Trump-Brazil Plot to Steal 2020 Election Appears to Have Been "Plan B" After Failure of Trump-Ukraine Collusion
A picture is emerging of how Trump and his top allies sought to use manufactured evidence from South America to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election.
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Introduction
Unbeknownst to most news consumers in America, the two reports on Trump-Brazil collusion at Proof—both relating to the January 6 insurrection—produced an ongoing congressional inquiry in Brazil, and substantial coverage in the Brazilian press on the Bolsonaro government’s possible involvement in Donald Trump’s ongoing domestic insurgency. A new investigative report emanating from the coverage of the scandal in Brazil now inflects our understanding of it substantially, as it helps position the de facto Brazilian ambassador on January 6 at the heart of a plot to steal a U.S. election.
The story behind this new report begins—as do so many stories of Donald Trump’s clandestine activities in South America—not in Brazil but its neighbor to the north, Venezuela.
Trump and Venezuela
As discussed in Chapter 12 of national bestseller Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), by the final eighteen months of his presidency Trump had trusted agents working on clandestine outreach to both Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and Venezuela’s opposition leader (the U.S.-recognized President of Venezuela), Juan Guaidó. The team included Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, whose most lucrative client was and remains Venezuelan oligarch Alejandro Betancourt, a man associated with both Maduro and Guaidó; Erik Prince, who secretly negotiated with representatives of both Maduro and Guaidó, thereafter claiming that both the Trump White House and the State Department (run by former Central Intelligence Agency chief Mike Pompeo) were aware of his secret talks in Venezuela; Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), one of Trump’s top allies in Congress, and the catalyst for Giuliani being brought into negotiations with Maduro’s team even as the United States was leveling crippling sanctions against the latter’s brutal regime; Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman who is now under federal indictment for financial crimes, and has confessed to working with both Trump and his team to acquire manufactured evidence from foreign nationals in order to steal the 2020 election; and at least one Trump mega-donor also from Florida, the billionaire oil magnate Harry Sargeant III, who at various points helped fund Parnas’ endeavors.
One might wonder why Donald Trump’s agents were secretly playing both sides of the Maduro-Guaidó tilt, given that the official policy of the United States throughout the clandestine negotiations Team Trump had with Maduro was to exclusively support Mr. Guaidó’s claim to Venezuela’s presidency. As established in Proof of Corruption, the focus of Team Trump in Venezuela during these talks was on one thing and one thing only: Venezuelan elections. According to Reuters and other major-media outlets that have since reported on Trump’s clandestine activities in Venezuela, the question on the table for Rudy Giuliani and Erik Prince in particular—note, men with intelligence backgrounds; indeed, Trump even named Giuliani his first cybersecurity czar in 2017, despite the former mayor’s long history of embarrassing security lapses like this—was whether the Trump administration would agree to new elections in Venezuela under a framework caredesigned to ensure (allegedly) that Maduro couldn’t cheat to win it.
Trump’s agents had enormous leverage with Maduro, of course, given the impact of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela—admittedly, sanctions blunted by Trump’s Russian (Vladimir Putin), Saudi (MBS), and Emirati (MBZ) allies, who repeatedly circumvented America’s sanctions on Venezuela with no response by the Trump administration—and the fact that the United States had joined most of the West in recognizing Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. The premise that the Trump White House might accept new elections in Venezuela, thereby pulling back on its prior unambiguous and unconditional support for Guaidó’s claim, would have been alluring to Maduro’s team.
The remaining question, of course, is what Trump, Giuliani, Prince, Sessions, Parnas, and Sargeant would have wanted from Maduro in exchange. Trump—famously venal, focused almost entirely on his own re-election odds and the bottom line of the Trump Organization—had just begun focusing on the 2020 presidential election as his most unscrupulous allies began seeking a secret “elections deal” in Caracas with Maduro.
