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Donald Trump: "They looked at practically everything you can imagine"
PHOTO: SHANNON STAPLETON / REUTERS
To this day, former US President Donald Trump claims he was cheated out of re-election.
But a team of outside consultants from the Berkeley Research Group, commissioned by the Trump campaign to look for evidence, found none.
The results of their investigation therefore remained under wraps, reports the Washington Post, citing four people familiar with the matter.
The investigation took place in six US states at the end of 2020, shortly after the election that Trump lost to Joe Biden.
According to the report, about a dozen experts checked, among other things, whether illegal immigrants were elected, people voted twice, voting machines were manipulated or votes were cast on behalf of the deceased.
"They looked at practically everything you can imagine," the newspaper quoted one of its informants as saying.
According to the sources, the results were not what the Trump team had hoped for.
They were therefore never the subject of the legal proceedings that Trump conducted against the election results.
The experts have recognized anomalies in voting behavior and unusual patterns in the data of some states, possibly also cases of violations of the law.
But they assumed that none of this would have been significant enough to influence the election result.
Trump's claims about manipulated voting machines and an allegedly large number of dead people who are said to have voted could not be proven by the investigations.
$600,000 cost
The Berkeley Research Group was not paid directly for this, but a subsidiary called East Bay Dispute and Advisory.
According to the Washington Post, documents from the election commission show that the Trump campaign paid more than $600,000 for “consulting fees” at the end of 2020.
The Berkeley Research Group declined to provide information about its clients.
Trump's spokesman did not answer questions from the Washington Post about the ex-president's reaction to the results.
"President Trump received a record 74 million votes, more than any incumbent president in the country's history," he said.
Anyone who sees Joe Biden stumble through his presidency knows who really won the election.” Biden received 81 million votes at the time.
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