Christian Jeremyah James, 31, and Armand Caleb Legardy, 32, each pleaded guilty in separate hearings to one count of use of unauthorized access devices, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a statement on Monday.

James, of South Los Angeles, worked in the Culver City Main Post Office, while Legardy, of Inglewood, worked in the La Tijera Post Office in South Los Angeles.

Prosecutors said the pair obtained debit cards that the California Employment Development Department (EDD) had issued to other people for unemployment insurance benefits. The cards were obtained by other unidentified individuals using stolen identities and false information, prosecutors said.

As part of a plea agreement, James and Legardy admitted they used debit cards the EDD had issued to other people in order to purchase or cash money orders from the USPS and to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash from bank ATMs between August last year and February, prosecutors said.

They also admitted that they deposited multiple fraudulently purchased postal money orders directly into their own bank accounts.

James deposited more than $27,000 worth of postal money orders into his bank account between September 3 and 19 last year, while Legardy deposited more than $10,000 in postal money orders that had been illegally purchased with EDD-issued cards in other people’s names, prosecutors said.

They said James admitted to knowingly using at least eight EDD-issued debit cards in other people’s names and causing a loss of around $142,652. Legardy admitted to illegally using nine EDD cards and causing a loss of around $160,879.

United States District Judge George H. Wu has scheduled a sentencing hearing on September 30 for Legardy, and on October 7 for James.

Each defendant could face a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison then, prosecutors said. The USPS and the EDD have been contacted for comment.

California officials have discovered billions of dollars in fraud in the state’s unemployment system over the past year. An investigation also discovered that millions of dollars worth of fraudulent claims were paid out to prisoners, including inmates on death row.

An audit of the EDD earlier this year found the state was hit with over 1,000 suspicious claims per day at the start of the pandemic and blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration for “significant missteps and inaction.”

Khaleda Rahman | Newsweek

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Even Joe Biden had the mental capacity to weigh in on the subject:

“I wonder if you’re outside trying to hold down your mailboxes. They’re going around literally with tractor trailers picking up mailboxes. You oughta go online and check out what they’re doing in Oregon. I mean, it’s bizarre!”

He may have been reading from a script, but Joe Biden said all of those words in order and we should be happy for that.

Nonetheless, Breitbart said it best: “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 Fact of the matter is that the US Post Office does regular maintenance on every facet of it’s infrastructure – yes, that includes mailboxes. We feel embarassed that we should also mention that the blue mailboxes seen around the country (all 142,000 of them) are made of steel and painted blue. When left out in the elements for decades at a time, eventually, they begin to rust and must be replaced.

One of the two pictures that went viral over the weekend showed a locking cover over the openings of a bank of mailboxes (above) with the caption “A disgrace and immediate threat to American democracy. Shame on them. Shame on the GOP.” These locks are common in high-crime areas to reduce theft.

With the shipping industry booming the way it has for the last decade, the USPS is slowly downsizing and becoming obsolete. The agency will also be removing hundred of mail-sorting machines – some to be scrapped, others to be sent for routine maintenance. This will not affect mail-in voting as the US Post Office has already explained in detail that it will not be able to handle the volume of “universal mail-in ballots”.

To add some truth to the wild leftist claims, Breitbart’s Joel Pollak writes, “The U.S. Postal Service has been a problem for years, constantly losing money. In 2009, the postmaster general proposed moving to five-day-per-week mail delivery to cut costs. President Barack Obama criticized the service that year for failing to keep up with private sector competitors. The Obama-Biden administration considered closing nearly 3,700 post office locations, and proposed cutting 12,000 postal jobs. President Trump tried a different tack, demanding in 2018 that Amazon lower the prices it charged the U.S. Postal Service for delivering its packages to consumers. One aspect of ongoing cost management is the removal of mailbox from areas where few people deposit mail.”

Considering that mail-in voting is supposed to be the 2nd option alternative to in-person voting, democrats and now celebrity virtue-signalers seems suspiciously concerned about the allocation of USPS resources.

Keep in mind that dozens of cases of confirmed mail-in voter fraud have been found throughout the United States in a number of different elections – resulting in hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes. We’ve seen it time and time again where democrats accuse republicans of the very thing they themselves are guilty of.

Finally, The Daily Caller was able to touch base with representatives from the USPS, indicating, “a USPS spokesperson said last week that collections boxes were being removed due to declining mail volume, thanks in part to the coronavirus pandemic. The postal service said on Friday that it would stop collecting the boxes in 16 Western states because of the allegations that the removals were related to mail-in voting. The USPS inspector general noted in a blog post on Sept. 21, 2016, during the Obama-Biden administration, that 12,000 underused mailboxes had been removed over the previous five years.”

As part of its efforts to keep its collection infrastructure proportionate to customers’ needs at a reasonable cost, the Postal Service has eliminated underused collection boxes that on average receive fewer than 25 pieces a day; it has also added collection boxes where they are convenient for customers,” the blog post said.

-Ben Jinno

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