Postal Worker Says He Threw Out Hundreds of Ballots Out of “Laziness”

A former U.S. Postal Service mail carrier was indicted for throwing away hundreds of ballots in Utah, claiming that he did so because he felt lazy.

According to court documents, the mail carrier, Damon Matai Seei, said his June 3 mail load was too heavy, and in an effort to “lighten his workload,” he threw some of the mail into a dumpster in a church parking lot. The mail he threw away included advertisements and about 300 ballots he was supposed to deliver to voters in Eagle Mountain, Utah, for a June 23 primary election.

Thanks to Seei, those voters never got their ballots, and some of them were not able to vote in the election. Now Seei is being charged in the U.S. District Court in Utah for secretion, destruction, and delay of mail.

Court documents say Seei admitted to throwing out mail because he was “overwhelmed” by how much he had to deliver that day. He claimed in a written statement that the load felt “heavier” than usual that day, and that he chose to get “rid of advertisement mail” to focus on other deliveries, not realizing that he was throwing away ballots.

Seei denied a political motive, claiming that he didn’t have a political agenda, isn’t a “very political person, and did not intend to disrupt the “political process.” Instead, he said he made a “poor decision” based on “frustration” and “laziness.” But law enforcement officers, according to court records, said that Seei put aside the ballots at the beginning of his shift and didn’t deliver a single one, throwing them in a dumpster within about 90 minutes of beginning his route. He only worked six hours that day, leaving early at 3:15 p.m.

“The evidence does not suggest that Seei made any effort at all to deliver the approximately 300 mail-in ballots. Nor does it seem plausible that he could not have noticed them—even if he mixed them in with advertisements at some point,” the documents state.

We don’t know for sure if Seei actually was feeling lazy or had an ulterior motive, but President Trump did have his supporters pledge to “cheat like hell” at the Republican midterm convention earlier this month. Scores of ballots around the country have been thrown out for lateness, and a spacing issue nearly led to a Florida county’s ballots being blocked by the USPS. With an election less than two months away, more mail-in ballot chaos could be coming.

Former members of the the Washington-based Alcoholics Anonymous chapter known as the Midtown Group call it more of a “sex cult” than a support group. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr was reportedly a member for a decade.

Young people flocked to the Midtown Group in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a social haven away from alcohol. But instead they would find that the group’s leader, a fiftysomething named Michael Quinones, would come to control nearly every aspect of their lives, according to an investigation by The Guardian.

One former member of the group told The Guardian that Quinones was the “Epstein of AA.” He would coerce and pressure women and girls as young as 16 into “dating” and having sex with men sometimes many decades their senior. But it was not always apparent to those “entrenched” in Midtown that what was happening was wrong.

“Obviously it was widely known that teenage girls were sleeping with older men, it was such a part of our culture. It took me to my late 20s to understand it was wrong,” one woman told The Guardian. “I was 16, sleeping with a 55-year-old. That was just the way things worked there.”

Another former member told the newspaper that what happened to her could be described as sex trafficking.

The Guardian investigation was built on interviews with 14 former members of the group, recordings of Midtown sobriety discussions, and photographs. Carr joined the group in 1996, when he was 17 years old, and remained a presence until at least 2005, when he was recorded at Midtown discussing his own sobriety journey. The following year, Carr was photographed at a men’s retreat, a few rows behind Quinones.

People that knew Carr at the time said they did not believe he engaged in any misconduct. Instead, one former member described Carr as a “safe respite” from the psychological manipulation that suffused the rest of the group.

One woman recalled that Carr had snuck her French fries to eat after Quinones had forced her onto a strict diet. The group leader liked his women “bone thin,” she said.

Another former member said that Carr was “never among” the predators, going so far as to describe him as a “victim of Midtown.” Yet another described Carr as sensitive and desperate for approval.

Still, some others insisted that Carr’s speckled history be made public because of the tremendous influence afforded him by his position in the Trump administration.

“The wounds inflicted upon us during our time trapped at Midtown have formed scars,” one former member named Lydia told The Guardian. “A man who has the power to control what types of stories the mainstream public have access to is a man who should expect the narrative of his own life to fall under scrutiny.”

Under Carr’s command, the FCC has targeted ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as their parent companies. Carr even went so far as to describe his agency’s investigation into CBS as a “penalty.”

