These are the answers of True North Research’s Executive Director Lisa Graves in response to Questions for the Record from Chairman Gerald E. Connolly on October 13, 2020.
- Since the hearing, what new information have you discovered about Mr. DeJoy’s background and conflicts of interest?
Since the hearing on September 14, seven federal court rulings have been issued against the U.S. Postal Service over the changes Mr. DeJoy made that have demonstrably slowed U.S. mail and placed our election at risk, since he became Postmaster General in June 2020:
· NAACP v. USPS, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Oct. 10, 2020)
· Richardson v. Trump, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Oct. 8, 2020)
· Pennsylvania v. DeJoy, Judge Gerald A. McHugh, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (Sept. 28, 2020)
· Vote Forward v. DeJoy, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Sept. 28, 2020)
· New York v. USPS, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, District of Columbia District Court (Sept. 27, 2020)
· Jones v. USPS, Judge Victor Marrero, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Sept. 25, 2020)
· Washington v. Trump, Judge Stanley A. Bastian, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington (Sept. 17, 2020)
In all, 12 federal cases have been filed against Louis DeJoy’s actions, edicts, and mismanagement of this vital public service which is especially essential in the midst of a deadly pandemic. The seven rulings above each make findings about the actual harm or prospective harm from changes under his management of the process for delivering our letters and packages.
These include his order that mail trucks leave “on time” even if that means leaving unsorted mail behind, which was a massive departure from practices that had helped ensure timely mail delivery. This August, DeJoy boasted about how his actions had increased on time departure of trucks as if that were the most important measure of success. On his watch, the availability of overtime was also greatly limited. And, among other things, a massive number of high-volume sorting machines were removed over a very short period this summer, which were removed disproportionately from counties where Americans voted for the Democratic nominee for the White House.
The judicial rulings above reflect determinations by independent federal courts that DeJoy’s management and decisions have failed to protect the crucial role the Postal Service plays in our elections and our lives. Some of these challenges reflect arguments that DeJoy also failed to follow proper procedures for administrative review of their effect on customers. Other challenges, before other tribunals, have been made about the harms of these practices by unions representing workers.
And despite the promises of Mr. DeJoy that the U.S. Postal Service will comply with these orders—including replacing mail sorting machines that were improvidently dismantled—just this past week, a Member of Congress was blocked from touring a USPS facility and other Members of the full Committee have been blocked.
In the words of Ronald Reagan, it is important to trust but verify, especially with Louis DeJoy’s track record. But also, we know from his testimony before the full committee, that he plans to resume any practices that are temporarily delayed once the election is over—because he promised or threatened to do so as part of his master plan to cut costs rather than to ask Congress for the financial support that is needed to address losses during covid-19, which many other U.S. businesses have received.
That’s not all. Since the hearing, the Project on Government Oversight has asked for an investigation of the procedures that led to the Board of Governors choosing Mr. DeJoy for the job, even though he was not on the lists of candidates recommended by search firms hired to identify candidates with records of excellence.
It has become increasingly clear that Mr. DeJoy’s financial contributions to the GOP played a major role in moving him into the position he now holds.
Just this week, CNN reported that new FEC filings show that Louis DeJoy contributed more than $685,000 to the host committee for the RNC, and more than $400,000 of that was since December. We have also reviewed the tally of Mr. DeJoy’s donations from his accounts to the Trump Victory PAC to aid Trump’s re-election and his overall election strategy since the position of Postmaster General arose. The updated total is more than $360,000 since last winter, not more than $600,000 as initially tallied, and more than $700,000 in this cycle.
So, I would like to correct the record to reflect that from December 2019 until his selection as Postmaster General, Mr. DeJoy gave just under $800,000 to aid the Trump campaign and the RNC host committee in support of Donald Trump’s bid for re-election in 2020. Cumulatively, he has given more than $1.7 million to aid Trump’s bid for re-election and the RNC host committee in support of that bid.
That does not include his donations to legislative candidates and committees.
Finally, there are new allegations of cronyism where one of the right-hand men of Mr. DeJoy is now being paid by the RNC. It is unclear if other DeJoy compatriots also now work for the RNC, where DeJoy previously was named a Deputy Finance Chair by Trump—alongside two men who were subsequently indicted: Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, and Trump’s buddy, Elliot Broidy.
