Byron York pushes back on claims Trump is trying to suppress mail-in votes: 'Simply not happening'
York says Trump is adding 'confusion' to the situation
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The accusation that President Trump is crippling the Postal Service to suppress the vote and interfere with the election is “simply not happening,” Washington Examiner columnist Byron York said on Monday.
“There is a whole of moving pieces to this. In May, when Congress passed the first big coronavirus stimulus, they gave the Postal Service the authority to borrow $10 billion. The postal service has been losing money for a long time and they asked for $75 billion for a bailout,” the Fox News contributor told “America’s Newsroom.”
TRUMP INDICATES ELECTION WON'T BE 'FAIR' IF UNIVERSAL MAIL-IN VOTING ALLOWED
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York's comments came after he wrote an op-ed pushing back on the notion that Trump launched an assault on the U.S. Postal Service in order to curtail efforts of mass mail-in voting for the presidential election. York added that the commander in chief has been "confusing" the controversial issue.
York wrote, "Despite the heated rhetoric, many of the Postal Service's problems are relatively clear, if extremely difficult to solve. In the context of the upcoming election, Trump has repeatedly added confusion to the situation, most recently with extended discussions in a television interview on Thursday and a press conference on Friday.
"The bottom line was that Trump made a mess of the issue. He didn't make a case against universal mail-in voting, which does not exist in the United States. He didn't make clear why Democrats wanted $25 billion for the post office," he continued.
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York said that Democrats want to give the Postal Service $25 billion.
“The fact is, they have money on hand, they’re not projected to go broke anytime this year and they deliver a lot of mail normally. They delivered 142 billion pieces of mail in 2019, 471 million pieces of mail every day. This year they delivered Census forms, they delivered stimulus checks. Together, those are a lot more pieces of mail than a mail-in election if every single American voted by mail which they won’t,” York said.
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“The idea that the U.S. Postal Service is not able to handle this seems to be completely wrong. There are some serious problems with some state election organizations that are not able to handle huge election numbers.”
Fox News' Tyler Olson contributed to this report.