459. Sofia Karstens repost: The CIA’s Own Document Contradicts the CIA

Sofia is also a Brownstone author and an activist in California who worked closely with publisher Tony Lyons and Robert F. Kennedy Jr on several projects, including Kennedy’s best-selling book: The Real Anthony Fauci. She collaborates with several organizations in the legal, legislative, medical science, and literary spaces, and she is co-founder of Spirit of 1776, which is building strategic infrastructure for the course correction in the form of fortifying human protections against interventions of all kinds and, under that tent, building the parallel alternatives for communities to thrive.

Sofia is also co-founder of Free Now Foundation, a non-profit preserving medical freedom and children’s health, the creator and host of the Patriot Network news show 4th Branch, the founder and treasurer of the Common Sense SuperPAC which supported Robert Kennedy’s bid for President, and the founder and current treasurer of the Decentralize America PAC, which focuses on legislative and judicial initiatives, grassroots lobbying, and supporting common sense candidates in both state and federal elections who focus on winding back corporate capture and corruption at all levels of government.

When I learned she was starting a Substack, I immediately asked if I could republish one of her first posts to help her acquire a readership. If you like it, please subscribe to her HERE. Her combination of brilliant writing and insight deserves to be widely heard. Even though I follow political material like this, it makes my head hurt. The most disconcerting part of it is that the forces arrayed against us are so dark and powerful.

The rest of this post is all Sofia’s. She would have dictated it, but had to get on an international flight.

In June 2026, the CIA declassified a five-page summary of intelligence reporting on Venezuela’s electronic voting manipulation capabilities, spanning 2004 to 2020. The document is heavily redacted. What survived redaction is still enough to raise questions the document itself doesn’t answer: if this much was worth declassifying, what’s still being withheld? And why does the agency’s document undermine its own baseline finding?

First, a 2006 National Security Council threat assessment evaluated Smartmatic’s acquisition of the U.S. voting systems company Sequoia as a “moderate overall threat to US national security interests.” The assessment rested on two pillars: intelligence indicating Venezuelan government intent to influence U.S. politics, and documented evidence that Venezuela had manipulated its own electoral systems. That finding led directly to pressure from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which forced Smartmatic to divest Sequoia by 2007.

Additionally, intelligence reporting from April 2004 indicated Hugo Chávez stated his objective was to prevent the reelection of a sitting U.S. president – language the document says the IC treated as evidence of intent to influence U.S. domestic politics, not merely Venezuelan politics.

Lastly, prior to Venezuela’s 2012 presidential election, intelligence reporting described Chávez’s intelligence services – military counterintelligence and the Bolivarian Intelligence Service – as working with the National Electoral Council and Smartmatic to develop a specific manipulation plan: deploying altered machines to roughly 300 voting centers in pro-Chávez strongholds to secure a margin of about 1.5 million votes. Sources reportedly said Chávez congratulated his team afterward for “successfully implementing” it. Separately, September 2020 reporting on Venezuela’s National Assembly election described a technical method: creating a second, parallel set of “virtual machines” that would replicate legitimate vote data while substituting manipulated results, engineered specifically to survive standard audit procedures.

That is a documented election-manipulation plan, and a documented manipulation method, from the same company whose voting systems now run some of the largest election jurisdictions in the United States.

The baseline assessment problem makes the document even harder to take at face value. Despite reporting a detailed 2012 manipulation plan, the CIA’s stated baseline assessment – repeated twice in five pages – “maintained that large-scale electronic fraud did not occur.” The stated reasoning: pre-election polling had Chávez ahead by roughly 10 points, government spending rose 24 percent before the vote, the opposition conceded, and CIA’s own quantitative analysis found no irregular voting patterns.