Trump and Brazil
Trump’s relationship with the Office of the Presidency in Brazil was as uncomplicated as his relationship with that political post in Venezuela was fraught. From the moment Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, he was one of Trump’s biggest international boosters. Immediately the subject of allegations of corruption (as well as racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a publicly expressed desire to murder his political opponents) Bolsonaro was also the scion of a family facing as many public corruption allegations as he himself—to include his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, who quickly became a Trump family friend and a close ally and agent (and I use the latter word advisedly) of 2016 Trump campaign CEO and 2020 post-election presidential adviser Steve Bannon.
While the U.S. and Brazil enjoy a strong trading relationship, no one would confuse the 45th President of the United States for a man with a strong grasp of (or interest in) South America, where the Trump Organization’s business forays have been muted in comparison to his efforts in Europe, the former Soviet republics, Russia, China, and the Middle East. So on what basis did the Trumps and the Bolsonaros—including Trump, his daughter-cum-top political adviser Ivanka Trump, her husband (also a top political adviser) Jared Kushner, and Jair and Eduardo Bolsonaro—become so close?
The answer, yet again, is Venezuela. Specifically, the subject of elections in Venezuela.
That’s Donald Trump’s anticipated personal benefit from his dealings in Venezuela was something other than the one sanctioned by official U.S. foreign policy is clear. For reasons that remain murky, Trump believed there was a benefit he could derive from clandestine dealings in that country—notably, a top Kremlin ally—that couldn’t be publicly acknowledged or in any way advanced by career diplomats inside the State Department. Presumably, the corrupt Bolsonaros could be trusted with some inkling of Trump’s ambitions with respect to the internal affairs of Brazil’s neighbor to the north.
In March of 2020, as he prepared for the 2020 general election and was—as detailed extensively in Proof of Corruption—using many elements of his Venezuela team to try to extract manufactured evidence about the Biden family from Ukrainian nationals, Trump met at Mar-a-Lago, and notably not the White House, with Jair Bolsonaro.
Their primary topic of their discussion? Venezuela. Specifically, per Bloomberg, “the US-led effort to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.”
The question, of course, is whether Donald Trump invited a family friend to his private residence simply to lie to him about his intentions in Venezuela, regaling his confidant with false claims about America’s public diplomacy in Venezuela while never revealing that his attorney (Giuliani), his attorney’s agent and client (Parnas), a top 2016 and 2020 national security adviser (Prince), one of his top mega-donors (Sargeant), and one of his top allies in Congress (Sessions) were trying to cut a secret deal with the Bolsonaros’ enemy—Maduro—intelligence that the Bolsonaros likely would have had anyway, given that their nation’s intelligence activities are significantly focused on Venezuela.
The BLT Prime Team and the Venezuela Gang
As detailed in Proof of Corruption, in 2019 and 2020 a cadre of trusted Trump agents and allies met regularly in the BLT Prime restaurant in Trump International Hotel to plot the theft of the 2020 presidential election via manufactured evidence received from foreign allies. The members of this “BLT Prime Team” included two members of the group of Trump agents and allies secretly working on Trump’s behalf in Venezuela: Giuliani and Parnas. Others on the Team included Trump legal advisers Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing; two agents and proxies of Devin Nunes, Derek Harvey and Kash Patel; professional propagandist John Solomon; and Lev Parnas associates David Correia and Igor Fruman (the former is now imprisoned, the latter under indictment).
The Team’s ties to Trump’s Venezuela scheme weren’t limited to Giuliani and Parnas, however. During the pendency of Giuliani’s plot to help Trump steal the 2020 election via contact with corrupt Ukrainian officials (see Proof of Corruption), he was aided by his Venezuelan client, Betancourt, who provided him with funding, lodging, and logistical support as the Trump lawyer sought to meet corrupt pro-Trump Ukrainians.
But the ties between the BLT Prime Team and the Venezuela Gang go far beyond this. Toensing and diGenova, who run a law practice together, are Erik Prince’s lawyers. At points Giuliani has acted as both the attorney for, and the employer of, Igor Fruman. Giuliani, Toensing, and diGenova are longtime friends—and all three are friends with former Trump Attorney General William Barr. Harry Sargeant III and Lev Parnas were in regular text communication, and Sargeant III sought to directly aid Giuliani and Parnas’ clandestine efforts in Ukraine. And Toensing and diGenova were at once representing Trump propagandist John Solomon, the oligarch (Dmitry Firtash of Ukraine) who planned to help Trump manufacture evidence against Joe Biden if Toensing and diGenova’s good friend, Barr, would drop a U.S. criminal case against him, and (as noted) a man secretly negotiating Nicolás Maduro’s team, Erik Prince.
