The big three networks ignored a report Wednesday uncovering violations of federal law committed by the U.S. Postal Service, which pressured managers to approve time off for employees to campaign for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.
“High-level postal officials had for years granted employees’ requests for unpaid leave, leading last year to an ‘institutional bias’ in favor of Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the National Association of Letter Carriers, one of the largest postal unions” amounting to a violation of the Hatch Act, reports The Washington Post.
The Hatch Act is a law enacted in 1939 to prevent federal employees from supporting candidates. Investigators concluded that the postal service had been involved in the process since the 1990s.
“You kind of have to scratch your head when you have such systemic violations of the Hatch Act and nobody’s really held accountable,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told WaPo.
Despite the report, coverage on the nightly news broadcasts was non-existent. ABC, CBS, and NBC ignored the story entirely, but “did find the time to run a two minute and eight-second report on how Jurassic Park got the speed of the T-Rex completely wrong” according to Newsbusters.
The Washington Post issued a long write up, but at the time of this writing, The New York Times has yet to report it.
“The investigation found that 97 letter carriers took time off, sometimes weeks, to take part in the union’s (AFL-CIO) Labor 2016 program, canvassing, making phone calls and working on other get-out-the-vote efforts to help elect Clinton and other pro-labor candidates,” according the Washington Post.
The workers were sent to battleground states “including Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio” and their time off was reimbursed by the National Association of Letter Carriers political Action Committee.
Federal employees can advocate for political candidates in their free time, but by requesting the time to campaign for Hillary Clinton against the protestations of local post office manager due to staffing concerns, they showed bias towards the Clinton campaign, according to the director of the Office of Special Counsel, Adam Miles.
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