Adam Schiff Revives ‘Mailbox Hoax’ for 2020 Midterm Elections

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) is reviving the “mailbox hoax” that Democrats used during 2020 elections, as his party faces the prospect of defeat in the 2022 midterm elections.

The hoax was the claim that the Trump administration was removing mailboxes ahead of the 2020 vote to prevent people from using new vote-by-mail methods that Democrats hoped to use to turn out their own voters.

As Breitbart News explained, there was no basis for the conspiracy theory whatsoever:

Democrats have spent several days flogging the false “mailbox conspiracy” theory that President Donald Trump is deliberately crippling the U.S. Postal Service so that it cannot handle votes by mail in November — even forcing it to remove mailboxes.

The truth is that the mailboxes were removed because mailboxes are always being removed. At least 14,000 were removed during the Obama-Biden administration. Democrats are creating a new hysteria to cast Trump as a tyrant and motivate their conspiracy-theory-addled voters.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has enthusiastically inflamed this phony conspiracy theory …

The removal of mailboxes has been halted until after the election, to avoid further confusion (sown deliberately by Democrats and the media).

Schiff sent a mass email Thursday asking recipients to add their names to a petition to demand the removal of U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. The email campaign is a common tactic used by political organizations to build contact lists and to fundraise.

In his mass e-mail, Schiff cites a two-week-old court decision in which a judge found that changes DeJoy made within the U.S. Postal Service affected mail delivery during the 2020 election, and barred DeJoy from making similar interventions in 2022.

But Schiff goes further in his email, implying that the judge found DeJoy had interfered in the election for political reasons. “We’ve long known that DeJoy’s conflicts of interest and loyalty to the GOP partisans made him unfit to serve as Postmaster General — now a federal judge has ruled that his leadership directly impacted our voting rights,” Schiff claims.

In fact, as CNN noted in a report Oct. 6, the judge — Emmet G. Sullivan, hardly a friend of the Trump administration — found that DeJoy had not violated federal election law.

Rather, the changes to postal delivery and administration had an affect on the election indirectly, because of the timing of the changes and the sudden, widespread adoption of mass vote-by-mail, largely at the behest of Democrats and Democrat-aligned lawyers.

Ironically, after Democrats created the mailbox hoax, which followed on the heels of the “Russia collusion” hoax, they accused the Republican Party and Trump supporters in particular of fomenting conspiracy theories about voting in the 2020 presidential election.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.