By Jonathan Landay, Erin Banco and Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON, April 23 (Reuters) - Late last summer, Kurt Olsen’s patience had run out.
U.S. President Donald Trump had enlisted Olsen months earlier to seek evidence of foreign interference in U.S. elections and re-investigate Trump’s 2020 loss. A prominent election-denier, attorney and former Navy SEAL, Olsen aimed to prove the discredited conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines had been infected with malicious code controlled by Venezuela, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
But a secret federal investigation of Puerto Rico’s Dominion machines had found no trace of hacking after the administration seized the machines in May and directed a cybersecurity contractor to scour them for months.
Confronted with the results, Olsen turned on the contractor, Virginia-based Mojave Research Inc. in a September message to Trump, the three sources said. Infuriated, Olsen accused the firm of blocking his work, serving the “deep state” and secretly taking money from billionaire George Soros, a Democratic donor and frequent right-wing target, they said.
Mojave had been brought on by Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to search for vulnerabilities in the machines Puerto Rico used during its 2024 gubernatorial elections.
Olsen’s campaign to discredit Mojave has not previously been reported. Five sources familiar with Olsen’s probe told Reuters that the failure to find evidence in the Puerto Rico machines led the administration to expand the investigation to Georgia, where the FBI seized 2020 election ballots, and Arizona, where the FBI has subpoenaed voter records.
The reporting also sheds new light on the broad leeway Trump has granted Olsen to use federal money and staff to chase discredited election-rigging theories – despite dozens of court rulings dismissing similar allegations by Trump allies after the 2020 vote.
Olsen’s investigation has used staff and resources from Gabbard’s ODNI, the Justice Department and the FBI, four of the sources said. At Trump’s request, the CIA gave Olsen access to “intelligence related to the 2020 election,” a CIA official told Reuters. The official declined to detail the intelligence.
The probe comes as the Trump administration seeks to access state voter lists and to mandate rules for voter registration and voting systems – authorities the U.S. Constitution broadly grants to states to limit the concentration of federal power.
With Trump’s popularity dropping over rising prices and the Iran war, Republicans are expected to sustain losses in the November congressional midterms. That raises concerns among Democrats and election-integrity experts that the administration is laying groundwork to challenge the vote’s legitimacy.
The doubt Trump has cast on election integrity has gained broad traction with the American public, an April 20 Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle called the Reuters reporting “misinformation” from a “few disgruntled leakers,” adding it did not fully reflect the government’s effort to ensure “critical infrastructure across all risk sectors remains secure.” He did not answer questions about what else the administration was doing to secure upcoming U.S. elections. Olsen did not respond to requests for an interview.
Trump took Olsen’s deep-state allegations about Mojave seriously, two of the sources said.
In response, the company opened its books to show it took no money from Soros, according to a September 8 company statement to Gabbard that was seen by Reuters.
The statement called Olsen's Soros theory "patently absurd and ridiculous.”
Olsen advocated that the company’s work be terminated, which happened in October. Around that time, Trump appointed Olsen as Director of Election Security and Integrity. He works from the White House and reports to the president, the two sources said.
DNI officials said Mojave’s contract ended only because it had completed its voting machine analysis and that Gabbard would continue working on election security.
“We believe, strongly, that this work has been shelved for reasons that have nothing to do with the mission of ensuring every American can trust our election outcomes,” Mojave said in response to questions, without elaborating.
Soros' Open Society Foundations said in a statement to Reuters that neither he nor the organization had ever worked with or contracted Mojave Research and had never heard of the firm.
MILLER PUSHED FOR FBI INVOLVEMENT
Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller shared Olsen’s frustration at Mojave’s failure to prove vote manipulation in Puerto Rico, according to two of the sources, describing previously unreported details.
They described an October 3 White House meeting where the Mojave team and Gabbard briefed Miller, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on their forensic analysis of the machines in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory.
Miller, the sources said, pushed to expand the probe and involve the FBI.
In January, agents seized ballots in Georgia’s Fulton County in a raid attended by Gabbard that the FBI’s search warrant shows originated from an Olsen referral. In March, the FBI obtained via subpoena Arizona election records connected to a 2021, Republican‑ordered audit of Maricopa County that confirmed Trump’s loss.
