Ex-RNC Chair Says Trump Chief of Staff is Behind Post Office Attack

(Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Image: https://www.c-span.org/video/?473623-1/white-house-chief-staff-mark-meadows-speaks-reporters)

The ringleader behind the White House’s attack on the U.S. Postal Service and voting by mail is not the new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, nor is it Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, as the New York Times implied in a recent report, according to an ex-Republican National Committee chairman and Lt. Governor of Maryland.

It is Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff and former North Carolina congressman and chair of the House Freedom Caucus, Michael Steele said during an August 17 webcast by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“Understand what we are dealing with,” Steele said (starting at 35.50). “Keep in mind that the president’s chief of staff is a former member of Congress who served on the relevant committee overseeing the Post Office. So this idea that there’s not an appreciation or understanding of how the Post Office works, and you know, the complications—this is deliberate folks. This is not something that was made up out of whole cloth or they just stumbled onto. This is part of a strategy.”

Steele told the panel that both major political parties have relied on absentee ballots as part of their get-out-the-vote strategies for decades—and the process has never been controversial, he said, until Trump’s White House and campaign opted to attack it as an election strategy.

“When your chief of staff ran the committee that oversaw the functions of the Postal Service when he was in the House, tells you everything that you need to know,” Steele said. “So understand the battlefield that we are on here and appreciate that all these folks who are running around playing stupid, like, ‘Oh my God, I just realized [the impact]’ and ‘I didn’t know that this worked this way,’ they’re loading you up with crap right now.”

Steele, who is now the board chair of the U.S. Vote Foundation, which helps civilians and troops overseas to cast absentee ballots, said that it was crucial to unmask this ruse.

“Clear out the crap,” he said. “Don’t let it get in your way. Because the reality is if you’re not protesting now, and pushing this agenda now, trust me, it becomes 10 times harder after the election is over; when Trump has already sowed the narrative effectively that this was a rigged game from the beginning, and the system was out to prevent him from getting re-elected.” “We will rue the day that he stands in front of the country and says, ‘Well, I’m suspending the results of the election until there’s an investigation.’ And then, what are you going to do?” Steele continued. “So, take this moment seriously.”