Expert Trump Hired to Prove Election Fraud Debunks His Every Point in Scathing Op-Ed

Despite endless speeches and public statements with claims of rampant voter fraud, Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and the rest of their crew knew ages ago that those allegations were baseless. So says the guy they hired to dig up dirt on 2020 election fraud, anyway.

“I am the expert who was hired by the Trump campaign,” wrote data specialist Ken Block in a USA Today editorial published Tuesday.

Block’s findings were used in the January 6 select committee’s investigation and were subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith and for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s Georgia investigation.

“Those emails and documents show that the voter data available to the campaign contained no evidence of large-scale voter fraud based on data mining and fraud analytics,” wrote Block. “More important, claims of voter fraud made by others were verified as false, including proof of why those claims were disproven.”

Although the Trump contract included mandates necessitating the discovery of wide-scale voter fraud, Block said the only indication of fraud he found was “bipartisan,” with as many Republicans casting duplicate votes as Democrats.

According to the Simpatico Software Systems owner, the number of deceased voters in the voting pool across the country was minimal and failed to meet the threshold for legal challenges to the election results in any state.

“If voter fraud had impacted the 2020 election, it would already have been proven. Maintaining the lies undermines faith in the foundation of our democracy,” Block wrote.

Time would be better spent reinforcing national electoral systems to strengthen election security by November 2024, according to Block, who noted that practices like gerrymandering are destructive to American democracy. But the opposite has actually been on the Republican agenda.

As another example, not mentioned by Block, Trump and his allies have worked to discredit an electoral voter-roll tool known as the Electronic Registration Information Center—or ERIC—in a potential bid to sow more chaos in the wake of the 2024 election than they did in 2020.

So far, Trump has claimed he would make the system illegal, despite its function of providing election officials with reports on potential inaccuracies in voter lists and identifying people who are registered to vote in more than one state. That’s led to a number of states departing the nonpartisan program, which in itself is a bit of a software engineering marvel, running on the work of just three employees with zero philanthropic funding.

Louisiana led the bunch, removing itself from ERIC in 2022. Since then, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have done so too—dropping its membership to 25 states plus Washington, D.C.—though more resignations are anticipated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Donald Trump has adopted a new strategy for the Republican primary: Instead of assuming he can coast to the nomination, he’s going after Nikki Haley.

In the past few weeks, Trump-allied super PAC MAGA Inc. has spent nearly $3.5 million in anti-Haley advertising, according to a report from The Daily Beast. The bulk of that money went to an ad buy, running a commercial accusing Haley of flip-flopping on support for a gas tax while she was governor of South Carolina. But several hundred thousand dollars also went to anti-Haley mailers and text messages.

Despite being more than six months into primary campaigning, this is still one of the first times that Trump’s team has targeted a specific candidate instead of lashing out at the rest of the Republican field in general. Trump ran a few ads early on slamming Ron DeSantis, once touted as Trump’s natural successor, but spent far less in comparison.

DeSantis’s campaign failed spectacularly to gain steam, while Haley has seen a recent jump in the polls. RealClearPolitics’s rolling average of the last three weeks of polling currently has Haley tied with DeSantis for second place, although Trump still enjoys a hefty lead.

Trump’s decision to attack Haley could backfire by revealing she’s the opponent who scares him most. Giving her such a spotlight could actually consolidate the conservative anti-Trump vote behind her. Haley herself is taking the ad campaign as a win.

“Two days ago, Donald Trump denied our surge in New Hampshire existed. Now, he’s running a negative ad against me,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter) when the ad first ran in mid-December. “Someone’s getting nervous.”

Haley has also pushed back against the premise of the ad. The ad claims that as governor, Haley reneged on a promise not to raise South Carolina’s gas tax. That allegation has been widely debunked as misleading: In reality, Haley had suggested raising the gas tax while simultaneously cutting the income tax. The bill did not pass.

“Everyone from Joe Biden to Donald Trump is attacking Nikki for one reason: She’s the only candidate with momentum,” a senior Haley adviser told The Daily Beast, speaking anonymously.

Unfortunately, Haley isn’t doing herself any favors by generally refusing to go after Trump in the same way. She ended 2023 by refusing to say that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, which fellow Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie ascribed to her being afraid of alienating Trump supporters.

Haley then said she would pardon Trump if he is convicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election. This isn’t the first time she has said she would let her former boss off the hook.

Stuart Stevens, the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, said he doesn’t think Haley is ready to go head-to-head with Trump. He described her as a “bundle of ambition with no particular purpose.”

For instance, Stevens told The Daily Beast that Haley undermined any claims that her campaign is about upholding the U.S. Constitution because she said she’d pardon Trump, “someone who tried to subvert the constitution.”

“It’s just a very confused candidacy,” Stevens said. “She’s running because she would really like to be president. That’s OK, but it’s not a particularly compelling reason for anyone else to vote for her.”

GOP loyalty to Donald Trump is morphing into total blinders to the former president’s violent politics.

A new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll illustrates that Republicans are now, more than ever, more likely to believe baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from their front-runner, that January 6 rioters were not violent, and that the insurrection was instigated by law enforcement. The results are the latest follow-up to another round of GOP interviews conducted by The Washington Post in December 2021.

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, told the Post.

Americans of every political demographic seemingly have more doubts about President Joe Biden’s legitimate ascent to the White House. According to the poll, just 62 percent of Americans, including Democrats and independents, believe the 2020 election was legitimate—down from 69 percent in 2021. Republican belief dropped the most, though, falling by eight points in the last three years to just 31 percent in the most recent survey.

