DeJoy Under Investigation for Campaign Finance Violations
Before he became Postmaster General; before he removed thousands of mailboxes and sorting machines to prevent mail-in voting; before he abolished overtime pay; and before he raised the price of a single postage stamp to 58 cents, Louis DeJoy was running a company in North Carolina. Now, the campaign contributions made by his employees during the 2020 campaign are under investigation by the Department of Justice.
The New York Times and The Washington Post reported in early June that DeJoy has now received a Grand Jury subpoena. The FBI has been interviewing several of the current and former employees of New Breed Logistics, the supply chain company in High Point that DeJoy ran from 1983 until he sold it in 2014. He remained on its Board until 2018.
His former employees said they were “pressured” to attend fundraising events and write checks to former President Trump’s election campaign and the election efforts of other Republican office-seekers. All employees spoke to the media on the condition of anonymity.
Two employees reported a link between these activities and increases in their bonus checks, which they said were “widely believed to be reimbursements” for their political donations. DeJoy himself was called a “major Trump donor” in 2016, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told the New York Times that DeJoy had donated more than $2.5 million to “Republican state parties, committees and candidates.” Federal filings show that when he was nominated, DeJoy had given $360,000 to Trump and thousands more to the Republican National Committee.
Evidence backs up the employees’ claims. For example, campaign finance records show that more than a dozen company managers often donated exactly the same amount of money to exactly the same candidates on exactly the same day. For example, on one day in 2014, 20 New Breed Logistics managers donated a total of $37,600 to the senatorial campaign of Thom Tillis (R-NC). Checks ranged from $1000 to the maximum allowable amount of $2,600.
A five-year statute of limitations for criminal violations of campaign finance laws will limit any prosecution to improprieties in 2016 or thereafter. The purported violations also violate state laws, but North Carolina District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said that her state would not undertake an investigation that was “better left to federal authorities.”
DeJoy’s staff confirmed the federal investigation and said that he is cooperating. Spokesman Mark Corallo defended the Postmaster General, stating, “Mr. DeJoy has learned that the Department of Justice is investigating campaign contributions made by employees who worked for him when he was in the private sector…He has always been scrupulous in his adherence to the campaign contribution laws and has never knowingly violated them.”
Corallo also pointed out that the Postal Service Inspector general has already given DeJoy a “clean bill of health on his disclosure and divestment issues… and he expects nothing less in this latest matter.”
DeJoy himself denied any wrongdoing during a 2020 hearing when Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) asked him about the alleged reimbursements.
“That’s an outrageous claim, sir, and I resent it,” DeJoy responded.
The illegality being investigated is whether DeJoy not only urged the campaign contributions, which is legal, but reimbursed them, which is illegal. Doing so avoids campaign limits because official donation records show that contributions were made under many different names, none of which alone exceeds limits.
The current FBI investigation is not the only one DeJoy has faced since his appointment as Postmaster General. During the election, Democrats regularly took him to task for possibly using his position to impede voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, a particularly important time when millions of Americans feared going to the polls in person for fear of deadly infection. DeJoy said that the changes were made not to impede voting, but to make troubled USPS operations “financially stable.”
President Biden is not permitted to replace DeJoy because the members of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board, not the President, select the Postmaster General. In February, Biden announced three new nominees: Anton Hajjar, former general counsel of the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO; Amber Reynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute; and Ron Stroman, recent Deputy Postmaster General and Chief Governmental Relations Officer for the USPS.
All three have been confirmed by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, but it is unclear whether, even if confirmed by the full Senate, there will be enough votes to oust DeJoy. President Trump appointed all existing members of what Forbes has called the “conservative-leaning board.”