In short, Trump’s scheme involving the leadership of enemies Brazil and Venezuela—whatever its precise contours—not only occurred during the same period of time his agents were seeking manufactured evidence in Ukraine from foreign nationals to help him win the 2020 presidential election, but also involved the same web of individuals.
After the 2020 election, however, a third group arrived in Trump’s orbit to transition his failed efforts in Ukraine toward a new target: extracting manufactured evidence from Venezuela instead.
Team Kraken
The members of Team Kraken—so named, here, because one of them used the term “Kraken” (a mythical leviathan) to describe pro-Trump litigation intended to prove the 2020 presidential election was stolen via electronic voting machines rigged under the auspices of the Venezuelans—include the aforementioned Giuliani, Prince, Toensing, and diGenova, as well as Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn, Lin Wood, and Michael Lindell.
As we can readily see, Team Kraken overlapped extensively with the BLT Prime Team (in Giuliani, Toensing, and diGenova) and the Venezuela Gang (in Giuliani and Prince). Flynn is an associate of Prince’s, and was represented by Powell in his federal criminal case, which ended with Powell securing a pardon from Trump. Wood is an associate and ally of Powell’s, occasionally releasing documents post-election on Powell’s behalf.
The wild card here—and ultimately the weak link in the narrative—is Mr. Lindell, the eccentric college dropout, former crack addict and Vegas card counter and bartender and carpet-cleaning business owner and pig farmer and lunch wagon operator, who is now a pillow salesman. If the three overlapping teams working to extract a Trump election win via Ukraine and/or Venezuela were populated by corrupt lawyers and corrupt intelligence operators and corrupt businessmen—as well as mid-level agents acting on behalf of and in concert with corrupt lawyers, corrupt intelligence operators, and corrupt businessmen—Lindell was the one Trump agent who stood out from the group. Unlike the other team members, Lindell has described himself as being, for much of his life, both fundamentally apolitical and a man of faith. He also appears to be a true believer in conspiracy theories, whereas his many co-conspirators have long histories of using conspiracy theories they themselves concocted to control political narratives (Flynn’s QAnon encouragement and exploitation being an example of this).
What Lindell’s associates didn’t anticipate was how thoughtlessly he’d betray their plot.
Michael Lindell
The following account is taken from three Facebook livestreams that Michael Lindell posted on Insurrection Day, reported on by Media Matters for America’s Olivia Little.
According to Lindell,
(1) He was originally scheduled to speak at the Ellipse on January 6 alongside Trump. Instead, Giuliani spoke as the representative of Team Kraken, flanked by former law professor John Eastman. It is remarkable, though, that up until just a couple hours before Trump’s now-infamous “incitement to insurrection” speech he was intending to let Lindell spread conspiracy theories about Venezuela to a frenzied pro-Trump mob.
(2) Lindell had seen all the evidence assembled by Team Kraken, and he claimed that it involved a Venezuelan plot. In his livestreams, always Lindell uses the first-person plural pronoun “we” to denote Team Kraken, noting that “all the evidence we have [that the 2020 election was stolen] is just overwhelming.” He quickly clarifies that the evidence in question involved “those [voting] machines” that other members of Team Kraken—most notably, Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell—had said were loaded with illegal vote-switching Smartmatic software of Venezuelan origin. “The news that’s going to come out in the next few days is going to be absolutely amazing”, Lindell tells his livestream viewers, noting that what remains uncertain is whether Congress will establish a “committee” to “subpoena” the allegedly Venezuela-hacked machines. This is key because it underscores that the only pending evidence of fraud being sought by Team Kraken on January 6—or at any point in the first week of January—involved Venezuela, not the Team’s myriad false allegations of voting irregularities involving deceased, juvenile, imprisoned, or otherwise ineligible voters in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That evidence, Lindell noted, the Team already had. Indeed, what Giuliani would ask for in his speech at the Ellipse was “ten days” to focus specifically on alleged Venezuelan efforts to steal the election via illicit software.