It is also not known how many of the people Mr. DeJoy has hired to assist him at the USPS worked for him previously. That may be important to know given the allegations that he bundled checks from employees, with the aid of his assistants, to boost his political capital with the party. Some employees have said they felt pressure to give to the GOP politicians he supported. The Washington Post also detailed allegations that he rewarded employees who donated to the politicians he supported, with bonuses and reimbursements.
For these and other reasons, including his terrible mismanagement of the agency, I have called for Mr. DeJoy to resign or be fired—doing so along with my project, the Ben Franklin Project.
2. Do you see Mr. DeJoy’s appointment as Postmaster General as an attempt by the Republican Party to weaken the Postal Service and eventually privatize it? Why or why not?
I firmly believe there is convincing evidence that his appointment is part of the scheme by the Trump administration and big donors like billionaire Charles Koch to push our Postal Service into privatization, as I detailed in my report with In the Public Interest and the BOLD ReThink, which is available here: https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/ITPI_USPSPrivatization_July2020.pdf
Additionally, I would draw the Subcommittee’s attention to news reports of the unprecedented role that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is playing in directing the U.S. Postal Service, as documented by the former Vice Chair of the USPS board of Governors in his testimony before the Congressional Progressive Caucus and reported by the New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/business/economy/dejoy-postmaster-general-trump-mnuchin.html and the American Prospect, https://prospect.org/politics/top-postal-service-official-details-mnuchin-extortion-effort/.
New documents obtained by American Oversight and reported by the Washington Post confirm these accounts and more, as noted here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/09/17/treasury-tried-to-take-over-postal-service-control-mnuchin-trump-administration-american-oversight/#7265947659be
It is also significant to me that most of the men Donald Trump has named to the Board of Governors have no experience in agency governance, but they do have experience in the lucrative business of private equity. Some of them have engaged in leveraged buyout work that has drained companies of their capital—including pension funds—in ways that enrich executives, shareholders, and LBO brokers.
It is also noteworthy that Mr. DeJoy is continuing his long-standing financial relationship with a private equity firm, Warburg Pincus, that has sought to broker deals to transfer government pension plans into private hands, as I described in my initial testimony to the Committee:
“Another potential issue is Mr. DeJoy’s long-term financial relationship with the private equity firm Warburg Pincus. According to his wife’s financial filings, he has between $2.5 million to $11 million invested in two Warburg Pincus private equity funds, with income of between $200K and $2 million in the past year…. Mr. DeJoy also has liabilities with the private equity firm in the form of capital commitments to Warburg totaling between $5,250,000 and $25,500,000. It is not known what those capital commitments are invested in, but Warburg Pincus has been a long-time financial partner of DeJoy and New Breed/XPO.
Warburg Pincus has also used its private equity to secure stakes in other logistics companies across the globe that could financially benefit from privatizing or parting out the U.S. Postal Service. It has also previously invested in pension buyout firms. It has helped UPS acquire other firms, like Coyote Logistics, to expand its reach.”
Privatization or even partial privatization of the Postal Service would be a disaster for the American people. A pension buyout of any kind would also be extremely harmful to workers.
I am also deeply concerned that the cost-cutting measures being pushed by DeJoy and Mnuchin will push this beloved public institution into the hands of privatizers, with more contracting out to the private sector in the meantime. We know that even though XPO—the logistics corporation in which DeJoy has invested between $11 million and $75 million—has said it is not a competitor of the Postal Service, it in fact benefits already from the outsourcing of mail sorting around peak volume periods as with holiday mail. As the press has reported, XPO’s revenue from the Postal Service increased significantly this summer compared with last year.
So we know with certainty that Mr. DeJoy’s decisions that require more contractors could benefit himself financially. This is totally unacceptable and unethical. No government agency should be led by a person with investments in contractors of that agency. Period. Full stop.
In light of all this, I believe it would be appropriate for Congress to reassert its constitutional role in governing the U.S Postal Service. I urge it to reorganize the Board of Governors and the selection process of Postmaster General, as soon as possible, in order to protect this vital public service from the privatizers and profiteers. With the support of Congress, the American people can help invest in our Postal Service to ensure it thrives. With the Postal Service’s purchasing power, it could be a real leader in good policies that help green our economy and other innovations–which the private sector has sought unfairly and selfishly to thwart.
3. What are the prior and continuing political activities and possible conflicts of interest of the current members of the Postal Service Board of Governors?
