CIA head gored for 'playing fast and loose' with agency data to back Trump lies

CIA Director John Ratcliffe lent credence to President Donald Trump’s wild claims about Venezuelan election manipulation during his national address last week, hinting at plans for federal intervention in the midterm elections.

Ratcliffe’s statement, posted on X as Trump was winding up his speech on Thursday, cited intelligence “showing that Venezuela’s government had developed capabilities to manipulate electronic voting systems, raising serious concerns for U.S. election security.”

Trump’s statement on the subject raised concerns about “whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or cheat on these terrible machines,” before citing declassified documents showing intelligence obtained by the CIA about the Venezuelan government’s handling of elections, and arguing that the “intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised, like it was in the past.”

Trump’s use of the phrase “like it was in the past” suggests a claim that the Venezuelan government manipulated vote totals in U.S. elections” — but that’s not what the declassified CIA document suggests.

Ratcliffe’s statement would be more accurate if he had clarified that Venezuela developed capabilities to manipulate its own elections, which raised theoretical, as opposed to serious, concerns about U.S. election infrastructure security, Kevin T. Carroll, a former CIA case officer who served as senior counsel to former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly during the first Trump administration, told Raw Story.

“Ratcliffe’s description of the analytical finding here is misleading, and this kind of inaccuracy erodes public trust in the Intelligence Community’s judgments,” Carroll said. “Playing fast and loose like this is dangerous for the agency, and more importantly the country, when a CIA director is speaking about a subject regarding domestic politics, such as election infrastructure security.”

The CIA did not respond to questions submitted by email by Raw Story for this story.

Trump’s claims during his July 16 speech have been widely debunked, but Democrats and fair elections advocates view his inflammatory rhetoric as an attempt to create a national security pretext for federal interference in the midterm elections — or set the stage to claim the election was stolen if Republicans lose.

“From a national emergency to seize control over elections, to sending ICE or FBI agents to the polls to seize ballots or voting machines — tactics that once felt outlandish or near-impossible —must be considered as possibilities as an unhinged, corrupt president becomes increasingly desperate to tip the scales in 2026,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. “The same people who tried to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss with false claims want to use those false claims to try to seize control of the 2026 midterms.”

The false claim that the Venezuelan government manipulated vote totals in the 2020 U.S. election was at the heart of a series of failed lawsuits brought by lawyer Sidney Powell attempting to overturn the election. The claim hinged on the purported role of Smartmatic, an election technology company. Smartmatic has a pending defamation suit against Fox News seeking $2.7 billion in damages for statements the network aired by Powell and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer at the time. Rival network Newsmax has already paid Smartmatic $40 million to settle similar claims.

Trump’s remarks bypassed Smartmatic, but the CIA intelligence released last week by the White House noted that the company “ceased operations in Venezuela” in 2018 “after publicly accusing the Maduro regime of inflating voter turnout” in a national election the previous year.

Trump’s false claim that the Venezuelan government of former President Nicolás Maduro manipulated vote totals in a U.S. election is based on a grain of truth: The Venezuelan government under Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, appears to have explored the idea.

But intelligence gathered by the CIA indicates the regime never developed the capability or attempted to put it in motion.

A declassified CIA note states that in April 2004 “intelligence reporting indicated Chavez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection” of President George W. Bush. Regardless of Chavez’s wishes, Bush won reelection.

Chavez’s antipathy towards Bush is well-documented: During a 2006 speech at the United Nations, Chavez called Bush “the devil” and claimed the podium, where the U.S. president had spoken the day before, still “smelled of sulfur.”

The CIA Note confirms that intelligence gathered by the agency raised concerns that Venezuela was developing capabilities to manipulate elections in other countries, but that’s as far as it went.

“Intelligence Community reporting from 2004-2020 documented persistent concerns about Venezuelan government manipulation of electronic voting systems and the potential national security implications for U.S. election infrastructure,” the document states.

In 2006, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Smartmatic’s acquisition of the American election technology company Sequoia posed a “moderate threat” to U.S. national security, according to the declassified document.

As a case officer, Carroll was assigned to a joint CIA-FBI Cuba-Venezuela foreign counterintelligence squad from 2007 to 2009.

“I do not recall any intelligence about Venezuela seeking to interfere in the 2008 U.S. election, nor being tasked by CIA or FBI headquarters to collect any intelligence on this subject,” Carroll told Raw Story. “If that threat had been a serious concern, my partner and I would have been directed to ask sources, and develop further sources, about it.”

The CIA note, entitled “Summary of Select Intelligence Reporting from 2004-2020 on Venezuela’s Voting Manipulation Capabilities,” directly contradicts Trump’s claims, almost point for point. The document is dated June 29, 2026, and was declassified by Ratcliffe two days later, suggesting it was drafted in preparation for Trump speech and the coordinated release of declassified files related to foreign election influence and interference.

A jumble of non-sequiturs with awkward phrasing that invites conflation and confusion, Trump’s statement begins by asserting that “many people have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals on these terrible machines,” before announcing that the White House was “releasing documents that actually show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela.

“And that’s exactly what happened, conspiring to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020,” Trump continued.

Trump’s statement went on to reference CIA reporting that Venezuela developed a plan “to digitally alter voter totals in ways that could not be detected even with an audit,” while suggesting without explanation that Venezuela also interfered in U.S. elections. “This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action,” Trump said, “to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised, like it was in the past.”

The CIA note says nothing about Venezuela manipulating vote totals in any U.S. election, stating only that in September 2020, the agency received intelligence that on “a specific technical approach to election manipulation” that “would, in theory, allow the Venezuelan government to monitor and adjust results in real-time during and after the election.” The election manipulation technology, the CIA said, could be paired with another technology to evade “detection through standard audit procedures.”

The CIA note doesn’t even say Venezuela manipulated vote totals in its own 2020 election.

Contrary to Trump’s statement that the CIA uncovered “a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela — and that’s what they did,” the declassified CIA Note states that the Venezuelan government “did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this story.