According to a major story in the Washington Post today, current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy committed felony campaign finance violations by pressuring his employees at his business in North Carolina to donate hundreds of thousands to his GOP fundraisers, then committing fraud by reimbursing the money back to his employees as year-end bonuses in order to hide the money.
Louis DeJoy’s prolific campaign fundraising, which helped position him as a top Republican power broker in North Carolina and ultimately as head of the U.S. Postal Service, was bolstered for more than a decade by a practice that left many employees feeling pressured to make political contributions to GOP candidates — money DeJoy later reimbursed through bonuses, former employees say.
Five people who worked for DeJoy’s former business, New Breed Logistics, say they were urged by DeJoy’s aides or by the chief executive himself to write checks and attend fundraisers at his 15,000-square-foot gated mansion beside a Greensboro, N.C., country club. There, events for Republicans running for the White House and Congress routinely fetched $100,000 or more apiece.
Two other employees familiar with New Breed’s financial and payroll systems said DeJoy would instruct that bonus payments to staffers be boosted to help defray the cost of their contributions, an arrangement that would be unlawful.
“Louis was a national fundraiser for the Republican Party. He asked employees for money. We gave him the money, and then he reciprocated by giving us big bonuses,” said David Young, DeJoy’s longtime director of human resources, who had access to payroll records at New Breed from the late 1990s to 2013 and is now retired. “When we got our bonuses, let’s just say they were bigger, they exceeded expectations — and that covered the tax and everything else.”
Another former employee with knowledge of the process described a similar series of events, saying DeJoy orchestrated additional compensation for employees who had made political contributions, instructing managers to award bonuses to specific individuals.
“He would ask employees to make contributions at the same time that he would say, ‘I’ll get it back to you down the road,’ ” said the former employee, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from DeJoy.
In response to a series of detailed questions from The Washington Post, Monty Hagler, a spokesman for DeJoy, said the former New Breed chief executive was not aware that any employees had felt pressured to make donations.
After repeatedly being asked, Hagler did not directly address the assertions that DeJoy reimbursed workers for making contributions, pointing to a statement in which he said DeJoy “believes that he has always followed campaign fundraising laws and regulations.”
Hagler said DeJoy “sought and received legal advice” from a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission “to ensure that he, New Breed Logistics and any person affiliated with New Breed fully complied with any and all laws. Mr. DeJoy believes that all campaign fundraising laws and regulations should be complied with in all respects.”
It's easy enough to follow the money here, and in DeJoy's House hearing just a few weeks ago on his wrecking the USPS on Trump's orders, he was asked about these allegations by Tennessee Democrat Jim Cooper of Nashville.
Cooper: (01:30:53)
Mr. DeJoy, here’s what your so-called reforms have done to my district in 70 days. A lady named Elena Roser paid $5 on July 22nd to send a certified letter to the Nashville, Tennessee social security office. The distance is 20 miles. The letter took 12 days to arrive. Just this morning, excellent reporting from Nashville’s Channel Five TV proves that Nashville’s mail trucks are being forced to leave on schedule even when completely empty. Imagine it: 53 foot trucks forced to travel hundreds of miles, completely empty, due to your so-called reforms. Here are the truck records. That’s not efficiency. That’s insanity. For anyone thinking of voting absentee, the effect of your policies is to unilaterally move up election day from November 3rd to something like October 27th. And if you force more empty trucks on the highway, you will be able to single-handedly move up election day even earlier.
Cooper: (01:32:06)
According to NPR, already 550,000 primary ballots, absentee ballots, were rejected in just 30 states, and one of the main reasons was late delivery. How dare you disenfranchise so many voters when you told the Senate committee just last week that you had a sacred duty to protect election mail. You know that it’s a felony for a postal service officer or employee to delay delivery of mail. A postal employee can be fined or imprisoned for up to five years for delaying the mail. But somehow you can delay all the mail and get away with it? They can be prosecuted, but you can’t, even if your actions are a million times worse? Mr. DeJoy, do you have a duty to obey US law like every other American?