Louis DeJoy is a member of the Postal Service Board of Governors, and his manifold conflicts of interest and disqualifying actions are described elsewhere in these answers, in my testimony, and in the testimony of other witnesses the Subcommittee called.
Mike Duncan
Robert “Mike” Duncan, the Chair of the Board of Governors, has helmed the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP-Aligned PAC that raised more than $100 million to help his fellow friend from Kentucky, Senator Mitch McConnell, remain in power, as David Sirota and Matthew Cunningham Cook reported.
Duncan began helping that PAC as a member in 2016, the year he chaired Karl Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, which was created in 2010 to exploit the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United to bar Congress from limiting such groups. He has been a member of American Crossroads since 2010 and was twice its chair. In 2016, when Duncan chaired the group fighting to stop Hillary Clinton from being elected, DeJoy gave it $25K to help, two weeks before the presidential election that left Trump the winner.
Duncan has also been a Director of GOP Data Trust, which had a data breach in 2017 that leaked data about more than 200 million Americans the group was keeping files on.
He’s a very partisan person and player, although at one point, Duncan told the Associated Press: “I am more than a partisan animal…”
This is the man Trump chose to line up to become the chair of the Postal Service Board of Governors. Duncan is the man who helped get one of Trump’s major funders approved as Postmaster General. Duncan used the weakened Board of Governors to push DeJoy through. Let’s be clear about this with the American people. The Board was not fully staffed with a majority of people with any real experience or understanding of the actual needs of the Postal Service.
The majority of the members of the Board at the time DeJoy was hired had barely been playing the part-time role of Board member for months. Their experience in the private sector does not equate at all with knowing how to assess the needs of a workforce of more than 500,000 people serving the needs of more than 300 million Americans. The Board still does not have a full complement of Board members to this day. Duncan is the longest serving board member and he has been doing this part-time gig for only a couple of years since Trump appointed him–while also spending substantial time fundraising for Mitch McConnell.
That’s who made the deeply flawed decision to give the job to a political crony and patron of Donald Trump and that’s the board that apparently failed to look more than skin deep at DeJoy’s actual background, the extent of his complex financial holdings, and even his track record with the Postal Service itself. This is the epitome of an old boy’s network, one that does not serve the genuine interests of the American people well at all.
But there’s more to Duncan’s partisanship; it runs deep and long, all the way back to crooked Richard Nixon, who at least had the wherewithal to resign after disgracing the presidency.
Duncan helmed the Republican National Committee (RNC) as chair when it raised hundreds of millions of dollars to try unsuccessfully to beat Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election. He’s been chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky’s Budget (fundraising) Committee since 1996. He also worked briefly for the George W. Bush Administration. Duncan was first a delegate to the RNC in 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon was re-nominated, before resigning after the crimes he was involved in became apparent and the GOP was unwilling to fully sully its reputation by standing by its man.
Aside from being an extremely partisan money man for Trump, McConnell, and the GOP, Duncan is also a Kentucky banker. Interestingly, Duncan’s “tax compliance” and financial holdings answers in his Senate nomination questionnaire were stamped “redacted.” What are his holdings? Does this Committee know what they are? The American people do not, and they should have a right to know more about the tax compliance and financial holdings of the man playing such a powerful role in our Postal Service, directing the choice of who gets the role of Postmaster General–a post with no term limit whatsoever.
Notably, Duncan’s Office of Government Ethics (OGE) form was signed off on by David Apol, the controversial OGE official who reportedly signed off on Jared Kushner’s ethics forms. Apol is the White House OGE lawyer whom former chief ethics officer Walter Shaub has criticized for being too lax in waiving away potential conflicts of Trump appointees.
Duncan also briefly chaired the Tennessee Valley Authority, a huge public utility. He has spent years helping to peddle claims about “clean coal” as the President of the special interest group called “American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.” ACCCE is an industry front group which, as DeSmog Blog has documented, has promoted extensive disinformation about climate change, tried to disrupt regional climate change agreements, and attacked efforts to protect Americans from the dangers of the neurotoxin mercury.
Duncan is fully plugged into the Trump political power structure, and Trump even named Duncan’s son to be the U.S. Attorney with jurisdiction in the state of Kentucky. That office would have jurisdiction should any federal issues arise around Senator McConnell or his posse.