Notice what ISN’T doing the work in that reasoning: none of it is forensic examination of the machines or the vote data themselves. It’s circumstantial; polling, spending, concession. A candidate can win comfortably by legitimate means andhave intelligence services simultaneously execute a manipulation plan for a smaller margin; the document offers no forensic finding that rules out the latter, only inference that it wasn’t necessary. The document’s own 2013 “Devil’s Advocacy” analysis – an internal exercise built specifically to stress-test the baseline conclusion – acknowledged “conflicting” reporting and “limited insight into key elements of the electronic voting system”.

That same company now holds dominion (no pun intended) over the largest U.S. election jurisdiction. In June 2018, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously awarded Smartmatic USA a contract, capped at $282,097,321, to build LA County’s new “Voting Solutions for All People” (VSAP) ballot-marking system – the same Smartmatic named throughout the CIA’s Venezuela reporting. VSAP was certified and deployed in time for the 2020 presidential election, and Smartmatic has continued servicing it through 2024, by the company’s own account. LA County is the largest single election jurisdiction in the United States.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida have since indicted Smartmatic and its parent company, SGO, along with three former executives – including co-founder Roger Piñate Martinez – on bribery and money-laundering charges. Filings allege the company overbilled LA County on the $282 million contract and diverted the surplus into a “slush fund,” the same mechanism prosecutors say Smartmatic used to bribe an election official in a Philippines contract dispute. LA County’s own top elections official, Dean Logan, has acknowledged regularly meeting with Piñate during this period.

So the same company the CIA assessed in 2006 as a “moderate” national security threat and reported in 2012 as having developed and executed a specific vote-manipulation plan, held a quarter-billion-dollar, sole-source contract to build ballot-marking infrastructure for the largest U.S. jurisdiction in time for the 2020 election… and is now under federal indictment for financial misconduct tied to that exact contract. Yet the agency’s own baseline finding was that neither Smartmatic nor the Venezuelan government had ‘the level of control or access required’ to manipulate an election outcome outside Venezuela.

It’s worth asking why that finding sits confidently on the same page as a documented, executed manipulation plan for a different election by the same actor. It’s also fair to ask what remains in the redacted sections of a document whose own scope note describes it as covering only “select” intelligence documents from a sixteen-year span, not a full accounting. The CIA declassified enough to confirm a threat assessment, a manipulation plan, and a technical method… it has not yet explained why its confidence in the “no fraud” conclusion outpaces the forensic evidence it cites for that conclusion, nor has it said what else, from the same reporting stream, is still classified.

In October 2022, LA County’s DA arrested Konnech CEO Eugene Yu, alleging the company illegally stored American poll workers’ personal identifying information on servers in China – a direct violation of its county contract. That arrest was the product of county investigators who said internal Konnech communications acknowledged storing PII outside the United States even as Yu had separately sworn in a signed affidavit that no such data left the country.

Fishily, charges were dropped a month later, with the DA’s office citing “potential bias” in how the investigation had been conducted – without saying whose bias, or resolving whether the underlying PII allegations were true or false. LA County went on to pay Konnech a $5 million settlement in 2024 over the prosecution, even though, according to on-record questioning from a county supervisor at the time, the internal investigations into the matter had not been completed before the county agreed to pay. Despite the arrest, the settlement, and the unresolved questions, Konnech remained LA County’s largest customer throughout.

Former CIA officer Sam Faddis has gone on record warning that Konnech granted “superadministrator” access – the highest level of system privilege available – to contractors based in China, a practice he flagged as a plausible spyware and data-theft vector.

Domain registration records add to that concern. On July 31, 2015, Konnech CEO Eugene Yu personally registered the domain hongzhengtech.cn – the website of Jinhua Hongzheng Technology, described in outside reporting as the premier voting-technology provider for China’s National People’s Congress – to the email address [email protected], giving Konnech administrative control over a Chinese state election vendor’s website. That finding has been independently reported by Blaze Media, which confirmed the underlying WHOIS record, in addition to earlier reporting from KanekoaTheGreat and World Tribune.

