In legal and corporate circles, the Berkeley Research Group is well known as a leading consulting firm with prominent clients. When Donald Trump’s political operation set out to scrutinize the 2020 presidential election, and it sought out expert researchers, it apparently turned to BRG to do the heavy lifting.
In fact, The Washington Post reported that Team Trump hired BRG researchers to look for evidence of voter fraud and election irregularities, examining everything from voter machines to the possibility of dead people voting.
And why, pray tell, are we just now hearing about this? The Post’s report explained:
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.
In other words, according to the reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, BRG provided the Trump campaign with its findings, which the Republican operation quietly put aside because researchers told the truth: There was no evidence to support the former president’s conspiracy theories.
Or as my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown put it, Trump “must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong.”
It’s worth pausing to appreciate the number of people close to Trump who told him the truth. As regular readers know, his campaign manager told him he lost. His lawyers told him he lost. His campaign data experts told him he lost. The courts told him he lost. His Justice Department told him he lost. His attorney general told him he lost. And the outside private researchers hired to prove that he didn’t actually lose told him he lost.
We now know, of course, that the Republican ignored all of these people and kept lying. We also know why: As former Attorney General Bill Barr explained in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, in reference to Trump’s attitude, “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.” The Post quoted an insider familiar with the BRG findings who explained, “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. 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.” But in the end, they simply couldn’t tell Trump what he wanted to hear — because reality is awfully stubborn. Related:
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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