Jack Smith’s office has been busy.
Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud were found to be false over and over again. But new reporting shows that a second firm retained by his campaign to find election fraud in 2020 also found nothing. In fact, the founder said, “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
That founder was recently questioned by the Justice Department, according to Josh Dawsey’s Washington Post interview.
Ken Block, the founder of Simpatico Software Systems, was hired by the Trump campaign in the weeks after the 2020 election to study more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations.
“No substantive voter fraud was uncovered in my investigations looking for it, nor was I able to confirm any of the outside claims of voter fraud that I was asked to look at,” he told the Post. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block told the Post that not only had he sent his findings in writing to the Trump campaign in late 2020 — that is, before the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol — but also that he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
Block said he has met with federal prosecutors in Washington.
This is corroboration of the reveal in March of Trump paying another firm, the Berkeley Research Group, to produce a 29-page report that found no fraud in 2020.
Trump claimed in his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021 that thousands of dead people had voted in Georgia.
But the Berkeley report, dated the day before, said the opposite. In fact, they found only nine dead voters in Fulton County (“dead voters” is usually not fraud, it can be people who filled out an absentee ballot, for example).
The Berkeley report found no evidence of widespread fraud specifically in Georgia or Nevada, where Trump’s lawyers had also falsely claimed in a court filing that 1,506 ballots were cast in the names of dead people.
Berkeley Research Group has also been talking with federal prosecutors. “They have learned that the firm’s work was given to a number of top Trump aides, and that Trump was briefed on the research himself by Berkeley employees, people familiar with the project said,” the Post adds.
There was no systemic election fraud in 2020, which was the most secure election in U.S. history.
But there were a lot of court filings that were based on known inaccuracies, apparently, and an attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by a former president who knew his claims that he had been cheated out of a win — he hadn’t — were false as he was pushing the lie to his armed and angry supporters.
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