About a year ago, The Washington Post reported on Donald Trump’s political operation having hired the Berkeley Research Group to scrutinize the 2020 presidential election after the Republican’s defeat. The purpose of the contract was obvious: The outgoing president and his team wanted the researchers to bolster Trump’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud and election irregularities.
That didn’t work out well: BRG couldn’t find any meaningful evidence. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown joked, Trump “must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong.”
But we later learned that the Berkeley Research Group wasn’t alone in tackling such an endeavor. Last April, the Post published a related report on Team Trump paying $750,000 to Simpatico Software Systems, which was also tasked with finding evidence of 2020 voter fraud. That didn’t go well, either: The company was unable to tell Republicans what they wanted to hear because the evidence simply didn’t exist.
It’s against this backdrop that Ken Block, the owner of Simpatico Software Systems, has a new op-ed in USA Today, which was published with a striking headline: “Trump paid me to find voter fraud. Then he lied after I found 2020 election wasn’t stolen.”
In November 2020, former President Donald Trump asserted that voter fraud had altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The day after the election, his campaign hired an expert in voter data to attempt to prove Trump’s allegations and put him back in the White House. I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign.
In his opinion piece, Block, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in his home state of Rhode Island, explained not only that his investigation failed to turn up meaningful evidence of voter fraud, but also that his company’s findings have been shared with congressional, federal and state investigators.
Block added that rank-and-file GOP voters have been fed “a steady…
Read the full article here