Trump hired me to investigate election fraud – I proved his claims were bonkers

Of all the claims Block examined, the belief that 740,070 voters in Wisconsin cast duplicate votes was “by far the wildest”, he writes in his book, “and also the silliest”. 

The allegation originated from the users of a Trump website forum. They had incomplete data – a file they’d found didn’t include 600,000 votes cast in person – and they’d made a basic mathematical error, too. 

Block says: “They believed they’d found the smoking gun – not just in Wisconsin, but for the whole nation. They wanted the federal government to send investigators in, they wanted people arrested. 

“The mistake was immediately evident, but not before these people got a lot of media attention and the story had gone crazy.” 

Once he showed Trump lawyers the truth, that should have ended the matter. Yet he stated at his 6 January rally that he’d lost Wisconsin because of “suppression”. 

Trump also told his supporters: “Over 8,000 ballots in Pennsylvania were cast by people whose names and dates of birth match individuals who died… Think of that. Dead people, lots of dead people, thousands.” 

Block had already shown Trump’s team weeks earlier that this wasn’t true. A maximum of 15 votes were cast in Pennsylvania using identities of the deceased. This tiny number of “zombie voters” was not remotely enough to swing a state that Trump lost by more than 80,000 votes, Block writes. 

With claim after claim being rebuffed, Block says that Cannon recognised the pattern. At the start, he was asking: “Please try to verify this claim.” By the end, he was saying: “Tell me why this claim is wrong.” 

None of this seemed to matter to Trump.

At the end of his 6 January address, Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell”. “We won in a landslide,” he said, but his opponents had “rigged the election”. “This the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.” 

Asking them to help stop Biden’s “theft” of the White House, he called for more pressure on Republican members of Congress “to take back our country”. He concluded: “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue… and we’re going to the Capitol.” 

Did this tempt Block to reveal his work to the public, showing them the truth to help stop the lies? 

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says. “At that point in time, there was no way to have a rational conversation about the facts. People were whipped up into a frenzy – it would have exposed myself and my family to tremendous risk.”