President Donald Trump and his Justice Department have spent the last two years hunting for consequential election fraud that does not exist. Everything Trump has done after losing the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden serves as sufficient proof that he cares little about election integrity, but a drugs-for-votes scandal in Puerto Rico is the latest proof of just how phony those claims are.
Federal prosecutors had been building an election fraud case on the island, ProPublica reported Tuesday. And even though the scheme reportedly involved both fraud and drug trafficking, which the president also has claimed to hate, the investigation was squashed. Sources suspect that was a move to protect Puerto Rico’s Republican governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, people familiar with the investigation told ProPublica. The pro-statehood Republican publicly supported Trump during her 2024 gubernatorial campaign and during the 2020 presidential race, she was a visible member of “Latinos for Trump.”
The pro-statehood Republican was a visible member of “Latinos for Trump.”
As ProPublica reported, prosecutors filed “an indictment charging 34 inmates and associates with crimes including drug distribution resulting in at least four overdose deaths, money laundering and possessing a firearm,” but the outlet found that none of the voting-related counts were included.
“Before the election, it was definitely full steam ahead,” one person close to the case told ProPublica about the DOJ’s investigation into the drugs-for-votes allegations. “After the election, that all changed.”
The Biden administration was still in charge then, but those familiar with the investigation told ProPublica they suspect that politics drove the decision to drop the fraud charges.
According to ProPublica, those prosecutors had built a case against a prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, for selling and trading drugs to incarcerated voters in exchange for votes for González-Colón. Puerto Rico is one of the few jurisdictions in the United States where people who are incarcerated are allowed to vote, and Los Tiburones reportedly took advantage of that by threatening violence and selectively withholding drugs from addicted inmates who did not comply. Four people reportedly fatally overdosed after using the drugs Los Tiburones provided. Not only had prosecutors “gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff,” sources familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors were also looking into whether González-Colón or her campaign played a role.
González-Colón’s pro-statehood New Progressive Party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to ProPublica’s tally of data from Puerto Rico’s State Elections Commission.
González-Colón declined to speak to ProPublica before it published its story, but in response to its publication, and without singling out anything ProPublica got wrong, she issued a statement calling the reporting “defamatory” and “a clear political attack designed to mislead the public and damage my reputation.” She also wrote that “any supposed federal investigation, if one exists, predates my administration,” which was a remarkably absurd thing to say. The question is whether there was a drugs-for-vote scheme that may have helped her win office.
In an email to ProPublica, a DOJ spokesperson said, “Neither Attorney General Bondi nor Acting Attorney General Blanche was involved in any charging or investigative decision in this Biden administration prosecution.”
The denials from the DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are also telling. The original investigation happened under the Biden administration, they pointed out, as if any prosecution launched by Biden’s DOJ was inherently problematic. Those officials claim to pursue corruption aggressively when sufficient evidence exists, but what could they possibly need that the evidence of four people dead doesn’t provide? Remember, when the U.S. tried to make the case that Venezuela interfered in U.S. elections, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence thought it OK to seize the island’s voting machines.
Rather than investigate election fraud where there’s actual evidence, the Trump administration prefers to pretend it exists where it doesn’t. The same DOJ that reportedly had an evidence-backed election fraud case to pursue in Puerto Rico but walked away from it the moment the political winds shifted has continued to target Georgia poll workers and even launched a raid on an election center hub in Atlanta.
The bitter irony is that Trump will never help the Republican González-Colón achieve her goal of Puerto Rican statehood.
The same president who issued executive orders in early 2025 aimed at eradicating drug traffickers and declaring election integrity “fundamental” to U.S. democracy watched quietly as a case that involved both was buried. The drugs-for-votes arrangement in Puerto Rico’s prisons is not a new phenomenon — political observers have described coercive tactics around the inmate vote as an open secret for decades — but what made this case different was that federal investigators reportedly moved beyond the rumors. As those close to the investigation told ProPublica, they had documented the scheme, built the case and were just beginning to explore what, if any, political connections were behind it.
The bitter irony is that Trump will never help the Republican González-Colón achieve her goal of Puerto Rican statehood. Trump has called Democrats who support its statehood “country-destroying sleazebags,” so the chances are zero that statehood will happen while Trump is in office. In the 2024 general election, Trump’s election integrity claims were not a crusade, but rather a selective and false fraud narrative, deployed aggressively against political enemies and quietly set aside when the reported beneficiary was an ally.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of "The Latino Newsletter" and co-editor of "Pressing Issues from Free Press."