Here's a comprehensive Washington Post report on Trump's blatant lie suggesting that he only lost the popular vote because between three and five million "illegal" votes were cast against him.
The voter fraud canard was just one in a rush of falsehoods that poured from Trump and his advisers during his first 10 days in office. [...]
The rapid dissemination of such easily refutable claims shows how Trump’s administration will be unlike any other — and how comments rooted in conspiracy theories instead of facts can now become the basis for official government policy.
This is how we have to track the doings of our government now. On the bright side, we seem to be rapidly abandoning the implausible old standard of pretending Donald Trump isn't lying about things. He's provably lying about things.
Oh, but Post reporter Jenna Johnson also tracked how it happened. If you haven't followed the whole thing, it's a good primer into just how egregious the White House lies on the subject really were, from Sean Spicer pretending Trump said something he didn't say to repeated House Republican claims about voter fraud that were all equally malevolent and false:
About 8 a.m.: Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) was on CNN and claimed “there are places, for instance, in and around Pennsylvania where 110 percent of the voters turn out.” [...]
Sessions’s staff has yet to explain the congressman’s claim.
That's not the (sigh) attorney general pick, mind you, but a separate Sessions from a different state. Don't get your anti-civil-rights, anti-voting-rights Republicans confused. Or do, I don't care. It's all the same crap.
After 10 p.m. that night: ABC News aired an interview with the president, who said there are “millions of votes” cast by dead people, “illegals” and those registered in two or three states.
He lied. He cited a Pew report that didn't show anything like that. Then he said everybody that cast illegal votes voted for Hillary and not one person illegally voted for him, based on nothing at all, apparently just to show Americans that there is no lie Trump isn't willing to tell. (This would be a good time to look up Narcissistic Personality Disorder, by the way, a crippling condition that would be almost incomprehensibly dangerous for any nation that found such a person in charge of their military.)
And on and on. The capper was when the sitting president of the United States tweeted a shout-out to what was almost certainly the actual original source of the "3 million illegal votes" claim, a man on Twitter who claimed the number out of nowhere, refused to provide any evidence of it, and who has continued his inability to justify the claim ever since he made it immediately after the election. He may or may not be a conspiracy theorist. He may or may not have been promoting "fake news" for the purposes of getting coverage from exceedingly stupid and gullible people like ... Donald Trump. But it appears to be where the White House got their invented claim from: Some Guy on Twitter.
Oh, but the White House has now said they'll be ordering an investigation into that "fraud" that nobody can find and which is almost certainly a figment invented by Some Guy and adopted by a president who has repeatedly and brazenly lied about that and other self-serving conspiracy theories he has chosen to promote. And it's all lies. At no point from November to now have any of them been able to point to even the tiniest stick of evidence that the conspiracy happened. It was invented, from start to finish.