Dear President Trump,
As a retired CIA operations officer with over two decades in the field, including leading the hunt for Osama bin Laden and serving as station chief in multiple high-threat environments, I have confronted existential threats to our nation. Today, I write to you not as a partisan, but as a patriot who, alongside my partner Martin Rodil, uncovered one of the most sophisticated criminal conspiracies in history.
This conspiracy—detailed in Ralph Pezzullo’s explosive new book Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide—threatens the very foundation of American democracy: the integrity of our elections.
For four years, Martin Rodil and I fought off an army of people from within the Biden Administration determined to stop our investigation. This was difficult. What has been more shocking, though, is the people inside your Department of Justice, Intelligence Community, and National Security Council who have done everything possible to block and smear Mr. Rodil and me. It has been disgraceful. Despite this relentless opposition from within our own government, the investigation you launched is slowly peeling back the layers of what Pezzullo meticulously documents.
Mr. President, the clock is running out. The 2026 midterm elections are just seven months away. States cannot flip a switch overnight. Transitioning to secure, hand-counted paper ballots will require procurement, training, and testing. Every day of delay risks another stolen election.
You alone possess the authority to act decisively. Invoke Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), the framework that established our national critical infrastructure protection system. In 2017, consistent with PPD-21, the Department of Homeland Security designated election infrastructure as a critical subsector of government facilities.
As President, you can enforce this designation to its full extent. Issue an immediate executive directive banning all electronic voting machines and tabulators containing hardware manufactured in China or Taiwan. Why?
Because, as Pezzullo documents, these machines are white-labeled products: assembled outside Beijing, shipped to Taiwan for rebranding as “Taiwanese-made,” then exported to the United States in violation of law.
The proprietary source code—developed in Venezuela under Hugo Chávez with Cuban intelligence assistance—remains under the control of the Venezuelan regime and its narco-state allies. That same code, first deployed to rig Chávez’s 2004 recall referendum, has been embedded in U.S. systems through companies like Smartmatic and Dominion since at least 2006. Pezzullo’s book, drawing on sworn testimony from Venezuelan engineers who built the system, reveals fourteen distinct technical methods to alter vote tallies remotely, erase audit trails, and evade detection.
The conspiracy has since expanded to include China, Iran, and Serbia, turning our elections into a multibillion-dollar grift. What it exposes is staggering: electronic election theft is not a glitch or a “conspiracy theory.” It is the greatest grift in history, worth tens of billions of dollars in stolen power and influence. Foreign adversaries and their domestic enablers have turned our democracy into a rigged casino.
Mr. President, only you can stop the destruction of our republic. States must be ordered to transition immediately to paper ballots—counted by hand in public view, with bipartisan observers. No more proprietary black boxes. No more foreign hardware. No more Venezuelan code. The American people deserve elections they can trust.
At the end of your presidency, saving our democracy will stand as your greatest achievement—even more vital than destroying Iranian ballistic missiles. You will have defeated the hardest threat of all: the insider threat. The foreign-backed insiders who have hollowed out our electoral system from within, including those who tried to silence the very investigators exposing the plot.
The men and women who built this country did not risk their lives for a democracy that could be stolen by algorithms and foreign supply chains. History will record whether we defended the ballot box with the same resolve we have shown on the battlefield.
Mr. President, act now. The republic is watching.
Sincerely,
Gary Berntsen
Retired CIA Officer
Co-whistleblower, Stolen Elections: The Takedown of Democracies Worldwide
The claims and allegations expressed in this opinion submission are solely those of the author and have not been independently verified by The Dallas Express.
