Louis DeJoy just made a huge mistake
Postmaster Louis DeJoy lost the battle when he agreed to testify at all, instead of trying to drag out a subpoena fight – it’s just that he doesn’t seem to know he lost. He’s had to keep caving, first agreeing to testify sooner than he wanted to, and then publicly promising not to remove any more sorting equipment. He thought the latter would get people off his back, but all it’s done is make it harder for him to carry forward with his evil plans.
DeJoy has succeeded in other arenas, but he’s new to politics, and it’s becoming clear that he doesn’t understand how political leverage works. It’s why he keeps making one strategic mistake after another. Today he made his biggest mistake of all. When he testified to the Senate, instead of dodging questions and giving non-answers like any seasoned corrupt politician would, DeJoy made the mistake of telling flat-out lies that can be disproven.
This means that before DeJoy testifies to the House on Monday, the House Democrats can inform him that he’s headed to prison for the felony of lying to Congress. Sure, maybe he won’t go to prison until Trump is gone, but Trump will end up being gone, and at that point the Democrats will make a perjury referral to the DOJ, and DeJoy will go down.
Of course the point is not to send Louis DeJoy to prison in the future. The point is to use the threat of future prison as leverage to pressure DeJoy to back down now and provide honest and helpful testimony on Monday. We’ve seen this tactic work before; it works particularly well with political neophytes who get in over their heads. We saw the House use the threat of perjury charges to get Trump’s former henchman Gordon Sondland to come clean. We’ll see if the threat works on DeJoy. But he just unwittingly made it a lot easier for us to win the Post Office battle.
