Despite losing the national popular vote in the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry would have been elected president if he had carried Ohio. I believe Kerry had valid reasons to suspect that various shenanigans cost him the state of Ohio. Proving it would have been difficult, however, and prevailing even with proof was far from assured. He made the quick decision to concede. It was a frustrating decision for his supporters, but it went down a little easier than Gore’s disputed defeat knowing that at least George W. Bush had won more overall votes the second time around.
If Kerry had decided to stall a concession, the logical move would have been to hire some investigators to conduct an analysis of the returns and look for anomalies. This is what we would expect President Trump to do, too, if he truly believed that he was robbed in the 2020 election, as he has always claimed. Yet, to all appearances, Trump relied instead on a slapdash team of hacks and nut jobs like Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and the Pillow Guy. They made wild accusations that either could not be backed up or were quickly debunked, and lost in court over and over and over again.
But it turns out that the Trump campaign actually did hire a team to do a legitimate investigation, and they paid more than $600,000 for the work. The problem was that they found that the election had a normal amount of low-level fraud, none of which would have changed the outcome. For this reason, the results were never published and the very existence of the report were kept secret.
The “Project 2020” report conducted by the Berkeley Research Group has now been obtained by prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. A copy was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it shows that Trump’s own campaign paid more than $600,000 for research that undercut many of his most explosive claims. The research was never made public.
The Justice Department has sought and obtained multiple reports, emails and interviews from witnesses that show campaign officials analyzing, and often discrediting, claims that Trump was making publicly, according to several people involved in the investigation, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal details. The Berkeley report was provided to the Justice Department earlier this month, one of the people said, after some people involved in its crafting received a subpoena.
The version of the report viewed by the Washington Post is dated January 1, 2021, which is one day before Trump made his infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. That doesn’t prove that Trump had actually seen the report by that time, but it’s potentially significant because the report debunks one of the claims the president made on that call.
“So dead people voted, and I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to all sorts of methods to come up with an accurate number, and a minimum is close to about 5,000 voters,” he said, without citing his study.
But a report commissioned by his own campaign dated one day prior told a different story: Researchers paid by Trump’s team had “high confidence” of only nine dead voters in Fulton County, defined as ballots that may have been cast by someone else in the name of a deceased person. They believed there was a “potential statewide exposure” of 23 such votes across the Peach State — or 4,977 fewer than the “minimum” Trump claimed.
Considering how many Americans are still under the impression that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate, it’s important to have one more piece of evidence that he is the duly-elected president. The source, coming from the Trump campaign itself, carries more weight. But this is also more evidence that by January 6 Trump was fully aware that he had lost. He tried to stay in power anyway, and that’s about the most serious crime ever committed by anyone in this country. The penalty should be appropriately severe.
