The government recruited 15 Venezuelan engineers who built tricks into voting machines.
Posted by Ask Dr. Drew, Checked
- Sources
- 4 context
- Said
- 1 time·
- Confidence
- 30%
Ask Dr. DrewOct 21, 2026
The claim departs from the passage: the post says "we recruited 15 Venezuelan engineers" (the speaker's own group, which then turned them over to the government), not that the government recruited them.
A guest makes this claim. Listeners heard it, so it counts against the post, and on the guest's own record.
What was said
… So people have no idea what's going on in these machines, and anyone who's certifying them has no idea what they're talking about. It turns out they are filled with tricks, and we recruited 15 Venezuelan engineers who built the tricks. So this isn't a theory. We're in the middle of it. We can make these machines, you know, sing Hallelujah. We can make them spit out anything we want. When you say we, who, who, who? …
Ask Dr. Drew · · from the transcriptPost →What we found
Context. The extracted claim attributes the recruitment to "the government," but the passage says "we recruited" and later that "we turned all of this over... to the government," so the extraction adds an actor the post did not name.
Context. Patrick Byrne's own statement says the White House "sat with the Venezuela engineers who testified," which is a claimant's assertion about contact, not evidence of government recruitment or of engineers building tricks into machines.[2]
Context. A Tina Peters defense letter repeats allegations from unnamed Venezuelan witnesses about Smartmatic software rigging elections; it is an advocacy filing, not an independent record, and does not establish government recruitment.[3]
Context. Court and fact-check sources show that Dominion's broader allegations that its machines were built in Venezuela to rig elections were examined and rejected in the defamation litigation, so the underlying allegation is contested rather than substantiated.[1][4]
Sources
4 sources: 1 fact-checker, 3 not rated
- 1Dominion sues Trump-friendly broadcasters over fraud claimsapnews.com · fact-checker · cited for: context
- 2Patrick Byrne (@PatrickByrne) on Xx.com · not rated · cited for: context
- 3[PDF] John Case letter pdf.pdf - Squarespacestatic1.squarespace.com · not rated · cited for: context
- 4Case 1:21-cv-02131-CJN Document 33 Filed 04/ ...courthousenews.com · not rated · cited for: context
Where this claim was made
Said in 1 published post
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