(3) Having met on the evening of January 5 with at least three United States Senators to discuss their plans for January 6—a conversation that had already been confirmed on Facebook, the night before, by Trump donor Daniel Beck, who also attended the meeting—Lindell says that GOP losses in the two January 5 special elections in Georgia were helpful to Trump. Lindell says the following to his livestream viewers:
“Everybody have peace [be at peace] about those [United States] senators [David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler]. Those senators that lost [on January 5] in Georgia, that’s actually going to put a lot of pressure on the—ah—on everything, so I view it [those two election losses] as, in a way, a good thing, because I didn’t want people getting complacent. There were [U.S.] senators that were ready to go [to the Capitol on January 6 and] vote the other way…”
Though he seems to be trying to avoid saying it at first—that “ah” is very telling, as it comes as Lindell was about to say, apparently, “the Senate”; and Lindell is unclear on which “people” he worried would get complacent if Republicans maintained control of the Senate after the two Georgia special elections—Lindell soon drops any pretense of discretion, thereby establishing a damning sequence of events:
Pre-January 5: Lindell is worried that GOP senators will become “complacent” if Perdue and Loeffler win and Republicans maintain Senate control—an outcome that might cause Republicans to be less concerned about losing the White House.
January 5 (day): The Georgia runoff elections occur, and Perdue and Loeffler lose.
January 5 (night): Lindell meets with at least three Republican U.S. senators at Trump International Hotel, one of whom is Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)—the very senator who agrees to challenge at least five states on January 6 (and who, on Insurrection Day, Giuliani telephones to ask that he challenge ten states, instead).
January 6 (early morning): Lindell says on his livestream that the election losses by Perdue and Loeffler the night before were “in a way a good thing” because now certain senators who were “ready to go vote the other way”, meaning for the certification of Biden’s 2020 election victory, are now (Lindell indicates he had been assured) going to vote to block that constitutional certification, instead.
It is impossible to imagine that between 5PM on January 5 and 7AM on January 6 the intelligence Lindell got about the thinking of Republicans in the U.S. Senate was not taken at least in part from the conversations he was party to involving three such senators in the evening of January 5. Some leaps in logic are dangerous to make; this one is not, and would certainly represent the working “theory of the case” for any federal criminal investigator. {Note: Lindell opines on the morning of January 6 that the Senate is “corrupt”—perhaps a telling conclusion for him to draw after meeting secretly with three U.S. senators.}
(4) Lindell wants his viewers to know that Team Kraken’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory are known and understood by international partners. Specifically, he says:
The whole world is watching [what will happen on January 6]. I met with Brazil last night—the President of Brazil, his son [Eduardo Bolsonaro]. And they—{here Lindell is interrupted by a passerby calling “hello” to him, and he does not finish his original sentence}.
What is most fascinating about this quote—apart from Lindell saying that the son of the President of Brazil was at Trump International Hotel with him on the evening of January 5—are actually the words, “And they—.” Why? Because Lindell was about to (before he was congenially interrupted by a passing pedestrian) characterize the view of the Bolsonaros on what was taking place in the United States. The clear implication of Lindell’s words is that (a) he spoke with Eduardo Bolsonaro directly, and (b) Eduardo Bolsonaro (at the time the de facto Brazilian ambassador to the United States, as the then-current ambassador, Nestor Forster Jr., was leaving his post, having only gained it because Eduardo chose to withdraw from his father’s controversial nomination of him for the role) communicated to Team Kraken the position of Brazil’s government on their efforts at a secret pre-insurrection meeting at Trump International Hotel.
