New House Speaker Mike Johnson Said 2020 Voting Software Came from ‘Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela’: ‘It Really Was Rigged’

Newly-minted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) apparently bought into even some of the most far-fetched theories touted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

On November 19, 2020, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis held an infamous press conference in which they made a number of false claims about the election.

“What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” said Powell at the time. “The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized coding systems here as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of [former president] Hugo Chávez.”

This bizarre claim went viral at the time, and was quickly disproven by fact-checkers.

Those who had heard Johnson during a radio interview just a couple of days before that press conference might not have been quite so surprised by the allegation, though.

“In every election in American history, there’s some small element of fraud, irregularity, error. We just know that. You just accept that that’s the case,” acknowledged Johnson before pressing on:

But when you have it on a broad scale, when you have, you know a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. When you have, you know, testimonials of people like this but in large numbers, it begs to be litigated and investigated. And the problem is, it’s exceedingly difficult to do that in a 45-day time window. You know, and that’s the problem that we’re up against. And that’s why the president is so frustrated and that’s why so many, so many 71, 73 million Americans around the country feel like  the election was stolen from them.

“The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion. Look, there’s a lot of merit to that. And when the president says the election is rigged, that’s what he’s talking about,” remarked Johnson at another point.

In another instance, Johnson said that his colleagues from Georgia were “so frustrated they want to pull their hair out” because “they know that in Georgia it really was rigged.”

Johnson was one of the organizers behind an amicus brief signed by more than 100 Republican members of Congress urging the Supreme Court to consider invalidating the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Listen to Johnson’s interview above via Rep. Mike Johnson on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter).