Surely you remember Jesse Morgan, the York County resident who came forward in early December 2020 with a story about thousands of stolen mail-in ballots.

Morgan, a truck driver for a company that delivered large volumes of mail for the U.S. Postal Service, said a trailer he hauled from New York to Lancaster on Oct. 21, 2020, was full of ballots already filled out by Pennsylvania voters. Those ballots, he said, went missing after he parked the truck trailer at the Post Office on Harrisburg Pike that evening.

Where did all those ballots go, Morgan wondered. His story was amplified by supporters of President Donald Trump, who blamed his loss in the November 2020 election on massive fraud in closely fought swing states like Pennsylvania.

Morgan’s story got lost in the tumultuous weeks leading up to Biden’s inauguration. But it wasn’t forgotten by many LNP | LancasterOnline readers who continue to call or write this newsroom asking about it.

It turns out that Morgan’s story wasn’t ignored by federal investigators. Agents from four agencies worked for months attempting to verify Morgan’s account. Earlier this year, and without any fanfare, a federal inspector general published a lengthy report concluding that Morgan’s story was, well, bunk.

It’s not hard to understand why Morgan stuck in the minds of so many people. First, he fit the mold of a working-class American – a bearded, husky man in his 30s with tattooed arms and a general body language that screamed “salt of the earth regular guy.” 

He related his account with humor and deliberate-but-unrehearsed pacing. He was believable – a guy you’d have fun drinking a beer with or joining at a local fishing hole.

“I’m going to tell you how I see it, and I’m a pretty straight shooter,” Morgan said at the press conference. “I didn’t want to come, I tell you what. I have everything to lose and nothing to gain from this, all right?”

The investigation resulted in a report from the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Postal Service. It’s a curious document. For one, Morgan’s name never appears in it. Well, the name is in there, but it’s redacted, a strange choice given Morgan’s widespread appearance on cable news when he first told his story.

Investigators from the FBI, the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the USPS inspector general’s office spoke to 20 witnesses, including numerous postal workers and officials from Morgan’s company, Ten Roads Eagle.

Morgan’s long day

Morgan told his story publicly on Dec. 1, 2020, at a press conference held in Arlington, Va., and organized by The Amistad Project and the Thomas More Society – two conservative legal groups. His story, in a nutshell:

• Morgan began his day at 1 a.m. when he picked up his truck at the private lot it’s stored at. He then drove to the Post Office at 1400 Harrisburg Pike where he picked up a trailer. The trailer, he said, was a favorite one in good condition. He rattled off its ID# – 10R-1440.

• He then drove directly to a postal facility in Bethpage, N.Y., which is on Long Island. There he was loaded with mail destined for Harrisburg and Lancaster. As he waited, he said a postal worker in Bethpage told him he’d be hauling mail-in ballots back to Pennsylvania, a prospect he said he was excited about – a small contribution to the national election. 

• At the Dec. 1 press conference, he said he saw “thousands” of ballots loaded onto his trailer. He described watching 24 “gaylords” of ballots loaded onto the truck; a gaylord is a large cardboard box used to hold trays of mail. A private investigator who spoke after Morgan that day, Tony Shaffer, a retired U.S. Army officer, gave a presentation in which he estimated the number of ballots Morgan carried back to Pennsylvania at 144,000 to 280,000.

• He drove straight to Harrisburg, arriving there about 9:15 a.m. But he said his typical short wait to unload dragged on and on. At 3 p.m., he said he complained to a postal supervisor, who told him to leave and deliver the full load to Lancaster.

• Morgan said he tried to object, but eventually left Harrisburg and arrived back in Lancaster. He parked the trailer at the USPS facility at 1400 Harrisburg Pike, then drove the truck to a nearby private lot and ended his day.

• The next morning when he went to pick up the same trailer, Morgan said it was gone. No one ever explained what happened to the load of mail-in ballots, in his telling. He also said his truck cab appeared to have been tampered with.

• After the election, Morgan said he began to think allegations of election fraud levied by Trump and his supporters might be true, with his missing load of ballots amounting to direct proof. In several media appearances in December 2020, Morgan said he told his mother about the ballots sometime after Oct. 21, and it was she who arranged for an attorney to speak with him, which ultimately led to The Amistad Project and the Thomas More Society scheduling the Dec. 1 press conference.

No stones left unturned

Federal investigators fanned out to try to verify Morgan’s account. They interviewed postal employees at Bethpage, Harrisburg and Lancaster. They spoke to Morgan’s bosses at the private contractor he drove for. Investigators tracked down GPS data for the trailer Morgan said he was driving. 