(5) Lindell was with other members of Team Kraken at Trump International Hotel at the time he met with Eduardo Bolsonaro. Per Lindell’s second January 6 livestream:
I just wanted to get back here [on Facebook livestream] and tell everybody [watching] that I spent the last two days—actually, the last two months—but the last two days with [Team Kraken members] Sidney Powell, General [Michael] Flynn, [and U.S.] senators. So I was right in—I’ve seen the evidence. That’s why I have the confidence I have [that, as he had just assured his viewers, “100%, Donald Trump is our president for the next four years”].
Not only does Lindell place himself and the Brazilian president’s son with two leading members of Team Kraken on the night before the insurrection, he also puts multiple U.S. senators in those exchanges, meaning both that these senators would have been in contact with Powell and Flynn (and possibly Bolsonaro) and that they would have seen “the evidence” Lindell spoke of in his livestream—which wasn’t about voter fraud but vote-switching software whose use had allegedly been effectuated by the Venezuelans.
Is it possible that Bolsonaro—whose family almost certainly has the best intelligence on activities inside Venezuela of any assemblage of persons in the world—was hearing on January 5 for the first time about Powell’s allegations regarding his family’s chief enemy, Nicolás Maduro? Certainly it’s possible, though it’s hard to credit the son of the President of Brazil flying to America for the most important day of his friend Donald Trump’s political life, attending a secret meeting at Trump’s private residence in D.C., knowing more about the goings-on in Venezuela than anyone in the room and then being lectured to by a former federal prosecutor from Texas (Sidney Powell) about alleged developments in a country bordering his own and coordinated by his family’s sworn enemy. Indeed, if Bolsonaro flew from Brazil just to hear a presentation from Powell for the first time, why lie about his trip afterward and say he was merely in the United States on “vacation”? It takes no great leap of logic to presume that Bolsonaro was more likely to lead a conversation on Nicolás Maduro than be a mere witness to it.
(6) Lindell says that Trump was personally briefed by Team Kraken about its alleged Venezuela evidence just 96 hours before the insurrection. Per Lindell on January 6,
They [Powell, Flynn, and the senators he spoke to] are all confident [the 2020 election will be overturned]. The president—I talked to him four days ago [January 2]—he’s confident. We [Team Kraken] got to the vice president [Mike Pence] with a note to him. So everyone just be very hopeful this morning, because it’s definitely going to be a historical [sic] day.
This is astounding for a few reasons. Most notably, it means that Lindell and possibly other members of Team Kraken spoke directly to Trump about Maduro and Venezuela just 48 hours before the chief expert on Venezuela in Trump’s personal, professional, and political orbit—Eduardo Bolsonaro—arrived in D.C. and went to the White House (see the first two links in this article) under the ruse of introducing his baby to Ivanka Trump. That meeting, which most assuredly had nothing to do with a “surprise visit” to introduce a baby to “Aunt Ivanka” as Eduardo would later claim, is pictured below.
Of course, we now know Eduardo Bolsonaro didn’t stop at meeting with the Trumps at the White House. Hours later, he was at Trump International Hotel with Team Kraken. So did Bolsonaro’s presence at the latter meeting, and his clear expertise on Venezuela generally and Maduro specifically, dissuade Team Kraken from proceeding with a plan to have Trump seize voting machines in battleground states and declare martial law?
No. Within eleven days of his meeting with Bolsonaro to discuss Venezuela at Trump International Hotel—and just 120 hours after Bolsonaro’s departure from the United States, following a second meeting at the White House, this time with Jared Kushner (see links atop this article)—Michael Lindell would be in the Oval Office lobbying Trump to declare martial law using the same conspiracy theory about Venezuela he’d discussed in a group that included the son of the President of Brazil just days earlier.
Proof can’t yet determine why the Bolsonaro family appears to have done nothing—across two White House meetings and a meeting at Trump’s private residence in D.C. that spanned the pre-insurrection period, Insurrection Day, and the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—to dissuade Trump or his agents from their conspiracy theory about Brazil’s enemies to the north. But suffice to say, the possibilities include (among much else) three plausible scenarios: (1) the Bolsonaros assisted Team Kraken with extracting intel from Venezuelan defectors (see below); (2) the Bolsonaros had nothing to do with the activities of Team Kraken, but saw domestic political benefit in having one of America’s two major political parties in thrall to the false notion that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 presidential election; (3) while Eduardo and his father had nothing to do with the intelligence-gathering activities of Team Kraken and believed their conspiracy theory lacked merit, they showed support for it anyway in order to maintain good relations with Trump in the event he remained president.
