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.
