HOW DEEP DOES FOREIGN INFLUENCE REACH INTO AMERICA’S ELECTION SYSTEMS?
In this explosive discussion from our 100th episode of GOING ROGUE, Lara Logan sits down with former CIA officer Gary Berntsen, investigator Martin Rodil, and author Ralph Pezzullo to examine allegations of foreign interference, intelligence operations, and vulnerabilities in American election infrastructure.
The panel raises extraordinary allegations involving Venezuelan cartels, Russian intelligence, Chinese-manufactured voting technology, and election data reportedly hosted overseas.
Berntsen alleges that Russian intelligence gained access to an undersea communications cable in Venezuela, potentially exposing sensitive U.S. government communications.
Rodil describes an alleged supply chain involving Chinese voting machine hardware routed through Taiwan, while Pezzullo questions the role of elements within the American intelligence community.
The discussion also addresses claims of surveillance, FBI investigations, and the national security implications of foreign involvement in election technology.
Are America’s elections adequately protected from foreign influence? And who is responsible for investigating these allegations?
These are serious claims raised by the guests that warrant independent examination.
GOING ROGUE WITH LARA LOGAN | 100TH EPISODE ELECTION INTEGRITY SPECIAL
Filmed live at the America First Warehouse in Long Island, New York.
By the way, and before you say something,
don't forget the special welcome I have at Dulles Airport.
Of course.
Martine, after the election is won, Martine flies into the country.
The FBI is waiting there to arrest him at the airport.
They had, they...
Two days after the election.
They were waiting for him.
In 2024?
2024.
They were waiting for him.
They were listening to our phones.
They were following us.
Look, we were at war with the cartel
and with the FBI and the agency at the same time.
Everybody's working against us.
The problem was, was this was a hybrid war
against the United States.
And the election machines were part of it.
Look, the U.S. Navy laid cables under the water, right,
for communications in the hemisphere.
The cartel brought the Russian GRU in,
gave them the head of the cable.
They built a building over it.
And they drilled right into it, into the Pentagon, for over a decade.
For a decade, they were listening to everything through those lines.
We had the JPOA, right?
What's that?
Where'd they build the building?
Where was that?
Right at the water, where the cable came out.
Oh, this was 15 years ago.
Where?
In Caracas.
In Caracas, in the capital, where the cable came out.
We had a cable that went into Caracas.
The cable went to a couple of different countries,
and they gave them access to GRU's technicians
so they could drill in and listen to U.S. government communications
through the cable because nobody turned it off.
It's just disgraceful.
You know, in addition to that, I mean, you know,
they knew the cartel was allowing uranium to be mined in Venezuela
and slightly enhanced there.
And they set up a secret port for the IRGC in our hemisphere,
two hours from Miami, and we've taken that stuff
and transported it back to Tehran.
They weren't just mining uranium in Iran.
They were doing it in Venezuela and Bolivia.
And they were moving out from there.
I mean, there was a number of things that were incredibly...
Detrimental to U.S. national security going on,
and our national security apparatus wasn't doing a damn thing
because they were their partners.
There is one element that would need to be taken into account,
which is, yes, this was started by the Venezuelan mafia and the Cubans.
But then China is the elephant in the room.
China came in.
Realize what they've been built. Realize they have the penetration
at least of the 35% of the electoral market of the United States.
And then China start producing the hardware for those companies.
They ship it from Beijing to Taiwan.
And because in the U.S. we buy a lot of Taiwanese hardware,
including the microchip for artificial intelligence.
They were shipping that as made in Taiwan,
so they were deceiving the U.S. customs, because
by federal law, you cannot take technology
from Chinese companies like Huawei and put
it on the critical infrastructure of the U.S. national security.
And they were doing that via Taiwan,
so we recruited the head of the warehouse of Smartmatic
in Taiwan.
And he said, oh no, we're buying everything in Beijing,
just ship it here white label, and
then we put the made in Taiwan label,
and then we ship it to the United States.
So at some point, we were like, wait a minute,
we're using a cartel software made in Venezuela,
machine made in China, and the data storage for the elections,
we found that were hosted
in Serbia.
What about made in America?
Can anyone make anything here?
So everything have to come from enemies,
and we have to believe then election will be OK?
And let me say this.
All of us in this room today are familiarized and impressed
about what AI is.
That was before AI.
Can you think what those capabilities mean today
when you put an AI system connected
to any of those election machine?
And what is coming toward us,
we're in front of a tsunami that is coming to us.
And very few people is doing something.
And the very few people that is doing something inside
the U.S. government is being attacked.
All the time and undermined.
Okay, we are actually out of time.
But, Ralph, I want to give you a moment just to close out.
And then, Gary, I'll come to you.
Just to close out in terms of
You know, people see this and they understand it.
You guys have laid it out very clearly.