What’s difficult to imagine is any scenario in which Bolsonaro’s presence in the United States during an insurrection—and more to the point, his involvement in at least three high-level meetings with Trump and his allies in 120 hours—was something besides an attempt to encourage and aid what the Brazilians would have known was an attempt to introduce Venezuela into U.S. politics as a leading and not tangential geopolitical foe.
Four men not yet discussed would have been critical to this clandestine effort: Trump donor Daniel Beck (along with his father, Doyle Beck, and his father’s friend, Layne Bangerter) and an unidentified man claiming to be a Venezuelan defector who used to work as a security guard for a long-dead socialist Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chávez.
The Mystery Defector
Roughly two weeks after the 2020 election, a key member of Team Kraken, Lin Wood—who would later claim that not only did Trump win the presidential election, but that, as of May 2021, he is still secretly the President of the United States, and has full access to America’s nuclear codes—filed a document with a federal court that had somehow been obtained by Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor with no obvious means of extracting intelligence from South America outside her client Michael Flynn (former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Donald Trump’s top intelligence adviser still today) and Flynn’s “Venezuela Gang” associate Erik Prince, who had pre-election been in direct clandestine contact with the Venezuelans, allegedly with the permission (as noted above) of Trump’s White House and Pompeo’s State Department.
{Note: Erik Prince has a long history of manufacturing evidence for Trump’s political use, most famously in his false claims, via Eduardo Bolsonaro pal Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, several days prior to the 2016 presidential election, that he had spoken to NYPD officers in possession of criminally inculpatory evidence relating to Hillary Clinton. He was also, we now know from the New York Times, behind a Project Veritas-run domestic intelligence operation intended to entrap the then-sitting National Security Advisor of the United States, H.R. McMaster.}
The document was extraordinary—and would be widely reported as having to do with Hugo Chávez. But this was misleading; in fact, the thrust of the document had to do with the very subject that the Venezuela Gang had been tackling in Venezuela, and that Trump had been discussing with Jair Bolsonaro, and that (of course) Team Kraken had discussed with both Trump and the Bolsonaros: Maduro and Venezuelan elections.
Per the affidavit (which, to be clear, there’s no reason to think is true in any particular):
On April 14, 2013, I witnessed another Venezuelan national election in which the Smartmatic Electoral Management System was used to manipulate and change the results for the person to succeed Hugo Chávez. In that election, Nicolás Maduro ran against Capriles Radonsky. {The next sentence or sentences is redacted.} Inside that location was a control room in which there were multiple digital display screens—TV screens—for results of voting in each state in Venezuela. The actual voting results were fed into that room and onto the displays over an internet feed, which was connected to a sophisticated computer system created by Smartmatic. People in that room were able to see in “real time” whether the vote that came through the electronic voting system was in their favor or against them. If one looked at any particular screen, they could determine that the vote from any specific area or as a national total was going against either candidate. Persons controlling the vote tabulation computer had the ability to change the reporting of votes by moving votes from one candidate to another by using the Smartmatic software.
By two o’clock in the afternoon on that election day, Capriles Radonsky was ahead of Nicolás Maduro by two million votes. When Maduro and his supporters realized the size of Radonsky’s lead, they were worried that they were in a crisis mode and would lose the election. The Smartmatic machines used for voting in each state were connected to the internet and reported their information over the internet to the Caracas control center in real time. So, the decision was made to reset the entire system. Maduro and his supporters ordered the network controllers to take the internet itself offline in practically all parts in Venezuela and to change the results. It took the voting system operators approximately two hours to make the adjustments in the vote from Radonsky to Maduro. Then, when they turned the internet back on and the on-line reporting was up and running again, they checked each screen state by state to be certain where they could see that each vote was changed in favor of Maduro. At that moment the Smartmatic system changed votes that were for Capriles Radonsky to Maduro. By the time the system operators finish, they had achieved a convincing but narrow victory of 200,000 votes for Maduro.
