The Justice Department has questioned the founder of a firm that studied the Trump campaign's 2020 election fraud claims and clearly informed the Trump team before the Jan. 6, 2021, crisis that its claims were "all false," the Washington Post reports. Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, was commissioned by the Trump campaign to study more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations. “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,” he said. “Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false.”
Block said he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington, but he declined to discuss his interactions with them. Prosecutors have obtained extensive information about Block’s efforts, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Separately, prosecutors have interviewed multiple employees from the Berkeley Research Group in recent weeks, another Trump-paid firm that produced a 29-page report ultimately undermining many of Trump’s fraud claims, according to three people familiar with the matter. Berkeley’s study contradicted claims made by Trump and his advisers that there were extensive numbers of dead voters and cases of fraud in states such as Georgia and Nevada. Prosecutors are trying to show that Trump and his advisers definitively knew — or had good reason to believe — that their myriad fraud claims were false as they continued to spread and raise funds off the claims. The claims ultimately convinced some voters that the election was stolen and inspired rioters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The falsehoods also brought in more than $250 million to Trump and his allies.