Trump blames ‘Democratic’ Postal Service for loss, despite being led by GOP mega-donor

The president blamed the US Postal Service “Democratic stronghold” for its electoral loss on Friday, even though he appointed a GOP mega-donor to lead it and spent months undermining the agency ahead of the election.

“Whistleblowers reveal USPS responsible for forging hundreds of thousands of ballots,” Trump tweeted Friday morning, referring to a report to this effect from the far right One America News Network. “This longtime Democratic stronghold got rid of massive numbers, especially in swing states, during and before ballot delivery. Well documented evidence!

He’s probably referring to a recent OANN story repeating Jesse Morgan’s claims. Mr Morgan, who claims to be a postal entrepreneur, claimed without evidence at a press conference called by a Republican lawyer on Wednesday that he drove a truck full of hundreds of thousands of fake ballots mailed from New York to Pennsylvania. The claims quickly went viral, and the driver was retweeted by the president and interviewed on Fox News.

Authorities said they were investigating the allegations, but Pennsylvania officials questioned the allegations, noting that it is not surprising that the mail ballots crossed state lines, because people could have been currently out of state by the time they voted, or stuck somewhere due to the coronavirus. The number of ballots Mr Morgan said he transported to Pennsylvania also exceeded the total number of mail-in ballots requested in the counties he described by hundreds of thousands.

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In May, Louis DeJoy, a logistics official in North Carolina who has donated millions to the GOP and President Trump, was asked to lead the Postal Service. Even before that, the president spent months trying to undermine the agency’s ability to deliver mail-in ballots because he believed they benefited Democrats.

In the spring, at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, Democrats pushed to add additional funding from the USPS to allow expanded mail-in voting, believing it would be safer during the pandemic.

Mr Trump criticized the push in March, saying Fox and friends It was crazy.”

“The things they had in there were crazy,” he says. “They had voting levels, that if you ever took it, you’d never have an elected Republican in this country again.”

In August, as Postal Service funding began to derail coronavirus aid negotiations, he told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that he didn’t want the Postal Service to receive money because it would expand vote.

“If we don’t come to a deal, it means they don’t get the money, it means they can’t have universal postal voting,” he said. “They just can’t have it.”

The president has also made numerous and false statements about the safety of postal voting, even though he voted by correspondence in recent elections.

Meanwhile, Mr DeJoy instituted a number of service changes, according to voting rights activists, that could hamper the vote, while lawmakers and the White House continued to haggle over funding, Democrats did having failed to secure their $ 25 billion funding envelope for the agency after a successful vote in the House of Representatives. The USPS reached the terms of a $ 10 billion Treasury Department emergency line of credit in July, but has since struggled to secure more much-needed funding.

Service changes, such as suggested overtime reductions and keeping some mail overnight, have sparked widespread outrage from Democrats and voting advocates, including more than a dozen lawsuits , fearing that the changes would affect the vote in an unprecedented election.

In August, DeJoy announced that he would put the changes on hold until the election was over.

The postal service says it delivered around 135 million ballots on election day.

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