One of the issues with seditious conspiracy charges against Trump is the matter of intent. Did he know that he had lost the election and went ahead with his plot anyway?
Of course he did. And here is some external proof we haven’t seen before:
Former president Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign commissioned an outside research firm in a bid to prove electoral fraud claims but never released the findings because the firm disputed many of his theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined werevoter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.
About a dozen people at the firmworked on the report, including econometricians, who use statistics to model and predict outcomes, the people said. The work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, before the Jan. 6 riotof Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol.
Trump continues to falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen despite abundant evidence to the contrary, much of which had been provided to himor was publicly available before the Capitol assault.The Trump campaign’s commissioning of its own report to study the then-president’s fraud claims has not been previously reported.
“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted,” said a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private research and meetings. “Literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”
The findings were not what the Trump campaign had been hoping for, according to the four people. While the researchers believed there were voting anomalies and unusual data patterns in a few states, along with some instances in which laws may have been skirted, they did not believe the anomalies were significant enough to make a difference in who won the election.
The research also contradictedsome of Trump’s more conspiratorial theories, such as his baseless allegations about rigged voting machines and large numbers of dead people voting.
[…]
Senior officials from Berkeley Research Group briefed Trump, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others on the findings in aDecember 2020conference call, people familiar with the matter said. Meadows showed skepticism of the findings and continued to maintain that Trump won. Trump also continued to say he won the election. The call grew contentious, people with knowledge of the meeting said.
Not that we didn’t already know this.
But never fear, Trump is now adding another layer to The Big Lie with the help of his chief sycophantic accomplice:
This is even dumber than the notion that Democrats stole the elections in six different states with Hugo Chavez’s election machines and Italian spy satellites. It is completely absurd.
Even if this Hunter Biden bullshit was true, which it isn’t, it wouldn’t have changed even one vote. Biden was running against Donald Trump a man under more investigations than his hero John Gotti ever was. It’s absurd on its face, and frankly, pretty desperate.