Markwayne Mullin, the new head of Homeland Security, arranged for a group promoting a debunked claim about election software linked to Venezuela being used to manipulate U.S. votes to meet with the Trump campaign three weeks before the 2024 election, Raw Story has learned.Martin Rodil, a Washington, D.C. area consultant, briefed Susie Wiles — then co-campaign manager and now chief of staff to President Donald Trump — at Mar-a-Lago in October 2024. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, has said Mullin, then a U.S. senator, arranged that meeting.Claims about election software supposedly controlled by Venezuelan leadership occupied a prominent place in failed lawsuits brought by lawyer Sidney Powell seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. Now, in the wake of the U.S. military strike against Venezuela and Republicans facing political headwinds in the upcoming midterm elections, Trump allies with the ear of the administration have begun to revive the claims.Byrne hailed the appointment of Mullin to lead DHS “as a fantastic decision by President Trump” in an X post earlier this month. He went on to say that Mullin “got my partner into” Mar-a-Lago in October 2024, and that his associate “spent three days briefing the team there on elections, Venezuela, and what had to be done November 5.” Byrne confirmed to Raw Story that his “partner” was Rodil.Byrne was out of the country at the time, and did not attend the meeting, but he described himself as part of a “three-man team,” along with Rodil and Gary Berntsen, a retired CIA senior operations officer, that assembled a package of information to present to the Trump campaign and Elon Musk. Berntsen, in turn, described Rodil in an interview with far-right podcaster Lara Logan as his “business partner,” adding that Byrne “bankrolled” a group of “Venezuelan whistleblowers” that he and Rodil assembled.An email to the White House Press Office seeking comment from Wiles for this story went unreturned.During his interview with Logan, which was published in November 2025 before the U.S. military attacked Venezuela and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, Berntsen claimed that the electronic election systems company Smartmatic, through the sale of a subsidiary to rival Dominion Voting Systems, gained “control” of more than 20 percent of the U.S. market, “primarily the swing states for electing president of the United States.” He went on to claim that Smartmatic has “two missions: number one, steal elections, and, number two, defeat audit.”The group claimed Smartmatic had originally been created in Venezuela to fix elections, and was controlled by Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.In a separate interview with Logan in January, Rodil claimed that Cuba, China, Russia and Iran have been manipulating U.S. elections through Venezuela-controlled election software."And they install their own software — the Venezuelan narco-software in that company," Rodil said. "So, for many years in the U.S., the American people have been voting on a software built on a cartel of drugs."A judge in Delaware ruled in September 2024 that those claims are false, writing that “statements regarding Smartmatic software or voting machines altering the results” of the 2020 election “are factually false” in a defamation lawsuit brought by the election technology company against the far-right network Newsmax.It is unclear whether Berntsen was present for the meeting with Wiles and Rodil, but in his interview with Logan, he described a presentation that matches the Mar-a-Lago meeting.“A month before the election, we showed it to the Trump people,” he said. “We went to them and gave them the brief. They looked at it in horror. And they had real concerns.”Berntsen and Byrne have said Trump himself is aware of their claims, and their assertion is backed up by a TruthSocial post in which the president amplified Logan’s interview with Berntsen.“We must focus all our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!” Trump wrote, while sharing a link to the video of Berntsen’s interview.Mullin opened to the doors at Mar-a-Lago to election deniersBoth Byrne and Berntsen said Mullin helped open doors for them at Mar-a-Lago.Byrne told Raw Story that prior to the Mar-a-Lago meeting, the team approached members of the House Freedom Caucus, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), before the 2024 election, but those members deemed the information to be “too radioactive.” In contrast, Byrne said, Mullin was willing to help.“That guy saved America because he was the one that got my partners into Mar-a-Lago,” Byrne said.Berntsen similarly praised Mullin as “one politician in America” who “was not afraid.”Mullin could not be reached for comment for this story, and an email to the Department of Homeland Security went unreturned.But in an interview with far-right podcaster Benny Johnson in December, Mullin signaled that he was open to considering unfounded claims that Venezuela could perpetrate fraud in...