WASHINGTON--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. Reuters first reported the investigation.
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."
Jorge Rivera Rueda, head of Puerto Rico's State Elections Commission, said he could not comment on any ongoing investigations. He added in a statement, "the Commission will fully cooperate with any investigative process conducted by the appropriate authorities, whether at the state or federal level."
Venezuela's government did not respond to a request for comment.
ODNI said 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 re-election loss in 2020 and has not abated, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss non-public operations.
Democratic leaders in Congress voiced alarm over Reuters' report on the Puerto Rico operation. Chuck Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, said the Trump administration was violating state and federal laws and the U.S. Constitution by seeking the election records."They're trying to intimidate local elected officials," Schumer told MS NOW television on Thursday, when asked about the Reuters story.
"What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway," U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence panel, told Reuters on Thursday.
"Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused,” Warner added.
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.
