Postal worker Richard Hopkins had relayed overhearing a conversation about backdating ballots.
A Pennsylvania postal worker who told Project Veritas about overhearing a conversation among officials about backdating ballots said in a new statement, under a settlement reached with one of the officials, that he was “wrong” about the conclusion he reached.
Richard Hopkins, the worker, told Project Veritas in 2020 that he “witnessed them talking about backdating.”
He said at the time that officials “were talking about how the day before, which was the 4th [of November], they had post dated all but one of the, all but one of the ballots that were picked up as the 3rd, but they had one that they made a mistake and postmarked it the 4th.”
Mr. Hopkins also submitted a sworn affidavit to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) stating that he overheard Erie postmaster Robert Weisenbach “tell a supervisor at my office that Weisenbach was back-dating the postmarks on the ballots to make it appear as though the ballots had been collected on November 3, 2020, despite them in fact being collected on November 4 and possibly later.”
The statements set off a firestorm among local, state, and federal officials.
The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General looked into the allegations and said that the worker who made the allegations “revised his initial claims, eventually stating that he had not heard a conversation about ballots at all—rather, he saw the postmaster and supervisor having a discussion and assumed it was about fraudulent ballot backdating.”
The worker could not recall what the officials said and said he did not have any evidence of ballots being backdated, according to the inspector general report. It said that postal agents reviewed ballots received by the post office and found no evidence any were backdated.
Mr. Weisenbach, in 2021, sued Mr. Hopkins, Project Veritas, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe for defamation.
The defendants “knew or purposefully avoided the truth” in promoting Mr. Hopkins’s allegations, even after he recanted his allegations during an interview with postal investigators, the lawsuit stated.
The case has now been resolved, according to the people involved.
