Former President Donald Trump reportedly hired a software firm to conduct an investigation that ended up disproving his claims of massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
In an interview published on Thursday, Simpatico Software Systems founder Ken Block told The Washington Post that his firm had been investigated by over a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations in the aftermath of Trump’s loss to President Joe Biden and found that the claims were “all false.”
“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,” Block said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block told the newspaper that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is conducting federal investigations into Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 loss and his post-presidency possession of classified documents, has recently issued him with a subpoena.
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He declined to discuss further details about the subpoena, saying, “I just don’t believe it’s appropriate at this point in time to discuss anything related to the grand jury process.”
Federal records show that payments labeled “recount” and totaling $750,000 were sent to the firm by the Trump campaign, with the last payment being sent around Thanksgiving 2020, according to the Post.
The Simpatico firm specializes in using “large scale database analytics solutions” to identify issues that include fraud.
The firm’s website states that it has “performed focused investigations for states like Rhode Island that quickly uncovered evidence of waste and fraud that led to immediate state action to remedy identified issues.”
An additional firm, Berkeley Research Group, was reportedly paid by the Trump campaign to investigate claims that significant numbers of fraudulent ballots from “dead” voters were being cast in battleground states. That investigation also found that Trump’s claims were false.
According to the Postprosecutors have “interviewed multiple employees from the Berkeley Research Group in recent weeks.”
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told the newspaper that its report was “nothing more than a targeted, politically motivated witch hunt against President Trump concocted to try and prevent the American people from returning him to the White House.”
“Just like all the other fake hoaxes thrown at President Trump, this corrupt effort will also fail,” Cheung added.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s office via email for additional comment.
Despite no credible evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election having emerged in the more than 2 1/2 years since the contest ended, Trump has continued to maintain that it was “stolen” from him.
The former president received over 7 million less votes than Biden in the national popular tally and lost by 74 votes in the all-important Electoral College.
In May 2022, Trump announced that he was authoring a book that would be focused on his baseless claims of massive fraud in the 2020 election. No further details or news about the book, titled The Crimes of the Century, have been released since.