Markwayne Mullin, the new head of Homeland Security, arranged for a group promoting a debunked claim about election software linked to Venezuela being used to manipulate U.S. votes to meet with the Trump campaign three weeks before the 2024 election, Raw Story has learned.
Martin Rodil, a Washington, D.C. area consultant, briefed Susie Wiles — then co-campaign manager and now chief of staff to President Donald Trump — at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, has said Mullin, then a U.S. senator, arranged that meeting.
Claims about election software supposedly controlled by Venezuelan leadership occupied a prominent place in failed lawsuits brought by lawyer Sidney Powell seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. Now, in the wake of the U.S. military strike against Venezuela and Republicans facing political headwinds in the upcoming midterm elections, Trump allies with the ear of the administration have begun to revive the claims.
Byrne hailed the appointment of Mullin to lead DHS “as a fantastic decision by President Trump” in an X post earlier this month. He went on to say that Mullin “got my partner into” Mar-a-Lago in October 2024, and that his associate “spent three days briefing the team there on elections, Venezuela, and what had to be done November 5.”
Byrne confirmed to Raw Story that his “partner” was Rodil.
Byrne was out of the country at the time, and did not attend the meeting, but he described himself as part of a “three-man team,” along with Rodil and Gary Berntsen, a retired CIA senior operations officer, that assembled a package of information to present to the Trump campaign and Elon Musk. Berntsen, in turn, described Rodil in an interview with far-right podcaster Lara Logan as his “business partner,” adding that Byrne “bankrolled” a group of “Venezuelan whistleblowers” that he and Rodil assembled.
An email to the White House Press Office seeking comment from Wiles for this story went unreturned.
During his interview with Logan, which was published in November 2025 before the U.S. military attacked Venezuela and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, Berntsen claimed that the electronic election systems company Smartmatic, through the sale of a subsidiary to rival Dominion Voting Systems, gained “control” of more than 20 percent of the U.S. market, “primarily the swing states for electing president of the United States.” He went on to claim that Smartmatic has “two missions: number one, steal elections, and, number two, defeat audit.”
The group claimed Smartmatic had originally been created in Venezuela to fix elections, and was controlled by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
In a separate interview with Logan in January, Rodil claimed that Cuba, China, Russia and Iran have been manipulating U.S. elections through Venezuela-controlled election software.
"And they install their own software — the Venezuelan narco-software in that company," Rodil said. "So, for many years in the U.S., the American people have been voting on a software built on a cartel of drugs."
A judge in Delaware ruled in September 2024 that those claims are false, writing that “statements regarding Smartmatic software or voting machines altering the results” of the 2020 election “are factually false” in a defamation lawsuit brought by the election technology company against the far-right network Newsmax.
It is unclear whether Berntsen was present for the meeting with Wiles and Rodil, but in his interview with Logan, he described a presentation that matches the Mar-a-Lago meeting.
“A month before the election, we showed it to the Trump people,” he said. “We went to them and gave them the brief. They looked at it in horror. And they had real concerns.”
Berntsen and Byrne have said Trump himself is aware of their claims, and their assertion is backed up by a TruthSocial post in which the president amplified Logan’s interview with Berntsen.
“We must focus all our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!” Trump wrote, while sharing a link to the video of Berntsen’s interview.
Mullin opened to the doors at Mar-a-Lago to election deniers
Both Byrne and Berntsen said Mullin helped open doors for them at Mar-a-Lago.
Byrne told Raw Story that prior to the Mar-a-Lago meeting, the team approached members of the House Freedom Caucus, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), before the 2024 election, but those members deemed the information to be “too radioactive.” In contrast, Byrne said, Mullin was willing to help.
“That guy saved America because he was the one that got my partners into Mar-a-Lago,” Byrne said.
Berntsen similarly praised Mullin as “one politician in America” who “was not afraid.”
Mullin could not be reached for comment for this story, and an email to the Department of Homeland Security went unreturned.
But in an interview with far-right podcaster Benny Johnson in December, Mullin signaled that he was open to considering unfounded claims that Venezuela could perpetrate fraud in American elections.
“Venezuela has been a hub for this,” Mullin told Johnson. “There’s a relationship between China and Russia that’s also involved in this. And we know they have been trying to get involved in our elections…. We also allowed those investors to be part of some of the stuff we thought was unpenetrable, which had been some of our election cycles and our election machines and the way we look at to it.” [sic]
Mullin has a history of election denial. As a House representative, Mullin voted against certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. When asked during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this month who won the election, Mullin would only say, “We know that President Joe Biden was sworn into office.”
Concerns that Trump could deploy ICE to polling places
As secretary of Homeland Security, Mullin now oversees the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, which, among other roles, is responsible for working with state and local governments and the private sector “to manage risks to the nation’s election infrastructure.”
Homeland Security also includes Immigration & Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, two agencies that have undergone a transformation into paramilitary forces that have racially profiled immigrants while violently arresting and even killing immigrants and civilian bystanders during campaign in Democratic-governed cities that many residents have viewed as an “occupation.” During his confirmation hearing, Mullin said he would consider deploying federal officers to polling locations “if there was specific threat.”
Steve Bannon, former White House strategist and a close ally of the president, said on his podcast last week that the recent deployment of ICE agents to U.S. airports could serve as “a test run, a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”
Meanwhile, Trump said during an appearance on the podcast of former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino last month that Republicans should “take over the voting” in at least 15 states and “nationalize” elections. Preceding his call to action, the president complained that “these people were brought to our country, and they vote illegally.” (There is no evidence of widespread systemic voter fraud by immigrants or anyone else.)
Election deniers have long embraced theories about foreign interference in U.S. elections as a trigger for justifying the president to issue emergency orders on national security grounds.
The 2024 meeting at Mar-a-Lago is not the first time Byrne has been involved in a group effort to bring extraordinary claims about election fraud to Trump’s inner circle — and call on the president to seize control of elections.
In December 2020, Byrne, Powell and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn showed up at the Oval Office and claimed that Venezuela had meddled in the 2020 election, while recommending that Trump seize voting machinery in key counties or deploy the National Guard to re-run the election.
Trump did not take the advice to seize voting machinery and re-run the election at that time. Instead, a couple hours later, the president sent out a tweet summoning his supporters to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, adding, "Be there, will be wild!"
Last week, speaking as a guest host of “InfoWars” — the show hosted by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been ordered to pay a $1.4 billion defamation judgment to the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims — Byrne again urged Trump to interfere in an election that will determine the balance of power in the country.
“He’s got to do it — he can’t do it through the legislature and the [Department of Justice],” Byrne said. “He’s got to use his war powers, national security powers, Department of War, or use the National Guard and run a simple, old-fashioned election like we teach Burma how to do it. At the end of the day, he can do everything — and he needs to — as a national emergency.”