{Note: emphasis supplied.}
If true—which it almost certainly is not—this affidavit would go a long way toward invalidating the presidency of Nicolás Maduro, an ambition shared by the Bolsonaros and official U.S. policy. The question, of course, is whether it was an ambition shared by Trump and his political team, which had publicly supported the presidential claim of Juan Guaidó while privately negotiating with Maduro. The still-unanswered mystery is whether Trump and his team were so convinced that Maduro was still in possession of incriminating documents or other evidence related to Smartmatic that it was willing to let him remain in power (a circumstance that the deal Giuliani was negotiating with Maduro would’ve resulted in) if he would supply such evidence to Giuliani and Prince of Team Kraken. While we don’t know if this occurred, there is currently no alternate explanation for Team Kraken working secretly to bolster Maduro’s regime—doing so with Trump’s blessing—against the whole of U.S. foreign policy, unless Maduro had something of value to offer Trump. Among the items of value Trump’s political team might have sought (to be clear, in exactly the same fashion, and for exactly the same purpose, as we already know for certain it was operating Ukraine) was manufactured evidence that would have aided Trump in remaining in power. As a working theory of the case for the FBI, there’s currently no more robustly supported option than this one.
The above assumes, of course, that anything said in the “mystery defector” affidavit is true—or, at a minimum, that Team Trump believed it was true. A second and equally likely possibility is that no one on Team Kraken or in the White House really believed that Smartmatic had secretly been working with Venezuelan socialists, and aimed only to manufacture evidence (including, possibly, a supposed “eyewitness” to the crime) that would make claims sufficient to place the 2020 presidential election into doubt.
Who, besides Flynn and Prince, would be in a position to act as a liaison between the Trump team and the Brazilian government—including Brazilian intelligence—if the intent had been to manufacture a Venezuelan defector willing to testify to Maduro’s regime being illegitimate (as the Bolsonaros have sought to establish for years now)?
The Becks of Idaho
Daniel Beck is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who believes that Venezuela tampered with the 2020 presidential election. A Trump donor, his father Doyle is a powerful figure in the blood-red, pro-Trump Idaho Republican Party. Daniel and his family, as well as his dad’s fellow Idaho GOP official friend Layne Bangerter, have longstanding ties not just to Brazil generally but to São Paulo specifically—the city where Eduardo Bolsonaro is the most powerful congressional representative. The Becks also happen to own Combat Armor Defense, an American company with factories in Brazil whose chief client in that country is the Brazilian military and the Brazilian government—of which (it need not be said) Brazilian intelligence is a critical component.
Daniel and Doyle Beck, Layne Bangerter, and Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the secret “war council” at Trump International Hotel on January 5.
It is at this meeting, as we know from Lindell, that the matter of supposed “evidence” emanating from Venezuela was discussed, the key piece of which was a dodgy affidavit from a mystery defector from the socialist regime now in power there. Given its roster of august attendees—two Trump family members, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump; Trump’s liaison to the January 6 event coordinators (Kimberly Guilfoyle, also a top Trump presidential adviser and the longtime girlfriend of Don Jr.); members of Team Kraken (Giuliani, Flynn, and Lindell); three United States senators (one of whom was Tommy Tuberville); trusted members of the Trump administration (Charles Herbster and Peter Navarro); trusted members of Trump’s campaigns (Corey Lewandowski and, according to Herbster, David Bossie); and two men who helped coordinate the January 6 Stop the Steal events (Adam Piper and, by cell, Ali Alexander)—why were the Becks and Bangerter invited? What aid could these three obscure Idaho Republicans offer?
