Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin releases a Postal Task Force report that calls for dramatically reorganizing the United States Post Office. In the months that follow, he sets out to find Trump loyalists for the USPS board of governors.
After the task force issued its report, Mr. Mnuchin sought to ensure that the president nominated postal governors who would enact Treasury’s recommendations and would pick a like-minded postmaster general to carry them out. Mr. Mnuchin referred prospective candidates to the White House, according to a Treasury spokeswoman, and then regularly asked his staff for updates, a former Treasury official involved in the process said.
The New York Times
Throughout 2019 and 2020, Mnuchin meets privately on multiple occasions with Robert Duncan, a Republican National Committee chairman added to the USPS board in August — just four months after Mnuchin was put in charge to reform the postal service.
He also meets with John Barger, “a California lawyer and financial investment adviser who was recommended to the Treasury secretary by a mutual associate.” Mnuchin recommends that Donald Trump appoints Barger to the board of governors, and he does in the summer of 2019.
In February 2020, Mnuchin meets behind the scenes with Duncan and Barger, secretly putting them in charge of finding a new postmaster general who will carry out his and Trump’s orders.
S. David Fineman, a former member and chairman of the Postal Service’s board, called Mr. Mnuchin’s close involvement in the affairs of the Postal Service “absolutely unprecedented.”
During his tenure in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, he said the board had minimal interaction with the administrations, and “certainly no communication regarding the hiring of the postmaster general.”
The New York Times
Sources
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm566
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/22/business/economy/dejoy-postmaster-general-trump-mnuchin.html?searchResultPosition=10
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