USPS: No evidence to support Pennsylvania employee's claim supervisors sought to tamper with votes

U.S. Postal Service investigators found no evidence to support one Pennsylvania USPS employee’s claim that he heard his superiors discuss tampering with mail-in ballots. 

Richard Hopkins, identified as a U.S. Postal Service employee in Erie who signed a sworn affidavit claiming postal supervisory officials hatched a plan to backdate ballots mailed after the election, later recanted his story to investigators, according to the Postal Service’s inspector general. 

During his second interview with investigators, Hopkins “revised his claims, eventually stating that he had not heard a conversation about ballots at all — rather he saw the Postmaster and Supervisor having a discussion and assumed it was about fraudulent ballot backdating,” the report, which was published in late February and posted to the blog 21st Century Postal Worker on Monday, states. He “acknowledged that he had no evidence of any backdated presidential ballots and could not recall any specific words said by the Postmaster or Supervisor.”

Hopkins’s allegation was peddled among Republicans, including then-President Donald Trump, many of whom engaged in an attempt to change the outcome of the election by questioning the integrity of the votes and the constitutionality of some of the methods of voting that states turned to amid the coronavirus pandemic, although some of the election changes predate the outbreak. 

After receiving the affidavit, Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, called for a Justice Department investigation into voting irregularities. Following the election, then-Attorney General William Barr issued a memo that authorized investigations into potential election fraud, prompting the Justice Department's election crimes chief to resign from his position. 

Hopkins, as he tried promoting the baseless claim in the immediate aftermath of the election, paired up with Project Veritas, an investigative reporting project that focuses on one-sided recording-style journalism with the goal of showing media bias.