Konnech.cn itself was registered to [email protected], tying Yu personally, not merely corporately, to both entities. Patent records show a further concrete link: in October 2015, rights to a patented “system and data processing method for network voting of absent electorates” were transferred from Jinhua Konnech, Inc. to Jinhua Hongzheng Technology Co., Ltd. – an intellectual-property transfer between a Konnech-linked entity and a company that builds voting technology for the Chinese Communist Party’s national legislature.

Hongzheng Technology is also reported to partner with Lenovo, Huawei, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile – three of which are formally designated national security threats by the FCC. Konnech’s own corporate lineage includes a further subsidiary, Jinhua Yulian, which the New York Times confirmed Konnech once owned. Outside reporting confirms the subsidiary to have bid on Chinese government election-technology contracts and to carry links to a Huawei-affiliated firm; relevant given that Huawei’s telecommunications equipment is separately restricted in the U.S. on national security grounds. An archived 2013 version of the subsidiary’s own site described its purpose: “election management software and election consulting services” tailored to China’s political conditions.

This is a documented case of a vendor holding sensitive U.S. election-worker data, granting high-level system access to China-based personnel, facing a criminal case that its own county later suggested it hadn’t finished investigating before paying to make go away – and continuing to serve as a vendor to jurisdictions across the country, including in swing states, throughout.

A separate set of declassified internal emails from Dominion Voting Systems, dated across March and April 2020, is worth noting. The emails show named Dominion personnel – including Eric Coomer, then the company’s director of product strategy and security, along with senior systems manager Ronald Morales and EVP of operations Nicole Nollette – coordinating the buildout of VPN access into two county election networks in the weeks immediately surrounding the 2020 election. The exchanges document operational details: two-factor authentication was explicitly discussed and found “not possible” on either county’s VPN network at the time; a shared virtual machine was built specifically to give Dominion staff a remote path into county servers; and the county IT administrators, per Dominion’s own staff, “could trace the VPN connections that we are making into their networks” – phrasing that establishes traceability after the fact, not real-time oversight during the connection itself. One email also references credentials for the remote systems being stored in a shared file.

This paints a picture of a loosely governed, vendor remote-access practice… shared virtual machines, incomplete two-factor authentication, and after-the-fact traceability rather than real-time monitoring, all documented in a voting-system vendor’s own internal correspondence during the run-up to a presidential election.

Strip away everything else, and the disclosure comes down to one document arguing with itself. The CIA’s baseline assessment – stated twice, in confident, declarative language – is that “large-scale electronic fraud did not occur” in Venezuela’s 2012 election. But that conclusion sits four paragraphs away from the agency’s own account of a detailed, sourced manipulation plan: which centers were targeted, how many machines, what margin it was built to produce, and reporting that Chávez congratulated his team for executing it. And it sits on the same page as the CIA’s own 2013 “Devil’s Advocacy” analysis, which concluded that if the plan had worked, other countries that are clients of the technology provider could be in doubt. The agency did not write that sentence about a hypothetical, it wrote it about Smartmatic’s actual other clients, in an actual internal analysis, and then filed it four pages behind a “no fraud occurred” conclusion built on polling and spending data rather than forensic examination of the machines themselves. The document’s most confident sentences outrun the evidence sitting right next to them. That gap – between what the CIA says it concluded and what the CIA’s own reporting actually shows – is the reason the redacted portions of this document matter more than anything that survived declassification.

If the agency knew this much about a single vendor’s conduct in Venezuela, and that same vendor went on to build election infrastructure for America’s largest county, the honest question isn’t whether something happened here. It’s what else the intelligence community already knows, and hasn’t yet told the public, because the CIA just wrote the case against its own conclusion.

Recommend Sofia Karstens to your readers

Intersection of media and politics. Co-Founder Spirit of 1776. Founder Decentralize America PAC. Co-Founder Free Now Foundation. Brownstone Author. Host of 4th Branch. Subscribe to her HERE.

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