MAGA Thinks Maduro Will Prove Trump Won in 2020
In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory.
Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” Lindell, who has long espoused election falsehoods, told me the day after the Venezuelan dictator’s arraignment.
The supposition boils down to this: Venezuela plotted with election-equipment and -technology companies to engineer Trump’s defeat in 2020. There is no credible evidence to support this. But with Maduro in U.S. custody months before the midterms and the Trump administration investigating the 2020 election, an idea that had been disproved by facts and debunked in lawsuits has been revived, with a newsy twist: Now Maduro will prove from a New York jail that Trump defeated Joe Biden.
Since Maduro’s capture, Trump has shared a raft of discredited election-fraud claims on his Truth Social site, including one tied to a company central to the Venezuela conspiracy. A top Justice Department official helped harden the narrative: Ed Martin, the United States pardon attorney (who also directs the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group, which pursues retribution against Trump’s perceived political enemies), promoted the idea that Maduro could offer crucial information to substantiate the stolen-election theory once and for all. Martin reposted on X a claim that Maduro could try “to plead to lesser charges by proffering evidence that the 2020 election was stolen,” adding “!”
The right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, an extremely online Trump-administration ally, claimed that Maduro “is in possession” of evidence against election-equipment companies. “Maduro might be Trump’s final revenge for the election theft of 2020,” Johnson told his audience. “If he begins to sing like a canary—which he will; they always do—then who will he give up?” Johnson added: “This is why they took him alive.”
[Read: ‘Stop counting votes or we’re going to murder your children’]
The conspiracy theory traces back to the days after the 2020 election. Trump allies, including his lawyers at the time Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, claimed that Trump had been denied a win because two voting-equipment companies, Dominion Voting Systems (which was sold last year and is operating under the name Liberty Vote) and Smartmatic, had flipped votes for Biden. The systems and software, Powell said at the time, were “created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chávez to make sure he never lost an election.”
Powell and Giuliani settled lawsuits with Dominion over election falsehoods. (The settlement details are confidential.) Smartmatic has reached legal settlements with right-leaning media outlets over false statements about the company. One of them, Newsmax, wrote on its website last year that “it has no evidence that Smartmatic machines or software altered the votes in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” It continued: “Smartmatic is a U.S. company not owned by the Venezuelan government, or any foreign official or entity.”
Smartmatic also won a defamation case last year against Lindell. That hasn’t stopped him from reviving claims of a stolen election after Maduro’s apprehension. Lindell told me last week that he had turned “a book” that he compiled about the 2020 election (Lindell also told me he’s “sure” it includes versions of the theory that Venezuela helped steal it) over to federal officials. He would not say who, specifically, but said he hoped that the Justice Department and other federal authorities were investigating. Lindell predicted that he, Powell (who could not be reached for comment), and many others would be vindicated. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean,” he told me, “and tell all about the machines and how they steal the elections.”
The Venezuelan-voting-machine conspiracy theory has returned as the Trump administration is using the government to investigate a valid election whose outcome the president didn’t like. (Trump apparently harbors regrets for not doing more to overturn the results, telling The New York Times that “I should have” had the National Guard seize voting machines in 2020.) The Guardian reported in November that federal investigators were interviewing people who were claiming that Venezuela had helped rob Trump of a win. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during a Cabinet meeting last April that investigators had “evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time.” At an August Cabinet meeting, Trump asked Gabbard if she had found information tied to “how corrupt the 2020 election was. When will that all come out?” Gabbard responded that she would brief Trump once she had all of the information, adding, “We are finding documents literally tucked away in the back of safes and random offices.”
The administration has also been attempting to access local voting equipment. A Department of Homeland Security official, with the help of a political operative, unsuccessfully sought access last year to vote-counting machines in Colorado, but county clerks rebuffed the requests to examine the tightly controlled equipment. Two GOP clerks in Missouri also rejected requests from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to examine their machines. And Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who challenged Trump’s 2020 loss in court, was tapped last fall to probe that election as a special government employee, The Wall Street Journal reported. Olsen has told people he wants, among other things, to examine equipment used during the 2020 election, according to the Journal. (Olsen didn’t respond to the Journal’s request for comment or one I left with him.)
[Read: The last MAGA prisoner]
The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told me that Trump wants to ensure the U.S. has safe and secure elections and that he has long said Maduro “was an illegitimate, narco-terrorist.” In response to Trump’s election-related executive order last March (titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”), she said the Department of Homeland Security is preparing a report on the cybersecurity of election systems and “will deliver that report shortly." (The Department of Justice, Liberty Vote, and Smartmatic did not return my requests for comment.)
Election administrators around the country who have been abused and harassed for the past six years are keeping a wary eye on the resurgence of the conspiracy theories. In Colorado, a county-clerks association is drafting an FAQ to help election officials navigate questions they may get from constituents about voting machines and Venezuela. In Arizona, election officials are worried enough to ensure that a cybersecurity analyst is monitoring the online chatter. If it escalates, officials could push back publicly against the falsehoods. In Utah, Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman told me she’s tracking the misinformation and is prepared to weigh in, if needed: “It’s a full-time job trying to explain this, let alone successfully administering elections.”
Every time those in power amplify inaccurate information about elections, election clerks and experts tell me, they risk deepening doubt in the democratic process. Even without getting states to change the ways that people vote, experts worry that a selective release of findings or evidence tied to the Venezuela claims could be used by the Trump administration to justify some sort of government action.
“It’s almost like an RFP for conspiracy theories,” Alexandra Chandler, a former Department of Defense intelligence analyst who now works as the director of the nonprofit Protect Democracy’s election team, told me.
Under the Constitution, states are responsible for running elections. But Trump has used the power of the federal government to rejuvenate debunked claims and set the stage for another battle over the validity of future elections if he dislikes the results. He’s staffed his administration with people who have sown doubt over the legitimacy of election outcomes, sparked a redistricting war for control of the House, and issued an executive order attempting to claim federal authority over elections.
Lawrence Norden, vice president of the elections-and-government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, sees more challenges on the horizon: disinformation and misinformation turbocharged by artificial intelligence, distrust in mainstream media that leaves outlets less capable of pointing out inaccuracies, and cuts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal agency that helps defend crucial election networks. It is, Norden said, “a toxic brew.” Add in the capture of Maduro and an online MAGA army demanding validation of its theories, and America seems destined for a new bout of feverish conspiracism just in time for the midterms.