US spy chief

WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) – A team working for President Donald Trump’s spy chief Tulsi Gabbard led an investigation into Puerto Rico voting machines last spring, Gabbard’s office and three sources familiar with previously unreported events said.

The sources said the goal was to work with the FBI to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but added that the investigation did not produce any clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the US territory’s elections.

Gabbard’s office, in a statement to Reuters, confirmed the May investigation but denied a link to Venezuela, saying it focused on vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems. His team took an unspecified number of voting machines from Puerto Rico and additional copies of data from the machines as part of their investigation, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.

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His office said the seizure of voting machines and data was “standard practice in forensic analysis.”

Noting similar voting infrastructure elsewhere in the United States, he added: “ODNI found extremely concerning cybersecurity and operational implementation practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections.”

Venezuela’s government did not respond to a request for comment.

ODNI said some security breaches in voting machines used in Puerto Rico were due to the use of vulnerable cellular technology and that software flaws existed that could give hackers deep access to vital election systems.

The operation in Puerto Rico appeared to be part of an effort by Trump administration officials to pursue unproven allegations of voter fraud, the sources said. Concern about voter fraud dates back to Trump’s 2020 reelection loss and has not abated, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss non-public operations.

Gabbard’s appearance at an FBI raid on a polling place in Fulton County, Georgia, last week highlights her direct involvement in these issues. Last week’s FBI raid in Georgia sparked alarm among some national security experts concerned that Gabbard and the ODNI may have exceeded their authority in investigating a sensitive domestic matter.

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Gabbard was not physically present during the operation in Puerto Rico, her office said, even though her agency took a coordinating role in the investigation.

US officials involved in the Georgia investigation sought records related to the 2020 presidential election that Republican Trump falsely claimed he lost to Democrat Joe Biden due to widespread fraud.

Domestic election security matters are typically handled by law enforcement agencies, current and former U.S. officials say, not the country’s intelligence services.

Gabbard’s office said it had the authority to conduct the investigation.

“Given ODNI’s broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate and analyze intelligence related to election security and our well-known work to understand vulnerabilities to foreign and other malign interference, ODNI conducted an examination of the electronic voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s elections,” the spokesperson said.

Reuters sources said it was the unproven allegation of Venezuelan involvement in voting irregularities in the US territory’s elections that had raised questions about possible foreign interference, something Gabbard had the legal authority to investigate.

Residents of the Caribbean island are U.S. citizens but have no voting representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential general elections.

Challenging denials from Gabbard’s office about Venezuela’s role, the three sources told Reuters that the FBI team involved in the Puerto Rico operation was investigating the theory that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government had hacked the U.S. vote, an allegation that has strong support among some Trump supporters but for which no public evidence has come to light.

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THREATS TO ELECTORAL SECURITY

The operation in Puerto Rico involved the FBI’s South Florida office, whose agents were coordinating with a group overseen by Gabbard that was investigating threats to election security, two of the sources familiar with the operation said.

This group included US national security officials, law enforcement agents and government contractors, the sources said.

Gabbard’s office said the U.S. Attorney in Puerto Rico, his team of national security investigations agents and an FBI supervisory special agent “facilitated the voluntary delivery of electronic voting hardware and software to ODNI for analysis.”

The US military detained Maduro in Caracas in January, removed him from power and brought him to New York to face drug trafficking charges, which he denies. Puerto Rico’s elections have had irregularities, but no credible evidence has emerged to support accusations of Venezuelan attacks to influence voting there.

“We have had widely reported problems in election administration. But they are all attributable to incompetence and corruption, not foreign interference,” said Pablo José Hernández Rivera, a Democrat elected in 2024 to represent Puerto Rico in the U.S. House of Representatives without voting rights.

(Reporting by Phil Stewart, Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay; editing by Diane Craft)