Disgraced Venezuelan generals accused of seeking Trump deal with election conspiracy lies

While Donald Trump’s polling numbers continue to slip amidst a rudderless and costly war with Iran that is sending gas prices soaring, he appears to be laying the groundwork to intervene in the upcoming midterm elections with a steady drip of rhetorical provocations and administrative actions.

And, while he claims not to be considering calling a pre-election national emergency, at least two former Venezuelan military officials have offered intelligence that fits a scheme long embraced by election conspiracists for the president to seize extraordinary powers based on the claim of foreign interference.

Hugo Carvajal Barrios, a retired general and the former head of Venezuelan military intelligence who faces life in prison after pleading guilty to narco-terrorism, said in an open letter to Trump that “regime operatives maintain relationships with election officials and voting-machine companies inside your country.

“I do not claim that every election is stolen, but I state with certainty that elections can be rigged with the software — and it has been used to do so,” Carvajal Barrios said in the letter, which was first published by the conservative outlet Dallas Express.

Clíver Alcalá Cordones, a former Venezuelan general who is currently serving a sentence of more than 20 years for material support for terrorists, has similarly offered to testify in an open letter to Trump about alleged election fraud. Alcalá Cordones’ letter also claims that Delcy Rodriguez, who took power in the country after the U.S. military seized former President Nicolás Maduro, and her brother Jorge retain control of a vast election-rigging apparatus with the ability to alter elections outside of Venezuela.

Election deniers have reportedly circulated a draft executive order in recent months urging Trump to declare a national emergency based on a claim that China interfered in the 2020 election, which is contradicted by the official findings of the U.S. intelligence community.

Peter Ticktin, a Florida lawyer who represents election denier Patrick Byrne in a defamation lawsuit brought by Liberty Voting (formerly Dominion Voting System), is among those who have reportedly worked on the proposed executive order. Byrne participated in a December 2020 meeting at the White House in which Trump was urged to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard to re-run the election. Byrne told Raw Story he is part of a group that approached Carvajal Barrios in prison.

In February, Trump told podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 states and “nationalize” elections. Last week, he issued an executive order that was not as far-reaching as the one promoted by Ticktin, but that nonetheless requires states to establish voting lists by cross-referencing data from the Social Security Administration and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is housed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Voting rights groups, joined by national Democratic Party organizations and attorneys general, promptly sued to block the executive order, arguing that “the order violates and subverts the separation of powers by lawlessly arrogating to the president authority to declare election rules and dictate election administration outcomes down to the individual voter by executive fiat.”

Max Flugrath, spokesperson for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, said it wouldn’t surprise him if Venezuela winds up playing a role in Trump’s efforts to meddle in the midterm elections.

“Trump appears to be increasingly desperate to interfere with the 2026 election,” Flugrath told Raw Story. “The voter suppression SAVE Act has stalled, his demand to rig voting maps has fallen short of the blowout Republicans needed, and the far-right Supreme Court justices haven’t ruled on cases Republicans see as critical to their victory. After his executive order — which is so blatantly unconstitutional it should be considered an angry press release — I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

Asked if the president is considering issuing a national emergency order on security grounds to deploy federal assets during the midterms, the White House referred Raw Story to a comment Trump made to a reporter in February in which he said, “No, I’ve never heard of that.”

He also asked the reporter: “Who told you that?”

The White House did not respond to Raw Story’s question about whether Trump has reviewed the open letters from Carvajal Barrios and Alcalá Cordones.

As previously reported by Raw Story, Markwayne Mullin, now secretary of Homeland Security, helped a consultant linked to Byrne arrange a meeting with the Trump campaign to discuss election fraud and Venezuela in October 2024.

Actionable intelligence on Tren de Aragua

Gary Berntsen, a retired CIA senior operations officer who is part of Byrne’s group, directly appealed to Trump in a video posted in June 2025, as Carvajal Barrios was preparing to go on trial in Manhattan.

“Carvajal’s firsthand testimony is key to prosecuting the conspirators involved in stealing the 2020 election,” Berntsen said. He went on to ask Trump for his “intervention to force [the Southern District of New York] to seek to delay the trial long enough to explore the value of this critical witness.”

Berntsen said in the video that he has been “leading a dedicated team of whistleblowers, who have uncovered critical information about the 2020 election fraud, which we’ve shared with the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

To establish his bona fides, Berntsen said in the video that he had “provided the first reports on the dangerous Tren de Aragua gang to U.S. law enforcement.”

Trump made the Tren de Aragua a campaign issue by insisting during his September 2024 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that the Venezuelan gang was “taking over” Aurora, Colo. — a claim sharply contested by local officials. During the debate, Trump paired the statement about Tren de Aragua with an outlandish claim that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the pets.”

Shortly after taking office, Trump made Tren de Aragua the centerpiece of his mass deportation campaign, claiming that the gang was part of an invasion of the United States while invoking the Alien Enemies Act to provide justification for a military response. The administration followed through with military action by launching an ongoing campaign to bomb alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in September 2025.

Once Trump took office, federal prosecutors were instructed to prioritize Tren de Aragua, even though one former counternarcotics official told ProPublica the gang “was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on.”

