The Justice Department has arrested a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier in Utah who allegedly threw out more than 300 mail ballots that were being sent to voters for the state's June primary.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said Damon Matai Seei, 34, was arrested Tuesday and appeared in federal court in Salt Lake City to be arraigned. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Seei had an attorney.
Seei was delivering mail in Eagle Mountain, Utah, when he threw the ballots and other mail into a dumpster in a church parking lot not long after his shift started, McCotter said.
It’s not clear what the motive was, but Melissa Holyoak, the U.S. attorney for Utah, said Seei indicated to authorities that there was no political agenda.
The investigation remains ongoing, officials said.
Most voters in Utah cast ballots by mail. Nationwide, nearly a third of voters use mail-in ballots.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump's attempts to impose new Postal Service rules that would have restricted mail voting for the November midterm elections.
In response, Trump wrote on social media: "This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”
"These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves," he continued, without naming any of the justices. "It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country's history."
Trump appointed three justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — during his first term as president, building a 6-3 conservative majority and allowing the court to steer a dramatic rightward course since 2020.
The court's decision preventing implementation of the rule, which the Postal Service adopted at the president's direction, was brief and unsigned, as is typical when it handles emergency requests. Trump called it a "horrible, highly political, ruling.”
U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters later that the Trump administration would comply with the court's decision.
