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Federal Agents Release Coronavirus Masks Seized From Black Lives Matter Protesters

Students participate in a Black Lives Matter sit-in at the National Cathedral on June 5 in Washington, D.C., during a peaceful protest against police brutality and the death of George Floyd. (Win McNamee via Getty Images)
Students participate in a Black Lives Matter sit-in at the National Cathedral on June 5 in Washington, D.C., during a peaceful protest against police brutality and the death of George Floyd. (Win McNamee via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON ― Federal agents on Friday morning released boxes of cloth masks that Black Lives Matter organizers mailed to cities across the county to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 during nationwide demonstrations against police brutality.

Four boxes of the masks were shipped to Washington, St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis on Wednesday afternoon, and were supposed to arrive in each city by Thursday. But until Friday morning, the boxes of 500 masks apiece that read “stop killing Black people” and “defund police” never left Oakland, California, because they were seized by the government. Federal agents with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service were involved with the seizure.

“These packages were originally set aside for further investigation because there were indications that they contained non-mailable matter,” the U.S. Postal Inspection Service said in a statement to HuffPost on Friday afternoon. “Once Postal Inspectors confirmed the contents of the packages were in fact mailable, they were immediately placed back in the mail stream to be delivered at their intended destinations without further delay.”

The USPIS, responding to a follow-up question about what kind of non-mailable material they suspected the packages contained, said that “specific investigative methods used by Inspectors are sensitive and must remain confidential, but they are effective in helping to locate non-mailable matter of all kinds.”

Mark Jamison, a retired postmaster, told HuffPost that he suspects that an outside law enforcement organization was involved in the investigation, which the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service denied. The U.S. Postal Service logs mail for law enforcement, and Jamison believes at least one of the organizers who was set to receive a package of masks was of interest to law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the Movement for Black Lives, which paid for the masks, called the USPIS statement “insufficient and a cause for...

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