But what was the thing that has surprised you about all of this,
having gone through all of this?
It is the involvement of our intelligence community.
So they joined hands with the cartel,
with the Venezuelan, probably around 2009.
And they've been working with them against
the interests of the American people so that they know,
and we know this from documents that have been released,
they know about how the Venezuelans are stealing our elections,
but they haven't reported it.
But to the public, they kept this information from the president,
and they've been, they're
still doing it.
And they're fighting to prevent anybody
from showing the proof.
The proof exists, but they are fighting tooth
and nail to protect their system.
So they want to keep, they want to control the world,
they want to control the results of elections,
not only in the United States, but all over the world.
And you could call this the deep state,
you could call this the global network,
whatever it is, but these, they do not want democracy.
They are enemies of democracy.
So Gary, who are these people? I mean,
I'm just going to say it, John Brennan is one of them.
Actually, he has his own
desire to drive forward. He's his own player.
Look, John Brennan, in 1980, worked for Gus Hall for president.
Gus Hall was a communist, okay?
So that's who John, he'll tell you that. I know him, you know.
But there are other individuals who are career officers within the
intelligence community and the diplomatic community and Capitol Hill
that have been recruited by the intelligence services,
these hostile intel services.
Recently, Marco Rubio gave a big presentation
on the Cuban intelligence services and how hostile they were.
What he didn't explain was the last time they arrested one was 2009.
That was Kendall Meyer, who was an analyst for 30 years.
He worked for the Cubans.
But then they didn't catch anybody until we turned
in Manuel Rocha 15 years later.
15 years, dry spot.
And the Cubans are running hundreds
of human sources in the United States.
You hear about them arresting Chinese people all
the time because they're kind of sloppy.
They're a tradecraft.
But the Cubans are quite good.
And we've made zero progress.
And actually, I was in a meeting in 2004 where
a senior American official said,
we're no longer going to work against the Cubans
because they're not a threat.
That man was on their payroll as other people.
I knew at that point, just at the end of my career,
we're in terrible trouble because this place is overrun.
We need to create a new service,
maybe like a director of strategic services like during World War II,
and we need a large counterintelligence service like MI5
that does nothing but hunt these people down.
That's what we need to do.
Do we still have 11 minutes? I didn't hear what was said in my ear.
Okay, good. We still have 11 minutes. Good. Okay.
So, um, okay. But Gary, um, I know that you can't
name people that, you know, are right because we've there,
we believe they may be investigating
some of the people we've turned in. I don't want
to give you the names because they're looking at
Probably covering them, but, you know, we were so disappointed because
when we went in, we talked to them and said, well, we can't talk
to you anymore because it's so sensitive and so complicated.
But they didn't even debrief us properly
on how we developed the information.
It was so unimpressive.
I mean, I'm just, I'm embarrassed for the people
that I meet in the national security apparatus.
You know, I have a 16-year-old.
She's a really, really smart girl.
She's smarter than all these people that I'm meeting, you know?
And she's in high school.
I mean, they don't know the world.
They don't understand history.
They don't, it's, what they did is during the Obama period of time,
they hired, you know, DEI hires and a bunch of people who were leftists
for these positions, and they don't see the world,
nor do they see that they are here to defend
the Constitution and the Republic.
They don't see the world the way we see it.
They have a different view.
What do they think they're there for?
They're there to experiment and find a new
and a better way to govern America.
I'm not kidding.
Nonsense.
It's crazy.
It's crazy.
But that's how they look at the world.
And they have no problem with packing the Supreme Court.
They actually think that the DSA is a good thing.
Look, people.
Fifty-one senior officers in the intelligence services
said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian,
you know, disinformation.
Fifty-one traitors.
What, just, all anyone would have to do is look at that,
you'd know in 15 minutes that this is real.
But they're willing to say and do anything to prevail
and to defeat those of us that want to hold up.
Unfortunately, the press is on their side.
So the press does their bidding for them.
And that's why people like you, Laura,
are so important because so much of this, so much
of this is, it's an information war.
People can't, you know, we,
I wrote this book based on what Gary and Martine did.
It's very difficult to get attention.
Mainstream media doesn't want to talk about it.
They don't want to talk about election fraud.
He's written six bestsellers.
Six bestsellers.
You know, it's like his father was assistant
secretary for Western Hemisphere.
I mean, Ralph knows the world.
And you can't get on mainstream media.
No.
You can't get on TV.
They're not interested.
They won't promote the book.
No.
We did Jawbreaker together 20 years ago as a bestseller.
Yeah.
I mean, we got a lot of coverage.
It was on 60 Minutes.
I remember.
Yeah, we were on it.
Everybody wanted to talk to us.
But, man, nobody wanted to talk to us now.
I think you did that with Scott Pelley instead of me.
What's that?
I haven't.
That wasn't my choice.
I haven't forgiven you.