‘Managing a river of information’

In text messages to Raw Story, Byrne promoted the notion that his team has provided the Trump administration with an alternative stream of intelligence outside of the formal U.S. intelligence channels that presidents typically rely upon to set foreign policy.

“We have been part of managing a river of information coming out of Venezuelan government officials,” Byrne said. “Using those same defectors, we’ve been bribing police captains and military generals…. It is getting funneled directly into the Pentagon, those involved with using it, rather than to the normal organizations such as the FBI or CIA (of whom I do not trust anymore).”

Asked if the administration relied on intelligence from Byrne’s team to designate Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization, bomb alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, or carry out the military operation against Maduro, Byrne said they had nothing to do with the boat bombings. Otherwise, he said he could neither confirm nor deny those matters.

The White House and Department of Defense did not specifically respond to questions from Raw Story about whether they have received information from Byrne’s group, although Trump has amplified an interview with Berntsen discussing drug cartels, election fraud and foreign influence on his TruthSocial account.

Repeated sentencing delays

Carvajal Barrios wound up pleading guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States and engaging in narco-terrorism for the benefit of Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the FARC, a group that was on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations from 1997 to 2021. Carvajal Barrios’ plea was entered only two days after the video of Berntsen’s plea to Trump was posted on YouTube, and there is no indication the president intervened in the prosecution.

As a result of his conviction, DEA Acting Administrator Robert Murphy declared in a press release issued by the Department of Justice that “Carvajal Barrios will now likely spend the rest of his life in federal prison.”

Carvajal Barrios was initially scheduled to be sentenced in October 2025, but about a month before the hearing, federal prosecutors asked for a delay on the basis that they expected him to object to some of the facts in his pre-sentence report. Since then, a federal judge in Manhattan has postponed Carvajal Barrios’ sentence three times, and the date is currently set for April 16.

Last December, while Carvajal Barrios was awaiting sentencing, his letter alleging election fraud related to Venezuela went public. Less than a week later, the Dallas Express published a letter from another former Venezuelan military official, Alcalá Cordones, who is currently serving a sentence of more than 20 years in prison for material support for the FARC. Using strikingly similar language, both letters specifically mentioned the election technology company Smartmatic.

The claims from the former Venezuelan military officials come at a time when Smartmatic and another voting technology company Liberty Voting (formerly Dominion Voting System) are racking up a string of legal victories against media companies and conspiracy theorists who promoted claims of election fraud during the 2020 election.

‘Statements regarding Smartmatic… are factually false’

Last September, a federal judge in Minnesota granted summary judgment to Smartmatic by finding there is no truth to three claims made by conspiracist Mike Lindell: "(1) that Smartmatic stole the 2020 election or otherwise manipulated ballots that changed the outcome of the 2020 election; (2) that Smartmatic [ballot marking devices] were connected to the internet and, therefore, susceptible to hacking; and (3) that Smartmatic designed its machines to manipulate ballots and change election results."

A judge in Delaware similarly ruled in a defamation suit brought by the election company against the far-right network Newsmax that “statements regarding Smartmatic software or voting machines altering the results of the election are factually false.”

Smartmatic currently has a $2.7 billion defamation case pending against Fox News. The network previously settled a lawsuit brought by Dominion for $787 million. Fox made little effort to defend the claims about election fraud, arguing instead that it was merely reporting on assertions made by Trump and his allies. A judge found that Fox “failed to meet its burden” to show a genuine issue of material fact as to falsity.

Among claims ruled as false, the order included at least seven statements by Trump allies between Nov. 13 and Dec. 10, 2020 that asserted that Smartmatic’s voting software was created in Venezuela to rig elections and was then exported to the United States, where it was used to manipulate the 2020 election.

The letters from Carvajal Barrios and Alcalá Cordones stop short of claiming that Smartmatic switched votes during the 2020 election in the United States, but appear to suggest a potential for manipulation in the future.

“The Smartmatic system can be altered — this is a fact,” Carvajal Barrios’ letter states. “This technology was later exported abroad, including to the United States. Regime operatives maintain relationships with election officials and voting-machine companies inside your country. I do not claim that every election is stolen, but I state with certainty that elections can be rigged with the software — and has been used to do so.”

Similarly, Alcalá Cordones’ letter states: “I am aware of the use of parallel Smartmatic voting systems to alter results, especially in locations without opposition party representatives, making irregularities difficult to detect. This is the same technology used in other countries including USA by the company Smartmatic. The controllers of this entire system are the siblings Jorge and Delcy Rodriguez.”

Samira Saba, a spokesperson for Smartmatic, told Raw Story the company “vehemently rejects the completely baseless and repeatedly debunked accusations about the integrity of our election systems, purportedly made by former Venezuelan officials convicted of serious charges.

“Giving credibility to these discredited narratives erodes public trust in elections,” Saba said. “The real threat to U.S. election integrity is the acceptance of such falsehoods at face value, especially when they originate from individuals openly attempting to bargain for leniency.”

Robert Feitel, Carvajal Barrios’ lawyer, declined to comment in response to a question from Raw Story about whether his client is angling for a pardon from Trump or seeking to leverage information about alleged election fraud to get his sentence reduced. Alcalá Cordones’ lawyer could not be reached for comment.