At first blush, The Washington Post’s new reporting on Donald Trump hiring researchers to uncover election fraud, only to come up empty, might seem familiar. But don’t click away just yet, because this is going somewhere.

Ken Block, founder of the firm Simpatico Software Systems, studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign in late 2020 and found they were “all false,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “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.”

The Republican operation paid the company $750,000.

At this point, some readers are probably asking, “Didn’t we already know this?” The answer is, “Not exactly.”

What we already knew is about a different group of researchers hired by the Trump campaign.

In February, the Washington Post reported on the Berkeley Research Group, which is well known in legal and corporate circles as a leading consulting firm with prominent clients. As we’ve discussed, when Trump’s political operation set out to scrutinize the 2020 presidential election, and it sought out expert researchers to bolster the former president’s conspiracy theories about voter fraud and election irregularities, it turned to BRG to do the heavy lifting.

“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,” an insider familiar with the BRG findings explained. “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 the Berkeley Research Group couldn’t generate the evidence Team Trump was looking for, because it didn’t exist. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown recently joked, Trump “must have really hated that his campaign spent over $600,000 to be told he was wrong.”

The new reporting from yesterday adds a new dimension to all of this: The Republican operation, refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results, also hired Simpatico Software Systems to conduct a separate investigation — but it couldn’t find any evidence for Team Trump, either.

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The obvious significance of revelations like these is that the former president, who continues to lie about his defeat, was well aware of the truth. Trump wrote sizable checks to some of the industry’s top researchers, but they told him the same thing his campaign manager, campaign data team, and campaign lawyers did: He lost, fair and square.

Presented with these facts, the former president not only kept lying, he also launched a scheme to remain in office, hoping to claim power he hadn’t earned. What’s more, he turned all of this into a lucrative fundraising scheme, collecting money from people who believed — and continue to believe — his lies.

But the less obvious significance of the revelations is that the findings from the Berkeley Research Group and Simpatico Software Systems are highly relevant to federal prosecutors.

The Post reported in February that the BRG’s “Project 2020” report is now in Justice Department’s hands, as part of the Jan. 6 investigation, and Simpatico’s founder added that he recently received a subpoena from special counsel Jack Smith’s office and met with federal prosecutors in Washington.

In other words, Trump’s willingness to lie about his election defeat matters as a political matter, but what should worry the former president far more are the potential legal consequences.