What did the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) conclude about Smartmatic’s 2005 acquisition of Sequoia?

1. Political heat and a CFIUS referral: how the Sequoia purchase landed under review

Concerns about the integrity of voting equipment and alleged connections between Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government prompted Representative Carolyn Maloney and media outlets to press the Treasury Department to examine whether the 2005 purchase of Sequoia should be reviewed by the interagency CFIUS process, and Smartmatic and Sequoia ultimately submitted to that review after initially resisting it ^{[1] [5] [6]}.

2. Exit, divestiture and varying public descriptions of CFIUS’s role

Public statements from Smartmatic and Sequoia say the company “withdrew from the CFIUS review process with the approval of CFIUS” and announced an intent to seek a buyer for Sequoia, thereby removing the foreign-owned parent from U.S. voting-machine operations ^{[3] [4]}. Congressional statements and press releases from Rep. Maloney frame the outcome as Smartmatic withdrawing from the investigation and choosing to divest rather than complete the CFIUS process ^{[1] [2]}. Some later summaries and secondary reports characterize the episode more bluntly, saying CFIUS “ordered” Smartmatic to sell Sequoia or that scrutiny “prompted” the sale — descriptions that compress government pressure, voluntary withdrawal, and commercial decisions into a single decisive action ^{[7] [8] [9]}.

3. What the record supplied here does — and does not — show about an official CFIUS conclusion

The primary documents in this set show a sequence: congressional inquiry, media reporting, voluntary filing or submission to CFIUS, and Smartmatic’s announcement of withdrawal from the CFIUS review coupled with intent to divest — and they document calls by Rep. Maloney for Treasury to publish the investigation’s final results ^{[6] [3] [5]}. None of the supplied sources contains a declassified CFIUS decision memorandum or an explicit, publicly posted presidential order formally mandating divestiture within the cited material; therefore the most defensible factual statement from these sources is that CFIUS scrutinized the deal and Smartmatic exited the review with approval while divesting Sequoia, rather than that CFIUS publicly issued a binary “approve” or “order to divest” ruling in a released document ^{[3] [2] [5]}.

4. Competing narratives, incentives and the truth-seeking gap

The political framing by Representative Maloney and press coverage emphasized national-security concerns and treated divestiture as the effective outcome of CFIUS scrutiny — a framing that amplifies the role of CFIUS for oversight audiences and legislative reformers ^{[1] [2]}. Smartmatic’s corporate statements emphasized voluntary cooperation and denial of Venezuelan government ownership to rebut reputational risk and to frame divestiture as a business decision consistent with CFIUS engagement ^{[3] [4]}. Secondary sources and later summaries sometimes blur these distinctions, alternating between “CFIUS ordered sale” and “CFIUS scrutiny prompted sale,” which reflects differing editorial angles and the absence of a single, publicly posted final CFIUS text in the supplied reporting ^{[7] [8] [9]}.

5. Bottom line: the cautious answer supported by available reporting

CFIUS reviewed Smartmatic’s acquisition of Sequoia and that review coincided with Smartmatic’s withdrawal from the CFIUS process (with CFIUS approval) and the company’s decision to divest Sequoia; multiple sources treat the divestiture as the practical outcome of CFIUS scrutiny, but within the documents provided there is no clear, publicly released CFIUS decision text that explicitly and singularly states “CFIUS ordered” the sale, so the strongest, evidence-based conclusion is that scrutiny by CFIUS resulted in withdrawal and divestiture rather than a widely disseminated formal public adjudication ^{[3] [2] [1] [5]}.