Duncan’s term is slated to run from August 2018 through December 2025, unless he is removed from the Postal Service’s Board earlier.
None of the other USPS Board of Governors Members have the kinds of massive conflicts of interest that Louis DeJoy and Mike Duncan do. There are also some noteworthy facts about the backgrounds of other Board members that have been eclipsed by the scandals surrounding Mr. DeJoy and Mr. Duncan’s political ties.
William Zollars
Board of Governors member William Zollars does have some financial conflicts. He is on the board of the logistics company Prologis, which also rents real estate to USPS, FedEx and UPS. HuffPo recently reported that Zollars was compensated with stock worth over one million dollars.
He is the former CEO of YRC Trucking. He has been interviewed by federal authorities in an investigation into allegations that the company defrauded the Pentagon during his tenure as CEO. His company was also the subject of several suits by employees regarding their treatment by the corporation. Notably, this spring, YRC received an emergency loan from the Treasury Department for $700 million, nearly a billion dollars from taxpayers, as part of Covid relief. (However, Zollars left the company in 2011.) It is not clear what his current investments are.
Zollars is slated to sit on the Board of Governors from June 2020 to December 2022. He was put on the Board after DeJoy was hired.
John Barger
Then there’s John McLeod Barger. Compared with DeJoy and Duncan, he’s a small donor, who gave money to GOP Senators Susan Collins, Tom Cotton, and Dan Sullivan, as well as the RNC. He is the managing director at NorthernCross Partners, a private investment firm located in Los Angeles. Barger reportedly played a significant role in making DeJoy Postmaster General, even though he had been on the Board for a very short time.
Barger is also someone whom Steve Mnuchin specifically recruited for a role on the Postal Service Board of Governors. Why? Barger’s expertise is in working with government pension fund investments. Why is the Treasury Secretary so interested in the Postal
Service’s pension fund? The Trump administration’s proposed federal budgets have specifically targeted the pensions of mail carriers and other federal employees.
Barger’s term on the Board is slated to be from August 2019 to December 2021.
Roman Martinez, IV
Roman Martinez, IV, has donated to Duncan’s Senate Leadership Fund, but like Barger, he’s a small donor. He is connected, and his son clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, before he was elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Martinez is a former investment banker whose mansion is on the same Palm Beach barrier island as Mar-a-Lago. Since retiring, he has served on numerous boards and has invested in real estate in Florida.
Martinez was a partner with Lehman Brothers for years until 2003. That year, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled a multi-year investigation of the firm and nine other investment firms, resulting in $1.4 billion in financial penalties for basically double-dealing in their investment banking operations. The settlement included an $80 million penalty for Lehman, which later collapsed in the midst of the mortgage crisis that crashed the U.S. and global economy in 2008. It is not clear what companies Mr. Martinez is invested in.
His term is slated to run from August 2019 to December 2024, through almost the entire next presidential term.
Donald Moak
Donald Lee Moak also does not appear to have any financial conflicts of interest based on his background. He served as a Captain in the U.S. Marine Corps and the CEO of The Moak Group, a corporate and political consulting business that he co-founded in 2015.
Moak’s term on the Board of Governors is slated for June 2020 through December 2022.
Ronald Bloom
Ronald Bloom is a former investment banker. In 2009, Bloom served as Senior Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the President’s Task Force on the Automotive Industry, as Obama’s “car czar.”
Per the Wall Street Journal, Bloom moved from investment banking “to work as a top adviser to Leo Gerard, the union leader who now is president of the United Steelworkers. In a dramatic overhaul of the struggling U.S. steel industry during the 1990s, Bloom and Gerard worked on dozens of bankruptcies and workouts, some of which forced steel workers to give up pay and job security to restructure the industry.” According to the Pittsburgh Gazette, Bloom advised USW to “focus on making steelmakers profitable rather than on the number of jobs.” He also served for a time as a Special Assistant to George Becker, the president of the United Steelworkers.
A Democrat, Bloom’s term is the shortest of all the Board of Governors Trump has named, and he is slated to serve from August 2019 to December 2020, unless he is re-nominated.
In general, it would be optimal for all members of the Board of Governors to make public any required financial disclosures and for those materials to be readily accessible online.
4. In your testimony you stated that “no Postmaster General in history has ever been subject to such charges of mail theft or fraud before in a civil court or criminal court.” Could you describe the charges of theft and fraud made against Mr. DeJoy?
