A team working under Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard probed Puerto Rico’s voting machines in May 2025, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
The aim of the operation was to work alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to look into allegations that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, but the investigation ultimately found no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference in the U.S. territory’s elections, Reuters reported, citing three anonymous sources. Gabbard’s office confirmed the investigation in a statement to Reuters but denied any connection to Venezuela, saying the focus was on vulnerabilities in the island’s electronic voting systems.
As part of the probe, Gabbard’s team seized an undisclosed number of Puerto Rico voting machines along with additional data copies, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told Reuters, adding that collecting voting machines and data is “standard practice in forensics analysis.”
Gabbard’s office added that “ODNI found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections,” Reuters reported.
“Given ODNI’s broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security and our known work on understanding vulnerabilities to foreign and other malign interference, ODNI conducted an examination of electronic voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s elections,” an ODNI spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation in part of a statement.
“Among the obvious issues ODNI identified was the configuration of extensive use of cellular modems throughout the voting system architecture that actively connected to cellular networks outside of the United States,” the spokesperson continued.
The ODNI spokesperson also told the DCNF that “some of these vulnerabilities have been made public before through CISA reporting and during the Def Con Voting Machine Hacking Village, which found that [many] widely used voting machines can be easily attacked through insecure hardware, exposed ports, weak or disabled protections, and the ability to run unauthorized code.”
“This is an ODNI led inquiry that continues to be synchronized with [the] DOJ, DHS, and FBI,” the spokesperson added. “ODNI is currently coordinating with our partners across the U.S. government to provide the findings from our inquiry to agencies that can take actions to improve the security of our system.”
Venezuela’s government could not immediately be reached for comment.
Gabbard was not on-site during the investigation in Puerto Rico, her office told the outlet. The operation involved the FBI field office in southern Florida whose agents were working with a team supervised by Gabbard that was probing potential threats to U.S. election security, two of the anonymous sources told Reuters.
The group included U.S. national security officials, law enforcement agents and government contractors, the sources added, per the outlet.
ODNI told Reuters the U.S. Attorney in Puerto Rico, his team of homeland security investigations agents as well as an FBI supervisory special agent had “facilitated the voluntary turnover of electronic voting hardware and software to ODNI for analysis.”
Additionally, the FBI conducted a search warrant on Jan. 28 at an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, aiming to seize ballots in an investigation connected to the 2020 presidential election, CBS News reported on Jan. 29, citing an anonymous source. Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey and Gabbard were notably both present outside of the Georgia elections office late that night, per CBS News.
Officials in Fulton County filed a motion on Wednesday seeking to regain election records seized by federal agents at the election office.
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