Trump aide's Venezuela fallback undone by CIA note he helped declassify: legal expert
Trump's declassification chief floated a Venezuela vote-fraud theory his own newly released CIA note flatly contradicts, a legal expert found.
The co-leader of President Donald Trump's declassification task force, John Solomon, made the slip-up moments after Trump wrapped up his primetime address on the renewed unfounded election meddling claims related to his 2020 election loss, legal reporter Adam Klasfeld said in an episode of Legal AF.
During an interview on MS NOW, Solomon was pressed by Vaughn Hillyard over whether votes were changed in the 2020 election. Solomon acknowledged that intelligence officials have zero evidence a foreign actor flipped a vote in 2020, 2022, or 2024, Klasfeld explained.
Solomon, a figure in Trump's first impeachment now helping run the White House effort to declassify election-related intelligence, then reached for a Venezuela theory that his own documents contradict. He claimed that the Venezuelan government manipulated results on "their own machines" and that its "machine protocols are the same as America's," according to Klasfeld.
Klasfeld pointed out that a CIA note dated June 2026, which was produced under Trump's own CIA director, John Ratcliffe, cuts against Solomon's claim and "says the opposite."
The CIA note found intelligence "did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic voting fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections," with baseline assessments pointing to other explanations, Klasfeld said.
Klasfeld added that Smartmatic, the vendor Solomon's argument leaned on, ran in a single 2020 U.S. jurisdiction, Los Angeles County, "where the results weren't close," as it's a heavily Democratic area that Biden carried by a wide margin.
"Trump is continuing his campaign of knowingly lying about the election, and nothing that he declassified this week changes that," Klasfeld said. "Not even the people who are preparing the declassified records that contradict everything that he's saying" will endorse the fraud claim.