Trump and the failed hunt for 2020 fraud

The Washington Post:

The December 2020 claim of voter fraud was explosive, if true: More than 700,000 people had voted twice in Wisconsin, the tip alleged.

But when a highly paid expert for Donald Trump’s campaign began to study the claim at the behest of a Trump lawyer, he quickly realized that not only was it false, but it had also traveled a surprisingly twisted path before landing in his inbox.

The expert, Ken Block, learned it had first appeared in a post on a website called TheDonald.win, where it was spotted by the owner of an IT company, who brought it to the attention of the general manager of Trump’s golf course in the Bronx.

The golf executive forwarded the tip to the president’s son Eric, who passed it along to the lawyer. At last, the lawyer, Alex Cannon, directed the wild Wisconsin claim to Block, a software engineer and former politician from Rhode Island who was hired by the campaign shortly after the 2020 election.

“I think there is a fundamental flaw with the analysis,” Block told Cannon a few hours later, in a Dec. 4, 2020, email reviewed by The Washington Post. The hundreds of thousands of supposedly double-counted votes were “nothing of the sort.”

“They have incomplete data, did not recognize that, and inferred that the only logical explanation is fraud rather than incomplete data,” he wrote in the email.

Block describes the moment in a new book, “Disproven,” which will be released Tuesday. In the book, Block reveals how, again and again in the months after the November 2020 election, he was tasked by Trump’s campaign with batting down implausible and inaccurate allegations that Joe Biden had won the election through fraud.

Block’s book provides an insider’s account of the desperate measures Trump’s campaign took to pursue allegations of voter fraud and of how quickly the campaign concluded internally that each one was invalid, even as the president continued to rile up his supporters by claiming the election was stolen....