Exclusive-US spy chief’s office investigated voting machines in Puerto Rico

By Phil Stewart, Erin Banco and Jonathan Landay

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

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

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

Her office said the taking of voting machines and data was “standard practice in forensics analysis.”

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

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

ODNI said that some security gaps in voting machines used in Puerto Rico stemmed from their use of vulnerable cellular technology and that software flaws existed that could give hackers access deep into vital electoral systems.

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

Gabbard’s appearance at an FBI raid of an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, last week highlights her direct involvement in these issues. Last week’s FBI raid in Georgia prompted alarm among some national security experts worried that Gabbard and the ODNI have overstepped their authority in investigating a sensitive domestic matter.

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

U.S. officials involved in the Georgia investigation sought records related to the 2020 presidential election that Republican Trump has falsely claimed he lost against Democrat Joe Biden because of widespread fraud.

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

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

“Given ODNI’s broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security and our known work on understanding vulnerabilities to foreign and other malign interference, ODNI conducted an examination of 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 U.S. territory’s elections that had raised questions about possible foreign interference – something Gabbard had the legal authority to investigate.

The Caribbean island’s residents are U.S. citizens but do not have voting representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential general elections.

Challenging the denials of Gabbard’s office about Venezuela’s role, the three sources told Reuters that the FBI team involved in the Puerto Rico operation was probing the theory that Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro’s government had hacked U.S. voting, an allegation that has strong support among some Trump supporters but for which no evidence has surfaced publicly. 

THREATS TO ELECTION SECURITY

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

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

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

The U.S. military seized Maduro in Caracas in January, removing 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 allegations 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 Jose Hernandez Rivera, a Democrat elected in 2024 to represent Puerto Rico in the U.S. House of Representatives in a non-voting capacity. 

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