And they eventually interviewed Morgan – apparently. It’s not clear from the investigation report because so much is redacted, but it appears Morgan spoke with investigators on Dec. 5, 2020, accompanied by attorneys from the Amistad Project or Thomas More Society who, the report says, insisted that Morgan be accorded whistleblower status.

In a Dec. 8 interview streamed online by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Morgan said he was “interrogated” by the investigators and agreed with Bannon’s assertion that the focus was more on finding dirt on Morgan than on locating the missing trailer of ballots.

The investigators also reviewed a sworn interview Morgan conducted on Nov. 20 – more than a week before the Dec. 1 press conference – in which he told his story. In that affidavit, and unlike on Dec. 1, he said the number of ballots could be lower: “There could be 250, or there could be 7,500.” 

Postal workers in Bethpage told investigators they saw only a few hundred mail-in ballots through the entire fall. The facility mainly processes packages, not envelopes. And no one in Harrisburg or Lancaster backed up Morgan’s claim about thousands of ballots being in his load.

As for Morgan’s favorite trailer, the investigators obtained GPS data that showed trailer 10R-1440 was actually en route from Florida to Pennsylvania and was somewhere in the Carolinas on Oct. 21, not on the back of Morgan’s truck. And contrary to Morgan’s assertion that he always drove the same trailer, 10R-1440, the investigators found that he used six different trailers during the month of October.

The trailer that Morgan drove to Bethpage that day was never missing, the investigators also found. Shortly after Morgan parked it in Lancaster, a different driver took it to Harrisburg, where it was unloaded and processed the same night. All of the mail was accounted for.

In the end, the inspector general’s report said the joint investigation “could not corroborate” Morgan’s story. “The investigation is complete and submitted for closure,” the report concludes.

The report mentions its findings were turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, which includes Lancaster County. A call to the office garnered the following response from a spokeswoman: “(W)e’re unable to comment on any charging decisions, nor can I confirm or deny any investigations (ongoing or closed).”

No one’s talking

Morgan was aided in telling his story by conservative lawyers and operatives. One was Phillip Kline, the former attorney general of Kansas who now teaches at Liberty University’s law school and runs the Amistad Project, which is affiliated with the Thomas More Society. Kline was subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 Committee in early 2022 seeking information about his work between mid-November 2020 and Jan. 6 in which he “actively promoted claims of election fraud on behalf of former President Trump.”

A voicemail, email and Twitter direct message to Kline were not returned. The Thomas More Society directed a reporter to a public relations firm based in Chicago. Messages to that firm were never returned, though a representative contacted LNP on Dec. 21 to promote a press release about a 2020 election recount ordered in Lycoming County.

Shaffer, who runs a private investigations company with offices in New York, was reached by phone earlier this month. He declined to comment on Morgan or the investigative report. 

He said he was not aware of the inspector general’s report on the investigation into Morgan’s story. Asked if he was interested in hearing its conclusion, Shaffer replied, “Not particularly.”

Efforts to reach Morgan were also unsuccessful. In 2020, when he first told his story, the York Daily Record reported on Morgan’s court record, which amounted to a “lengthy history of drug abuse, mental health issues and domestic violence.” 

Morgan last showed up to work for Ten Roads Eagle on Nov. 22, 2020, and the company last heard from him on Nov. 29, the federal investigators noted in their report. When the company still hadn’t heard from him by Dec. 23, they officially ended his employment.

In a June 2021 interview with Kline that was streamed online, Morgan said he didn’t work for a time after he came forward, and noted that had suffered a COVID infection that took some time to recover from. By the time of that interview, he was working for a trucking firm based in Adams County. A message left for Morgan at the company was not returned.

Requests to speak with any of the federal employees who investigated Morgan’s story were also unsuccessful. The report, available on the Inspector General’s website, identifies more than 30 attachments, but those attachments are not included. 

LNP submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to all four investigating agencies to obtain an unredacted version of the report and all attachments. The agencies have acknowledged receipt but offered no estimate of when, or if, the materials would be made available.

In telling his story, Morgan said more than once that he didn’t bother to vote in the 2020 election, explaining that he didn’t see the point in voting for the lesser of two evils. Still, he said it should matter to everyone whether or not the election was run fair and square, even if he risked blowback by coming forward.

“I didn’t want this put on me, but for some reason it’s on me, and here I am, all right?” Morgan said at the Dec. 1, 2020, press conference.