Mojave started working with Olsen last spring. Mojave CEO Jason Wareham said Olsen fixated on allegations such as vote rigging in Arizona but never detailed any evidence. "I lost count the number of times Olsen said 'Maricopa is a crime scene,'" Wareham said in the statement the company wrote to ODNI in response to the allegations it was a Soros front.
Eventually, what Wareham described as Olsen’s “cacophony” of rumor and opinion led Mojave to stop working with him, he said in the statement.
Olsen initiated his probe focusing on a firmly debunked conspiracy theory – that code from Smartmatic USA Corp, a Florida-based company founded by Venezuelans, has allowed foreign manipulation of machines from Dominion Voting Systems, a separate company founded in Canada. Dominion machines were used in 27 states in 2024.
The theory draws on Dominion's 2010 acquisition of assets that previously belonged to Smartmatic. Despite the asset deal, Dominion and Smartmatic operated as two independent companies. Dominion was bought last year by a company called Liberty Vote.
Neither Liberty Vote nor Smartmatic responded to comment requests.
For all his efforts, Olsen has provided no clear evidence Dominion machines were ever manipulated, the three sources said. Reuters could not establish whether Olsen has since broadened the focus of his investigation.
LONG-KNOWN FLAWS, NOT HACKS
Mojave, the cybersecurity contractor, detected software flaws in the Puerto Rico Dominion machines, but no evidence they had been exploited.
Believing the vulnerabilities could affect machines elsewhere in the U.S., Mojave recommended a plan to address them. The company advised analysis of more machines, a task force to advise states on software patches, financial aid for that effort and penalties for states that refused. One source said it believed states would have to begin implementing the recommendations in May if they were to be completed by the November midterms.
Another of the sources said Mojave found issues similar to those highlighted in a 2021 analysis by Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer-science professor, and a 2022 advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. Those flaws affected a certain type of Dominion touchscreen voting system known as ImageCast X that was deployed in Georgia and three other states in 2020.
Like Mojave, neither Halderman nor CISA found evidence that the Dominion system had ever been hacked.
Dominion developed patches to address the vulnerabilities CISA identified in 2022. It is up to states to implement changes to their voting systems. Reuters could not establish which states had implemented the patches.
The three sources said they were not aware of any effort by the administration to address potential issues Mojave identified in Puerto Rico. “The administration has ignored real evidence of severe vulnerabilities," one of them said. The White House did not respond to a question about whether it planned to address anything flagged in the report. Puerto Rico’s election board did not respond to comment requests.
In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle a defamation case about the false vote-rigging claims involving Smartmatic. In 2024, conservative media outlet Newsmax agreed to pay $40 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Smartmatic, acknowledging that its claims the company had manipulated the 2020 election were “untrue.”
Halderman, the professor, told Reuters the idea of Smartmatic code in Dominion machines is “technically incoherent,” because products of the two companies are built on different platforms with different computer languages.
MEETING AT A TAMPA HOTEL
Olsen, however, stuck with the theory. On June 19, he met at least three former Smartmatic personnel at a Tampa hotel to discuss it, according to the three sources with knowledge of the session.
Also present at the meeting, which has not been previously reported, two of the sources said, was an FBI agent detailed to ODNI, a computer engineer from Olsen’s team and Andrew “Mac” Warner, an attorney and political appointee to the DOJ, who has claimed the CIA rigged the 2020 election. The DOJ did not respond to a question about Warner’s attendance.
The former Smartmatic employees offered no evidence that Dominion machines were hacked in any election, the sources said. Instead, they presented a computerized demonstration that claimed to show how a foreign actor could exploit Dominion equipment using a once highly classified hacking tool called “Eternal Blue” that was developed by the code-breaking U.S. National Security Agency, according to two of the sources.
The meeting followed shortly after ODNI’s May seizure of Dominion machines in Puerto Rico, which was first reported by Reuters.
In a series of briefings between June and October, Olsen pushed Mojave to look harder for suspicious code in the Puerto Rico machines, one of the sources said. When Mojave failed to find any trace of the code, the person said, Olsen repeatedly told the team it was “clearly doing it wrong.”
(Reporting by Jonathan Landay, Erin Banco and Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
