MS NOW anchor Lawrence O’Donnell torched Donald Trump during Wednesday night’s edition of “The Last Word,” calling the president’s attempt to obstruct mail-in voting throughout this year’s midterm election cycle the “biggest crime of mail obstruction in American history.”
“What Abraham Lincoln gave us, Donald Trump wants to take away,” O’Donnell said at the top of the segment. “The first significant use of voting by mail occurred during the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln trusted the Postal Service to deliver that mail. He trusted those envelopes.”
“We now have a Postmaster General who has put in writing his eagerness to violate the law for Donald Trump,” he then noted, referring to Postmaster General David Steiner. O’Donnell added that the latter has vowed to Trump that “the Postal Service will violate the law and not deliver mail if that mail contains election ballots sent to or from someone who the Postmaster General has decided should lose the right to vote in America.”
“Postmaster General David Steiner is now eager to obstruct millions and millions of pieces of mail,” the host summarized, calling the plan “the biggest crime of mail obstruction in American history.”
O’Donnell continued criticizing Steiner, Trump & Co. throughout the second half of the Wednesday night segment. The MS NOW anchor even expanded the scope of his outrage to the Supreme Court over its decision this week on Trump’s mail-in voting plans.
“The Republicans on the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to block Donald Trump from committing this crime,” O’Donnell explained. “The Supreme Court Republican majority said it was just too soon to know if what Donald Trump was going to do was illegal because his Postmaster General had not yet written his new rule about how to handle mail-in ballots. Never mind that he had actually written that rule on Friday and the Supreme Court ruling was on Monday.”
“He’s written a 95-page rule that was released on Friday, giving him control over all ballots mailed in America,” he said of Steiner. “The Postmaster General, according to this rule, will look at the ballot envelopes when the Postal Service receives them and then decide which of those envelopes the Postal Service will deliver.”
O’Donnell noted that only Congress is legally allowed to dictate acceptable and non-acceptable forms of mail to the Postal Service. He slammed Steiner for not taking that into account or pushing back against the president’s demands.
“David Steiner had a life-defining moment delivered to him when Donald Trump sent him an illegal executive order that was both illegal and unconstitutional, and David Steiner showed us exactly who he is, exactly how craven he is, exactly how dishonorable he is,” he concluded. “He is another disgraceful and now permanently, lifetime-disgraced Trump accomplice trying to commit the crime against democracy that Donald Trump wants him to commit.”
