When they didn’t find fraud while testing a voting machine for the Trump admin, this cyber firm faced a wave of backlash

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration abruptly declined to renew a contract for a cybersecurity firm it hired to examine voting equipment in Puerto Rico after the company didn’t echo administration officials’ false claims of voter fraud, the firm’s executives said in their first extensive public remarks on the episode.

After hearing that the firm had found no evidence of vote tampering, allies of President Donald Trump derailed the cybersecurity firm’s work with the government in part by spreading false claims that the firm was funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, according to the firm’s executives and documents they provided to CNN.

A group of “White House-adjacent” Trump allies was “dissatisfied” that “I was not willing to name and shame at that moment and to say, ‘Turns out 2020 was a landslide for Trump. Nobody knew,’” Jason Wareham, CEO of the firm Mojave Research, said this month at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.

Mojave Research had no prior experience in testing election systems when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence contacted them in the spring of 2025 as part of the agency’s broader probe into voting equipment. ODNI hired the firm to analyze a specific voting machine made by Liberty Vote (formerly Dominion Voting Systems) that the agency acquired from Puerto Rico. Mojave did the work in six weeks in Wareham’s basement in Reston, Virginia, according to Wareham.

Mojave submitted a report on their findings to ODNI in July 2025, Wareham said, but it has yet to be made public. However, Mojave chief technology officer Manbir Gulati described the findings in detail at DEF CON’s “Voting Village” symposium.

“We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses, but we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered,” Gulati said.

What Wareham’s team found — and didn’t find — in his basement would become a Rorschach test for Trump administration officials focused on election issues. It’s a cautionary tale of how a company that says it wanted to provide the administration with unbiased election security analysis was rejected by a group of officials who still dispute the results of the 2020 election and have Trump’s ear. The Trump administration’s revisiting of the 2020 election has extended to Arizona, where the FBI has obtained records of an audit that confirmed Joe Biden won the state.

After the company made clear what it had found, multiple figures aligned with Trump began to cast doubt on the integrity of Mojave, according to Wareham.

Wareham, a Republican, submitted a declaration in September under the penalty of perjury to the Trump administration to refute the notion that his company was “some form of deep plant meant to ensure the suppression of truth around compromised elections or election systems,” the declaration says.

Reuters has previously reported on Wareham’s declaration and Mojave Research’s tensions with Olsen, but CNN reviewed his full declaration submitted to ODNI. The document sheds light on how a faction of Trump allies has aggressively tried to prove the president’s false claims of voter fraud.

Wareham submitted his declaration and financial statements to ODNI to prove he was not affiliated with Soros, who has long been the subject of antisemitic conspiracy theories about secret levers of power. The next month, Wareham said he received an email, reviewed by CNN, which said that ODNI had issued a “stop-work order” on the contract.

The declaration alleges that attorney Kurt Olsen, who has repeatedly disputed the results of the 2020 and served as an adviser to Trump in his efforts to undermine faith in that election, repeatedly inserted himself into a probe of voting equipment begun last year by ODNI under a program known as the Director’s Initiatives Group.

Olsen had no experience in election law prior to the 2020 election, but he gained traction in Trump’s orbit — and eventually a direct line to the president — for trying to challenge elections in court. The Arizona Supreme Court ordered $2,000 in sanctions against Olsen and his co-counsel after they made false claims about the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election in their failed effort to overturn that result.

“During many of those interactions and meetings, Mr. Olsen would inform me he was speaking with [t]he President on the election topic and at times seemed to intimate that he spoke on this issue for him,” Wareham’s declaration says. Olsen did not become a special government employee at the White House until October 2025, but Wareham told CNN that Olsen would routinely attend ODNI meetings on election security prior.

After Mojave’s contract ended with ODNI, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present in Fulton County, Georgia, in January as the FBI seized records related to the 2020 election. Gabbard’s presence, which she said Trump requested, alarmed election officials from both parties. Olsen drafted the criminal referral to the Justice Department that led to the FBI seizure.

Wareham’s declaration spotlights Olsen’s alleged actions in the months prior to the FBI seizure in Georgia. Discussions involving Olsen and others in his orbit were “hindered by rampant conjecture and assertions made without supporting evidence or documentation,” the document says.

“I lost count the number of times I heard ‘Maricopa County is a crime scene,’” Wareham said in his declaration. Maricopa County is Arizona’s largest county and has been at the center of Trump allies’ false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

“In total, despite requests and invitations to provide us materials that could be fully integrated into our reporting, we have received little to nothing that would support anything that Mr. Olsen has said or that would allow us to do a primary forensic analysis of sufficient quality that the [Director of National Intelligence] could rely on our conclusions,” the declaration says.

Olsen, now a Justice Department employee, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did the ODNI. The Justice Department had no comment other than to say that Olsen did not join the department until June. The White House referred questions to the ODNI.

Liberty Vote said it would not comment on Mojave’s findings because it had not seen the report Mojave submitted to ODNI, but added that it “is committed to advancing the future of secure American elections.”

ODNI officials accepted Mojave’s findings, according to Gulati and Wareham. The split within the administration over the Mojave report and the delay over releasing it has undercut efforts to fix the software flaws in the voting equipment, the Mojave executives said.

“What we encountered [were] a lot of competing factions within the government — people who want the boogey man to be out there and are willing to do anything to find it and then people who actually do genuinely care about the issue [of election security],” Gulati added. “There was a huge faction that was like, ‘Mojave doesn’t know what they’re doing. They’re dummies and that’s why they can’t find evidence of compromise.”

Cybersecurity research of election systems has become a fraught exercise after the 2020 election because of the tendency of conspiracy theorists to equate software bugs with voter fraud.

Gulati said he wrestled with the decision to work with the administration, given the risk his research could be weaponized.

“Because their motivations were off, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of looking into election security is wrong or something that shouldn’t be prioritized,” Gulati said, adding that he would rather contribute his security expertise than stay silent. “There have been plenty of pushes for election security efforts both on the left and the right, as there should be.”

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