A research firm investigated Donald Trump’s assertion that the presidential election was fraudulent, but its findings were suppressed because they found nothing to support his claims, The Washington Post reported citing four sources familiar with the matter.
The Berkeley Research Group, hired by the former president’s 2020 campaign, gathered a team of around a dozen people to look into alleged voter fraud and irregularities in six states, according to the Post.
The team reportedly briefed Trump, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on a conference call held in the last days of 2020 — before Trump held a rally urging his supporters to march on the Capitol preceding the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. The call reportedly became contentious.
But the researchers had looked at “everything,” one source told the Post.
“Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it,” the source said.
As recently as Saturday morning, Trump has claimed that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him, pushing various conspiracy theories about voting machines and election workers.
He has made these claims even as dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign or his allies were tossed out for lack of evidence in the weeks after President Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump continued to make his claims throughout the House select committee’s monthslong investigation, which revealed that people close to Trump repeatedly tried to tell him there was no evidence of fraud.
And apparently, he made them despite knowing that a team of professional researchers he paid to try and find evidence of fraud came up empty-handed.
The Post’s source added: “Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities.” But the person stressed that they were not nearly enough to sway the election.
“It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove,” the source said, “and it actually went in both directions.”
For more, head to The Washington Post.