Chavez agenda. Great access and intel network/insider sources. Good personal relationship. Sometimes gives embellished information. Info usually needs to be shared in person. High maintenance.
Last month, Hettena, the national-security reporter, asked a former senior CIA official about the effort by Rodil and Berntsen to sell Trump officials on their claims about Maduro. The source called it “Bullshit.”
Nevertheless, five years after pouring gasoline on election denial with their witness, the two partners could claim just months into this administration that their intel led to the arrests of 800 people in the U.S. this year, some of whom were sent to prison in El Salvador.
Their story is now providing the foundation for Trump’s claim of war-time powers, and the deaths of at least 80 people in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The U.S. military has sent warships, planes, and thousands of troops to the waters off Venezuela and Trump has said operations on land may be next.
It’s possible that Berntsen, Rodil, and Byrne have been just as hyperbolic about their influence on Trump as they have been about Venezuela. But Flynn at the end of September wrote 4:
Why President Trump has the US Navy offshore from Venezuela right now is due to a variety of factors, among them are the Voting systems the Venezuelans perfected to help steal elections around the world on behalf of select intelligence agencies and certain nation-states.
Exaggerated or not, the gasoline and powder provided by Berntsen and Rodil appear ready to explode.
This account comes from “Find Me the Votes” by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.
Noriega was another Venezuela hard-liner who had served in the administration of Pres. George W. Bush.
I appreciate this reporting being expanded & "amped". As overwhelming, sad, & sickening as I find it for our international & domestic affairs to be reduced to nothing more than toys for a wannabe mob boss dictator, it is important to know the half-truths being used to justify actions. There has been legitimate concerns about elections being interfered with, but it's all about how concerns hold up to scrutiny, not using partial information as an excuse to do whatever the hell you want to do. These are important dots to be connected, why 2020 continued to be something Felon47 wouldn't let go. It maybe isn't all about him, entirely. It isn't about election integrity, for damn sure, but controlling elections is a big part of how dictators operate. I can see that being the objective, in addition to all the other abuses of power & profiting. Man, it's a lot...but only in understanding what is being done can we stop it. This is important reporting.
Now that’s the biggest wagging the dog scenario I’ve ever heard. The biggest. The most beautiful! It’s enormous! You won’t even believe how big this thing was!
So trump’s had it out for Venezuela for at least 5 years all because his make believe voter-Rama machine scheme didn’t work out? A scheme they knew nothing about?
I remember events like the disappearing whistle blower. Wow! There were a lot of moving parts in this whopper.