A spokesperson for Carr denied that the FCC chairman had been a member of the Midtown Group “up to and through 2006,” and claimed that Carr’s decision to get “sober over 30 years ago as a teenager” was being weaponized by a small group of people in order to “embarrass or pressure him into doing his job differently.”

President Trump is reportedly looking for a way to stick his name on Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.—where former President Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed in 1865.

MS NOW reported that the theatre is one of multiple different establishments floated by aides as potential targets for the “Trump” name. The offer to label historic buildings with “Trump” speaks to the president’s well-documented narcissism and susceptibility to brown-nosing.

“Why would I say no? Everybody’s trying to please me,” one former administration official said of Trump’s worldview. There has been no official decision made on renaming Ford’s Theatre, and it’s unclear what other buildings have been considered.

This comes in the wake of Trump’s previous failed naming attempts. Most notable was his effort to rename the Kennedy Center the “Trump-Kennedy” Center, which was legally rejected. In response, he tried to place “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump,” somewhere on the historic venue. That was also struck down in court, leading him to shut down the center indefinitely for “renovations” (spite, in reality). Now those most willing to tap-dance for him are searching the city for other buildings he can claim.

Ford’s Theatre would be a particularly disrespectful thing for Trump to stake claim over, as it was the site of one of the most brutal presidential assassinations ever—and happened to a president who is much more widely beloved than Trump. Maybe he feels a certain kinship to Lincoln given attempts made on his life. Either way, it’s obvious that Trump’s ego is more important than actually doing anything that would have a positive material impact on the lives of American citizens.

The White House has denied MS NOW’s reporting, calling it “completely false.”

President Donald Trump claimed that the media outlets he banned from the White House threatened national security—without bothering to provide any actual evidence.

In a court filing Tuesday, the Department of Justice defended Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. But a closer look at the supposedly supporting evidence reveals that the Trump administration has a weak basis for this argument, Politico reported.

“The President determined that Plaintiffs have failed to maintain minimum professional journalistic standards by publishing classified and national security information,” Trump’s brief says.

In addition to the filing, the DOJ attached letters addressed to each outlet citing the stories that were the basis for their removals. The letters, which were unsigned and did not appear on official letterhead, did not claim that the stories cited there contained classified information—in fact, some of them had nothing to do with national security at all.

For example, the letter addressed to Politico complained about a report describing the “bad vibes” at the Republican midterm convention in Texas.

The DOJ also cited a Politico article about security improvements made to Trump’s ballroom, but the supposedly “intricate” and “internal” document was actually just a handout given to Senate Republicans.

Other reports the DOJ cited, such as those about depleted U.S. munition stockpile and the FBI investigating leaks to a reporter that led to an unflattering article about Kash Patel, have been repeatedly refuted by the Trump administration. If the stories aren’t true, how does it threaten national security to publish them?

The letters, which were purportedly sent out Tuesday before filing, grant each media outlet an opportunity to contest their removal by EOD Friday. The three outlets go to court Wednesday to ask a judge to overturn the ban.

President Trump didn’t want to adhere to building safety codes for his White House ballroom and fought with its original architect until he quit. 

The Washington Post reports, citing anonymous sources, that James McCrery II withdrew from the project in October after warning repeatedly that the ballroom Trump wanted didn’t have adequate emergency exit routes or fire containment measures. The president reportedly didn’t care about McCrery’s concerns, saying that building codes did not apply to anything built at the White House.

“I am the code,” Trump said.

Trump has directed much of his time and attention to the ballroom, and the Post obtained documents, including early ballroom designs that have black Sharpie writing on them in the president’s handwriting. The newspaper’s reporting indicates that Trump is bypassing or overruling the federal agencies that usually handle White House construction and renovations and are legally required to follow national building safety standards to the “maximum extent feasible” except for national security reasons. 

In fact, Trump’s White House construction projects are going through the Executive Residence, which is not a federal agency and is not subject to any of their rules. And buildings on federal property are out of District of Columbia jurisdiction, which means that they are not subject to local building codes. That responsibility falls on the contractors hired to design and build them, and right now, Trump has them working almost around the clock to meet his deadlines. 

After McCrery resigned, the White House continued to discuss safety concerns about the ballroom’s design for months afterwards, according to the Post, but it’s not clear if the more recent designs from the architecture firm that took over the ballroom, Shalom Baranes Associates, addressed them in any way. 

Trump has been wholly focused on the expensive ballroom, going back on promises that it would be financed entirely by private donations and invoking national security justifications that have been debunked. If he is overruling safety codes, he is actually risking national security.