Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm to prove electoral fraud claims, but its work never saw the light of day after no evidence was found to support those claims, the Washington Post reported in an exclusive story today.
The campaign hired Berkeley Research Group to study the 2020 results in six states “looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts,” the Post reported. That study, for which the Trump campaign paid more than $600,000, was conducted in the final weeks of December 2020.
The Trump campaign “never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter,” the Post reported.
Its sources indicated that it had been a serious undertaking.
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“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “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 Berkeley Research Group tested at least a dozen hypotheses that Trump’s team presented, the Post reported.
"None of these were significant enough,” one person familiar with the study said. “Just like any election, there are always errors, omissions and irregularities. It was nowhere close enough to what they wanted to prove, and it actually went in both directions.”
After that was the answer, there was some drama, according to the Post. Here’s its description:
“Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in a December 2020 conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.
“The research group’s officials maintained privately that they did not come into the research with any predetermined conclusions and simply wanted to examine the data provided by the Trump campaign in the battleground states."
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