Yes. I have searched the historical records and can find no news accounts of any Postmaster General ever having been accused of stealing the mail, other than Louis DeJoy.
Accordingly, the detailed allegations made by his brother claiming a pattern of deception by Mr. DeJoy are important to examine, even though Mr. DeJoy denied any wrongdoing.
Here are the most noteworthy details from the litigation from 1999-2000:
· Dominick DeJoy, Jr., alleged that he and Louis DeJoy along with a third brother were equal one-third partners in the trucking and delivery company their father created in New York, New Breed Inc. This was not denied by Louis DeJoy.
· All three brothers worked for the company in different capacities, with Dominick performing marketing and sales duties to expand the business and with Louis handling the accounting and management because he was an accountant. This was not denied by Louis DeJoy.
· Dominick alleges that Louis DeJoy fraudulently created a series of similarly named companies, like New Breed Leasing Corp., which were part of New Breed Transfer Corp., which he believed were all owned equally but which, in fact, Dominick had no ownership in. The majority owner was actually Louis DeJoy, with the third brother holding a minority interest. Louis DeJoy claims he did nothing illegal but that he did create and control these other companies.
· Dominick alleged that in tax filing and other documents Louis DeJoy presented to him the main family business was described as a “parent company” but in fact the other “new companies” were not subsidiaries of it. Louis DeJoy admitted that the term may have been used but that it had no effect and that the term “new companies” was ambiguous.
· Dominick claimed that when he discovered the fact that he had been cut out of the other companies (that is, was never included), that he was induced to sign a stockholder agreement as part of a reorganization to obtain 15% of the businesses (with Louis DeJoy owning 55% of them). However, he alleged that Louis DeJoy tried to sell Dominick’s reduced portion of the company to someone else and provide him with less than the amount of even that small share of the company. Louis DeJoy admitted the percentages in the reorganized companies but denied doing anything wrong.
· Dominick also alleged that Louis DeJoy opened three different bank accounts in his name, forging his signature without his permission, and that he did not know these financial accounts–that held millions of dollars–were in his name. Louis DeJoy claimed they often signed each other’s names on documents.
· Dominick also alleged that Louis DeJoy hid the mailed bank statements for three different bank or investment accounts in Dominick’s name from him for more than five years, from 1994-2000, or had employees of the company hide that monthly mail from him. Louis DeJoy denied this, but Dominick DeJoy claimed he did not know the accounts existed for years and never received any monthly bank statements and that he only discovered the existence of the accounts in 1999. Louis DeJoy denied those allegations, which are detailed below.
The theft of mail, if proven, is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1708, which bars stealing or taking or obtaining someone else’s mail “by fraud or deception.” Conviction can result in a fine or imprisonment of up to five years and a restriction on voting based on the commission of a felony.
The law provides a five-year statute of limitations for mail theft, though the statute of limitations is ten years if the mail theft involved any fraudulent scheme affecting a financial institution.
As noted above, Mr. DeJoy denied the sworn complaint his brother signed on January 12, 2000.
His brother did not refer his allegations to state or federal authorities in North Carolina.
The case was settled by all parties as part of a secret settlement on January 18, 2001. The filing of this case was covered by reporter Richard Craver in the High Point Enterprise in 2000 in a story titled: “Legal Battle between North Carolina Siblings Alleges Plots, Deception.”
Here are the complete litigation files from the state court in North Carolina:
99cvs12425a (PDF) and 99cvs12425a (Text)
5. What federal entity do you think is best suited to perform background and conflicts of interest vetting on the Postmaster General and the Postal Service Board of Governors?
I strongly believe that the candidates for these positions of public trust with fiscal responsibility over an agency that has billions in revenue each year should be conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The FBI should conduct a full field background investigation of candidates for that Board, including for Postmaster General, going back to their 18th birthday to interview their employers, co-workers, employees, and neighbors, examine their financial condition, and review and document all lawsuits involving them.
That material should be reviewed by cleared staff at the White House as well as by any committee of jurisdiction, before any appointment is approved—even if Congress does not revert to requiring Senate confirmation of the Postmaster General as an executive nomination.
