This explains soooo much. Everyone except Republicans thinks Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has a really terrible plan to “save” the Postal Service by slowing down deliveries and hiking postage prices—including special price gouging specifically for holiday deliveries. The Postal Regulators blasted the plan. The new members on the Board of Governors blasted the plan.

But DeJoy is holding on to a critical ally: the chair of that Board of Governors (and Trump’s only Democratic appointee), Ron Bloom. He’s been sticking by DeJoy and this plan. “We do not and will not always agree,” Bloom said, but insists everyone “has the best interest of the Postal Service at heart.” He defended DeJoy’s 10-year plan, saying it “further embeds the Postal Service as a critical part of this nation’s infrastructure, providing reliable and affordable mail and package delivery to 161 million American households six and seven days a week.” Why Bloom was sticking with the most unpopular, and arguably most corrupt, of all of Trump’s appointees has been kind of baffling. But we might have an answer now: “DeJoy bought up to $305,000 in bonds from USPS board chair’s investment firm.”

The Washington Post reports that from last fall until April, “DeJoy purchased 11 bonds from Brookfield Asset Management each worth between $1,000 and $15,000, or $15,000 and $50,000, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure paperwork.” Bloom just happens to be “a Brookfield senior executive who manages the firm’s private equity division.”

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According to a Postal Service spokesperson, DeJoy’s financial adviser made the purchases on the open market. Also according to that spokesperson, Bloom manages a whole different division than the one that sells those bonds DeJoy bought. Also according to the spokesperson, those bond sales certainly are not a conflict of interest.

Not everyone agrees. “I’m stuck on DeJoy’s purchase of bonds from the company in which his quasi-boss is a managing partner,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor who studies government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post, “because I wonder whether it affects Bloom’s ability to protect the public interest in his assessment of DeJoy’s performance as postmaster general.”

Bloom is arguing that since he personally doesn’t make money directly on the sales of bonds, and since his firm has no business with the Postal Service, there’s no problem. “I receive no benefit whatsoever when Brookfield bonds are bought or sold,” Bloom said in an email to the Post. “Brookfield has no business relationship with the USPS, therefore there is no basis for a conflict.”

Kind of like how DeJoy’s $600,000+ donation to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in the time between the Postmaster General vacancy and his appointment had absolutely nothing to do with his getting the job.

Or how what appears to be an an illegal straw donor scheme by DeJoy’s former company, New Breed, to pump more than $1 million to Republican candidates from 2000-2014 meant that DeJoy became a major donor to the GOP in North Carolina and nationally is not at all a problem for DeJoy.

There’s also that ongoing issue with how DeJoy still has financial ties to his other former company, XPO Logistics, which is getting a new $120 million contract from the Postal Service over the next five years.  DeJoy could realize as much as $23.7 million from the company in the next decade. DeJoy and his family foundation, as well as  companies he controls, have divested somewhere between $65 million and $156 million in XPO shares, filings and tax documents show. But his family businesses still have ties to XPO in the form of four office buildings in North Carolina that they lease to the company. That’s where DeJoy will get those millions ,in the form of lease payments.

The Postal Service ethics officials apparently see no problem with that. DeJoy, however, remains under investigation by the FBI for his political contributions and company activities involving XPO.

There’s a whole lot about DeJoy that is really, really stinky. That stench just spread out to envelop DeJoy’s protector on the board. The USPS has a lot of work ahead of it to regain the trust of lawmakers and the public after the disastrous 2020 DeJoy created via flat-out sabotage, and the ongoing problems with delivery service. All of the big neon signs screaming “CORRUPTION” aren’t going to help.