One plausible, if unconfirmed, explanation—at least prior to a new investigative report emerging from Brazilian media—was that Daniel Beck’s position as the CEO of a mass text-messaging company, Txtwire, was critical to both Trump and the Stop the Steal “movement” (run by Alexander, Roger Stone and Alex Jones) given the latter’s ongoing and publicly acknowledged effort to set up a mass text-messaging system that would allow seamless real-time coordination between group members at events like those on January 6. But the evidence for this possibility remains elusive. By comparison, a link to Team Kraken offers a new theory of the case that gains support from a new report by Agência Pública, a São Paulo-based independent investigative journalism outfit. According to the new report,
The Brazilian armor company [Combat Armor Defense] chaired by Daniel Beck, a Trump activist who participated in the demonstrations that culminated in the invasion of the U.S. [Capitol] in January, had an exponential growth during the government of Jair Bolsonaro...[with] the share capital of Combat Armor Defense do Brasil increasing 1244%, jumping from $1 million [reais] to more than $13 million in a period of just one year and seven months. The company…has a figure close to Daniel Beck [at its] head: Maurício Junot de Maria. A former well-known businessman in the armored [vehicle business] sector, Junot also [represents] another [vehicle] armoring company, International Armoring do Brasil, which for years accumulated debts in excess of $60 million [reais] in federal and state taxes.
Junot experienced “golden times” [success] in the 1990s and early 2000s, when he joined the International Armoring Corporation, headquartered in [the Becks’ original home state] Utah and with a subsidiary in Brazil. The company, portrayed in a report in the New York Times, came to supply armored vehicles to the armed forces of the United States during the Iraq War. Currently, the [company] is [regarded as] “unfit” by the Federal Revenue Service of Brazil, with an active debt record of $48.49 million reais with the São Paulo government related to non-payment[s]…according to data from the State Attorney General. In addition, International Armoring has [other] debts, in the amount of $14 million, with the Federal Revenue Service, most of which [debts]—$7.1 million reais—refer to non-payment[s]…
Junot told [media outlet] Folha de S. Paulo that he was invited by Daniel Beck, owner of Combat Armor Defense in the United States and president of [the company] in Brazil, to manage his business in the country. According to information gathered by Agência Pública, they met at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah, where the two lived when Junot ran the International Armoring Corporation.
Proof could note here that Junot’s involvement with the U.S. military during the Iraq War—an effort both Michael Flynn and Erik Prince were heavily involved in—is worth consideration, but it would be merely a placeholder, as there is no evidence to suggest a connection between Junot and Team Kraken, nor frankly a need for one given what the rest of the report from Agência Pública indicates, most notably this section:
In an interview with Folha de S.Paulo, Junot stated that he sought federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro in the [Brazilian House] chamber last year [2020] to “present” [Combat Armor Defense]. “It was about a year ago. I [just] went for it,” Junot said. “I knocked on the door [of his office]. He was there, by chance, and I introduced myself. I said to him: ‘Mr Eduardo, how are you? I have a company that does this and this. I would like your support.’ Junot did not explain, however, how the parliamentarian could help him.
President Jair Bolsonaro was also introduced to Combat Armor last year [in 2020]. He participated in the exhibition of one of the company’s armored vehicles [while it was] passing through the Battalion of Special Police Operations in Rio de Janeiro on August 4.
Junot’s outreach to Bolsonaro would have come almost immediately after Bolsonaro’s father met with Donald Trump in Florida, and during the period (1).Trump agents were negotiating with Maduro, (2) the same group of Trump agents (and a few others) were in Ukraine seeking manufactured evidence against Biden from foreign nationals, and (3).Trump was personally ramping up his pressure on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help him win re-election in November 2020. That the Becks’ company thrived under Brazil’s presdent, Jair Bolsonaro, was even personally attended to by Bolsonaro, and received an audience with Bolsonaro’s son within 24 hours of him visiting the Trumps at the White House in January 2021—less than 16 hours before an armed insurrection against our government—can’t go unnoticed by media any longer.
Thank you again, Seth, for making this all make sense! I could never get the connection of this Venezuelan twist and also what Brazil had to do with it! It’s crazy to think DOJ, FBI, CIA haven’t put these things together. Why would they keep it all soooo under wraps? Do you think the American public will ever know the extent of what went on here with all these out-in-the-open players? Hats off to fruit loop Mike Lindell ! Kind of the gift that keeps giving!
Wow! Just Wow! It reads like a zpy novel. Yet it rings true