In my view, Congress should consider whether to eliminate the Board completely and examine alternative methods of ensuring it is governed by people devoted to preserving the
Postal Service as a public institution. Congress should consider the value of requiring that an agency like the Postal Service have an advisory board constituted of people who have demonstrable records of public service and experience in leading major governmental functions—for example, limiting the membership to ensure there is majority of people with SES experience and qualifications. It should also take steps to reduce the influence of special interests or the financial sector, which have predominated as with the prior appointment of Koch ally James C. Miller III, at McConnell’s behest, and the majority of the current board.
At a minimum, Congress should reorganize the board to prevent the gaming of the terms for Board members as Senator McConnell has done in coordination with the White House in order to extend the term of his fundraiser, Mike Duncan, to exceed the next presidential term.
I also believe the decision to hire a Postmaster General should be subject to a democratic check, meaning be made by elected officials accountable to the people, in order to add a needed measure of accountability and public opportunity to weigh in.
Whether Congress changes the appointment process to include Senate confirmation or not, I also believe the Postmaster General role should have a definite term limit, which perhaps should not exceed a presidential term.
6. What type of conflicts of interest vetting should be required before someone should be considered eligible to serve as the Postmaster General?
It is fundamental that the Postmaster General not have financial conflicts of interest that would allow him to profit from his or her decisions at the helm of this public agency. Those should be verboten and not something that an ethically compromised White House can waive away.
It is essential that anyone appointed to this position should have to follow the same rules as other agency heads in filing annual financial disclosure forms and those be made publicly available through posting them directly on the agency’s website (not something a citizen has to submit a FOIA to obtain).
Congress needs to reform the financial disclosure forms across the board to require more detail about financial holdings, including requiring the actual value held on a date certain versus a highly ambiguous range that, as shown in the case of Mr. DeJoy, does not allow the public to know if he holds $11 million in stock of more than $75 million in stock in XPO Logistics. The public has a right to know about any major financial holdings with specificity.
Furthermore, if there are hedge fund investments, as with Mr. DeJoy, the fund in which companies invest must be publicly disclosed or divested, rather than keeping that information from the public.
The same goes with the type of major property holdings on Mr. DeJoy’s ledger. The public should be informed of the identities of major tenants, who might have business with the agency the candidate is in charge of, as with the multimillion-dollar leases he has with XPO, which were discoverable via SEC filings, not due to any White House ethics form.
If a candidate for office has a complex arrangement of trusts and holding companies of the kind Mr. DeJoy has deployed, the FBI should examine that as part of a background investigation to ensure that all of those companies are and/or were in full compliance with federal and state tax and other legal obligations.
Should a candidate for office have a non-profit entity, as with Mr. DeJoy, the financial investments of that non-profit must be disclosed in detail and not simply listed as “securities.”
It’s also vital that if a candidate has run a firm that is a contractor of a government agency, as with Mr. DeJoy, that there be a thorough review of any audits or Inspector General investigations of the terms of those contracts and the performance of them before such an individual is offered a position of public trust running that agency. In this instance, an IG report showed that DeJoy’s company had obtained no-bid contracts from the Postal Service and those contracts enriched him greatly while in essence over-charging the Postal Service compared with the rate that a competitive bidding process would have resulted in.
Finally, I think it is essential for there to be a thorough review of all of the litigation brought against any company led by a person being considered to helm a federal agency, like the Postal Service. Such a review would have uncovered the sworn complaint of his brother alleging that Mr. DeJoy cheated him out of the family business by creating holding companies that excluded his brother and allegedly also including the opening of bank accounts in his brother’s name and having those monthly bank statements intercepted to prevent his brother from learning about them every month for more than five years.
Such a review would also have identified numerous complaints by employees alleging a hostile working environment was created by his managers and also that Mr. DeJoy enriched himself by having no air conditioning available to cool employees working in sweltering warehouses in the North Carolina summer heat.
The bottom-line is that many of the things the public has learned about Mr. DeJoy’s background should have disqualified him from the position he now holds. And his actions on the job would result in his termination in almost any other circumstances, except here where the chairman of this partisan-dominated board, Mike Duncan, is a fundraiser for the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, and is himself a partisan political operative.
The U.S. Postal Service deserves better. The American people deserve better. There are certainly women and men who have stellar records of public service and a devotion to the public interest, as opposed to their own profits and political power, who could ably lead our U.S. Postal Service. Mr. DeJoy should resign or be removed, and at the earliest possible opportunity he should be replaced by someone who does not have such financial and political conflicts of interest.