“There were so many people that felt the election was rigged. It was not right for them to break in like that, but they were fed up and frustrated and they were whipped into a frenzy by the FBI and others,” said Colleen Michaels, 59, of Woodsfield, Ohio, who told the Post that she would have attended Trump’s protest at the U.S. Capitol herself if not for a medical emergency.

In defending their turned perspectives, interviewed Republicans cited debunked claims of voter fraud in Georgia, pointing toward a video of election workers allegedly placing fake ballots into the tally. That same claim, advertised by Rudy Giuliani, recently earned the Trump fixer a $148 million judgment for defamation.

And while the majority of Americans believe that the events of January 6 threatened U.S. democracy, Republicans seem to feel otherwise, differing wildly from their recorded opinions in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

More than seven in 10 Republicans say the attack has been overinflated and feel it is “time to move on,” reported the Post. Republicans seem to believe less and less that the attack was violent, with 18 percent believing the rioters were “mostly violent,” a statistic that has dropped from 26 percent in 2021. That’s compared to 77 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents who also reported that the attempted insurrectionists were violent.

Donald Trump has kicked off the new year with a brand new conspiracy about how people are out to get him.

Trump’s Monday evening rant takes aim primarily at former Representative Liz Cheney, who has recently increased her condemnation of the Republican primary front-runner. Trump’s comments also show growing frustration with the many lawsuits against him.

“Why did American Disaster Liz Cheney, who suffers from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), and was defeated for Congress by the largest margin for a sitting Congressman or Congresswoman in the history of our Country, ILLEGALLY DELETE & DESTROY most of the evidence, and related items, from the January 6th Committee of Political Thugs and Misfits,” Trump demanded on Truth Social.

“THIS ACT OF EXTREME SABOTAGE MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR MY LAWYERS TO PROPERLY PREPARE FOR, AND PRESENT, A PROPER DEFENSE OF THEIR CLIENT, ME.”

Trump then insisted that the “ridiculous Deranged Jack Smith case on Immunity, which the most respected legal minds in the Country say I am fully entitled to, is now completely compromised and should be thrown out and terminated.”

Cheney was one of just a few Republicans to reject Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. The party turned on her as a result, and she ended up losing her 2022 reelection campaign during the primaries. (She did lose by a massive margin, but it was only the biggest incumbent primary loss of this century, not of all time, as Trump claimed.)

The former Wyoming representative released a book in early December, in which she brutally criticizes Trump. During her press tour for the book, Cheney repeatedly issued chilling warnings that reelecting Trump would be disastrous for the country.

Trump’s anti-Cheney screed came about a week after he slammed special counsel Jack Smith, Joe Biden, and the Democratic Party in general as “thugs” who are “looking to destroy our once great USA.”

“MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, really getting into the spirit of the season.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that he is immune to criminal proceedings because he was president at the time of his alleged crimes. Smith, who is investigating Trump for both trying to overturn the election and mishandling classified documents, urged an appeals court over the weekend to reject Trump’s claim of immunity.

Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley says she would pardon Donald Trump for the sake of letting the country move on. It’s the latest weird moment in a week of self-sabotage. It’s also the latest example of one of Trump’s ostensible political opponents opting to treat the many criminal accusations against him with solicitousness instead of actually taking advantage of his one massive vulnerability.

During a Thursday campaign event in New Hampshire, a 9-year-old asked Haley if she would pardon Trump. Haley replied that she would. “If he is found guilty, a leader needs to think about what’s in the best interest of the country,” Haley said. “What’s in the best interest of the country is not to have an 80-year-old man sitting in jail, that continues to divide our country.”

“What’s in the best interest of the country would be to pardon him, so that we can move on as a country and no longer talk about him.”

Haley is naïve to think that a pardoned Trump would just go away. There’s a far greater chance that Trump, once fully pardoned, would go right back to what he’s doing now: working to obtain the power necessary to get revenge on his political enemies, and working behind the scenes to undermine democracy. With the support of his fervent fan base and his well-documented tendency to bear grudges, he’d likely undermine even a Republican successor.

This isn’t the first time Haley has suggested pardoning Trump if he is convicted in one of his many lawsuits. After Trump was indicted in June for hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Haley said she “would be inclined in favor of a pardon” for him if he is found guilty.

Haley’s opinion on a potential Trump pardon came just hours after she refused to say that slavery was one of the main factors in the Civil War. Instead, she insisted at a Wednesday night campaign stop that the war was fought over the role of government and (white) people’s freedoms.

When asked about Haley’s lack of comments on slavery, her fellow presidential hopeful Chris Christie accused her of running scared. (Christie doesn’t appear to have a chance of winning, but he isn’t shy about calling out his fellow candidates.)

“She didn’t say it because she’s a racist, because she’s not,” Christie said Thursday. “She did it because she’s unwilling to offend anyone by telling the truth.”

“If she is unwilling to stand up and say that slavery is what caused the Civil War because she’s afraid of offending constituents in some other part of the country, if she’s afraid to say that Donald Trump is unfit because she’s afraid of offending people who support Donald Trump, and because maybe she harbors in the back of her mind being vice president or being secretary of state … what’s going to happen when she has to stand up against forces in our own party who want to drag this country deeper and deeper into anger and division and exhaustion?”