Overstock founder Patrick Byrne has been fighting to expose massive, widespread voter fraud since the stolen 2020 election. His latest efforts point to an article from Venezuela of all places that highlights the corruption within Smartmatic, a company that has been at the heart of election scandals… at least it would be if our corporate media did its job.
At least one outlet in Venezuela is still trying to get to the truth.
Here’s Byrne’s thread, which he translated and which we’re posting here in its entirety for easier reading:
BRAVE REPORTERS EXIST… IN VENEZUELA: Smartmatics’ owners = Chevron + PDVSA (corrupt Venezuelan oil firm/$3 trillion cartel slushfund). “The PDVSA papers | Why did Smartmatic share an address in Amsterdam with a mixed company of Petróleos de Venezuela?”
EXTRACT: “The fingerprint capture system is unique in the world and was created maliciously and at overpriced prices by Jorge Rodríguez. Its maker, Cogent System, provides services to the CIA, FBI and police to capture criminals and terrorists.
“Diosdado Cabello, without dissimulation, reminds from time to time that there is no way to escape fingerprint scanners, the key to ensuring Maduro’s re-election.” EXTRACT COMPLETE
In November 2006, Hugo Chávez pointed out on television that the new Secretary of Defense of the United States, Robert Gates, former director of the CIA, had been part of the board of directors of SAIC, a multinational company that advises the information systems of Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). ). SAIC was expelled from the country accused by President Chávez of espionage at the service of the CIA. SAIC’s departure caused the accounting, marketing and control systems to collapse.
In June 2004 (he was not yet president of the CNE, but he knew he would be) Jorge Rodríguez met in Mexico with the directors of two companies that provide security services to the CIA, the FBI, and the United States Department of Domestic Security. . Rodríguez unofficially approved a proposal from these companies that the CNE would officially validate a few days later. The businessmen from Cogent Systems and Gilat had traveled from Los Angeles. Rodríguez did not want to meet them on American soil because he wanted to make believe that Cogent Systems was an Asian company because the CEO is called Ming Hsieg. However, Ming Hsieg is a pure-blooded American who enjoys the confidence, as we have seen, of the cream of the intelligence services of “Yankee imperialism”.
What was the most hysterically anti-imperialist government on the planet doing expelling an accounting firm for espionage and at the same time negotiating with two CIA and FBI contractors? As usual. In every Bolivarian equation, two factors are unalterably present: the patriotic/revolutionary stridency and dollars, many dollars, millions of dollars. Back in Venezuela, Rodríguez announced the purchase of 12,000 fingerprint readers manufactured by Cogent Systems and transmitted by Gilat via satellite.
Rodríguez signed the Memorandum ORP-101/2004 with which the fingerprint scanners were approved. Shrewd psychiatrist convinced that his specialty offers him an exceptional ability to manipulate or deceive and get away with it.
With the voting machines, he made believe that Smartmatic was a large company with a voting machine factory in Italy knowing that it had been registered for $3,500 in Boca Raton, Florida, and operated in an office with two cubicles that we personally visited and we check.
In reality, what Smartmatic sold to the CNE were machines manufactured by Olivetti, with large premiums. Later we found that Smartmatic had acquired Sequoia Voting Systems in the United States and in search of background information we learned that Sequoia was investigated in 1999 by the Department of Justice and charged with the crime of bribing electoral officials for more than 8 million dollars. Dollars. On another occasion, after Pinellas County in Florida had contracted the voting machines, it was discovered that one of its executives, Phil Foster, was facing trial in Louisiana for money laundering and bribery and was accused of being controlled by government officials. bolivarian. The Treasury Secretary forced Smartmatic to sell to Sequoia Voting Systems and prohibited it from operating in its territory.
Is PDVSA the owner of Smarmatic? Who are the real owners of Smartmatic? They were questions that plagued us. Suspiciously, there were also overprices in the sale of fingerprint scanners to the CNE. Rodríguez’s CNE acquired 12,000 Thales Cogent DactyScan40i Fingerprint Scanner CS500f machines that Cogent regularly sells for $1,109, which, under normal conditions, would have cost about $13 million, but for a reason that probably has to do with the psychiatrist’s professional fees. , the CNE paid 60 million dollars and, as we will see, there are reasons to believe that the funds came from PDVSA.
In the search for answers, we learn that Smartmatic and Sequoia met with Chicago city officials to discuss voting machines. When asked by one of the commissioners, the Smartmatic representative assured that the true owner of Smartmatic was “a company registered in the Netherlands and controlled by important Venezuelan investors.” Exasperated and incredulous, Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush declared: “I don’t trust that. We are in Chicago, here we invent fraud, scandal and vote theft.”
With this information, the Venezuelan researcher Aleksander Boyd, in London, did the same and followed the lead that we had offered from Smartmatic in Amsterdam. Indeed, in the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce he found a record with the name Smartmatic International Holding B.V., domiciled at Naritaweg 165 Telestone 8, 1043BW, the same address that we found for the financier Chevron Boscan B.V. and Chevron/Petroboscan/PDVSA.
In a previous installment we said that the Plan B Group found that Dr. Rondón-Sanso, Rafael Ramírez’s mother-in-law, had conceived the strategy of hiding billions of PDVSA funds abroad under the pretext of protecting them against arbitration claims that never occurred. To that end, they created the Chevron/Petroboscan/PDVSA joint venture and a Payment Agreement through which Chevron Boscan Finance B.V. granted a loan to Petroboscan for an amount of 2 billion dollars. The two companies, together with Smartmatic, share the same facilities or the same address in Amsterdam.
What was Smartmatic doing, during all the elections that followed the 2006 recall referendum, sharing the same address with a mixed company formed by the Chevron/PDVSA company? Did Chevron/PDVSA finance Smartmatic? Was Smartmatic owned by Chevron/PDVSA in Amsterdam?
In response to Smartmatic’s response to the Chicago city official, were you referring to the Venezuelan company Petroboscan made up of PDVSA and Chevron with the same address as Smartmatic?
The question that we have also asked ourselves since then: is Jorge Rodríguez the true owner of Smartmatic?
To all these mysteries is added the fact that the complex system created by Jorge Rodríguez for the CNE, in which the voter’s fingerprints are digitally captured to be transmitted by satellite to a mysterious center where they are processed by companies specialized in identifying criminals and terrorists, is definitely unique in the world and is created maliciously and expressly to inhibit the opposition voter who, rightly, panics every time they have to vote and remember that Diosdado Cabello openly reminds them from time to time that there is no way to escape the fingerprint scanners.
For reasons that are difficult to explain with any logic, the opposition leadership did not find, nor does it seem to find, any serious objections to opposing this technological racket. On one occasion, Gustavo Roosen himself, former president of Polar, former Minister of Education, and former president of PDVSA, publicly declared his support for whom he affectionately called the “Smartmatic boys.” “Regarding Smartmatic -said Roosen- we have been confident in the capacity of the young engineers… we have evaluated the encryption system that they present and in our opinion it does offer security in the protection of the data”.
If an experienced man like Roosen is persuaded by this Trojan horse of the psychiatrist Rodríguez, what can be expected from the opposition leadership that in a constant outburst has always been ready to resolve this tyranny “in a peaceful, democratic and constitutional manner”.
If a scheme similar to Rodríguez’s was hypothetically imposed in the United States, the United Kingdom or France, countries where the rule of law prevails, citizens would abstain from voting motivated by exactly the same misgivings that millions of Venezuelans correctly intuit.
An achievement by psychiatrist Jorge Rodríguez on his patients, some of them opposition leaders. STORY ENDS
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.