Ari Berman is reporting on DeJoy’s testimony.

Embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before the US Senate on Friday that he will not reinstall more than 600 mail sorting machines that have been removed under his leadership. Postal workers say the removal of these machines has contributed to major mail delays that could affect whether mail ballots are counted in the 2020 election.

He’s said he’ll stop taking any more out for now, since he got caught, but that’s all he’ll concede. It’s as if someone breaks into your house and the police show up and the intruder says “well ok I’ll leave now but all that stuff I stashed in my car before you got here? I’m keeping it.”

“Will you be bringing back any mail sorting machines that have been removed?” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) asked DeJoy during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee.

“There is no intention to do that,” DeJoy testified. “They are not needed.”

They’re not needed if you have no desire to get the mail out in a timely fashion. Otherwise…they are.

Many of the machines have been removed in critical swing states: 59 in Florida, 58 in Texas, 34 in Ohio, 30 in Pennsylvania, 26 in Michigan, 15 in North Carolina, 12 in Virginia, 12 in Wisconsin, and 11 in Georgia. (This data was provided to Mother Jones by Jacob Bogage and Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post, who have detailed removal of the machines.)

While some of the removals have been described as routine, many more machines have been removed this year compared to years past. “In 2018, for instance, the agency decommissioned about 3 percent of its Delivery Bar Code Sorters, or 125 machines,” the Post reported. “In 2019, it was 5 percent, or 186 machines. The 671 on this year’s list amounted to about 13 percent.”

Trump of course has come right out and said he wants to kneecap the mail in order to steal the election.