DeJoy: (01:32:58)
I do, sir.
Cooper: (01:33:00)
Well, previous postmasters general have been punished for much smaller conflicts of interests than yours. In 1997, the 70th postmaster general Marvin Runyon from Tennessee had to pay $27,000 because of a $350,000 conflict of interest. If your $30 million conflict of interest, a hundred times larger than Mr. Runyon’s, were treated like your predecessors, you would have to pay a $2.7 million fine and probably be ousted from being postmaster general. So Mr. DeJoy, are you above the law that applies to other postmasters general?
DeJoy: (01:33:45)
I don’t agree with the premise. I’m in full compliance with all ethical requirements that I need to have. And there’s an OIG investigation, and I welcome the result of that report.
Cooper: (01:33:59)
Well, Mr. DeJoy, as a mega donor for the Trump campaign, you were picked along with Michael Cohen and Elliott Broidy, two men who have already pled guilty to felonies, to be the three deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Did you pay back several of your top executives for contributing to Trump’s campaign by bonusing or rewarding them?
DeJoy: (01:34:25)
That’s an outrageous claim, sir, and I resent it.
Cooper: (01:34:29)
I’m just asking a question.
DeJoy: (01:34:30)
The answer is no.
Cooper: (01:34:32)
So you did not bonus or reward any of your executives-
DeJoy: (01:34:36)
No. No.
Cooper: (01:34:36)
Or anyone that you solicited for a contribution to the Trump campaign?
DeJoy: (01:34:39)
No, sir.
So on top of the finance violations and the fraud, he straight up lied to Congress under oath.
In any other administration, DeJoy would be made to resign over this and would lawyer up to face the numerous federal investigations that would almost certainly result in prison time and a hefty fine. We know this because a fundraiser for Al Gore was convicted in March 2000 over an extremely similar scheme.
Maria Hsia, a longtime political fund-raiser for Vice President Al Gore, was convicted today of all five felony counts against her for her role in arranging more than $100,000 in illegal donations to the Democratic Party and its candidates in 1996.
Of that amount, $55,000 was contributed to the Democratic National Committee in connection with the vice president's much-criticized visit to a Buddhist temple in the Los Angeles area. The event, at the Hsi Lai Temple in the community of Hacienda Heights, has shadowed Mr. Gore throughout the current political season, with a variety of his opponents referring to it in efforts to remind the public of the Clinton-Gore organization's fund-raising embarrassments.
As her federal jurors filed in today, Ms. Hsia (pronounced shaw), a 48-year-old Taiwan-born American citizen who works as an immigration counselor in Los Angeles, consulted a Chinese fortune-telling book to try to divine her fate. She then sat impassively as the jury delivered its verdicts for what the government had described as her masterminding an evasion of election laws by disguising the true source of campaign contributions.
The five counts against Ms. Hsia, who did not testify at her three-week-long trial, charged her with causing finance officials of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic campaigns to file false contribution statements with the Federal Election Commission. Although conviction on these counts can mean a years-long prison sentence, federal sentencing guidelines make it more likely that she will serve only a brief term, if any.
In the case of the Buddhist temple, Justice Department prosecutors charged that Ms. Hsia had arranged for nuns and monks there to write checks to make it appear that they were the donors to the Democratic National Committee. In reality, they were only ''straw donors,'' reimbursed by the temple itself, which, as a religious, tax-exempt institution, is prohibited from making political donations.
In other cases, the $1,000 limit on contributions to presidential campaigns was evaded by wealthy Chinese-Americans who testified at the trial that Ms. Hsia had helped them find straw donors for contributions to the Clinton-Gore re-election committee.
This is pretty much exactly what DeJoy is accused of doing. In the Trump regime, DeJoy will get kudos, will keep his job, won't be investigated at all, and would be pardoned anyway if he was actually convicted.
The Trump regime is intrinsically corrupt.
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