ODNI terminated its Puerto Rico voting-machine security contractor after a Trump adviser pushed back on findings that found no fraud

Reuters reported on April 23, 2026, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence terminated its contract with cybersecurity firm Mojave Research in October 2025, after Trump adviser Kurt Olsen pressured the company over findings that did not support the administration's unsubstantiated claims of 2020 election fraud. ODNI had hired Mojave in 2025 to examine electronic voting machines seized from Puerto Rico for security vulnerabilities. Mojave's chief technology officer, Manbir Gulati, said the system was "deeply insecure" -- citing reused passwords, disabled firewalls, and cellular modems that created unauthorized access pathways -- but the firm found no evidence that any vote had been altered or that the vulnerabilities had been exploited.

Olsen, then a White House official leading the administration's election-integrity portfolio, pressed Mojave to broaden its work toward finding evidence of manipulation. After CEO Jason Wareham submitted a sworn declaration on September 8, 2025 denying that Mojave had secretly received funding from George Soros, Olsen accused the firm of serving the "deep state" and advocated that its contract be terminated. A White House meeting on October 3, 2025 grew tense over the firm's refusal to support the fraud narrative, and ODNI issued a stop-work order later that month, during the record-length government shutdown.

Nextgov/FCW and CNN, reporting in August 2026 after separately interviewing Wareham and Gulati, found the government had been preparing to expand Mojave's team from roughly 10 to 60 people and had authorized follow-on equipment funding before the contract was abruptly shut down. Asked whether the termination resulted from Mojave's failure to produce a "smoking gun," Wareham said, "I believe that was part of the termination, yes." ODNI has said only that the contract "ended because the company completed its voting-machine analysis" and has not publicly released Mojave's findings; the White House, ODNI, and Olsen did not respond to reporters' on-the-record requests for comment. The Justice Department, where Olsen now works, said he did not join Mojave-related meetings before June 2026.

This is a companion event to two entries already in this archive: ODNI's own February 2026 confirmation that it covertly obtained and tested the Puerto Rico machines (federal-politicization-of-intelligence-functions-5c81e46a), and a June 2026 Reuters report that the White House separately delayed releasing an ODNI voting-machine vulnerability assessment ahead of the midterms (federal-suppression-of-government-data-79afa31d). Punishing the contractor whose technical findings did not support a predetermined political conclusion, while withholding those findings from the public, shows politically inconvenient facts about election security being suppressed at their source rather than addressed on the merits.