The Claim
Radio host Hartmann's newsletter this week put it this way: the administration has hired Prosegur, "a Spanish multinational armed mercenary force," to put nearly 1,000 armed guards in postal facilities in Democratic cities, and nobody from the Postal Service is supervising them. The Old Goat checked it against the sources. Part of it holds. Part of it does not.
What Holds
REPORTED. Raw Story's Alexandria Jacobson reported on Oct. 6 that the Postal Inspection Service uses contract armed security officers at postal sites, citing contract records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, in which the dollar amount is redacted. Frank Albergo of the Postal Police Officers Association told Raw Story nearly 1,000 such officers work at 55 or more facilities, approved for nearly 40,000 hours a week. Raw Story says it found plans to add guards at 18 more facilities in July, more than 12,000 additional hours a week. A September memo for a Carol Stream, Illinois, facility indicates 12 armed guards, where Albergo counts 11 active postal police officers in all of Chicago. Albergo's description of training: "They're just basically giving people guns without any training." Raw Story cites a July 2026 UC Berkeley Labor Center report putting average armed-guard training near 40 hours, against at least 1,440 for postal police officers, which is Albergo's figure.
DOCUMENTED. In April 2024 Norway's central bank excluded Prosegur from the Government Pension Fund Global on the Council on Ethics' recommendation, finding an unacceptable risk that the company contributes to serious and systematic human rights violations. That is the fund's own notice.
What Does Not Hold
DOCUMENTED. The guard contract is not new. A 2022 audit by the Postal Service's own Inspector General (report 21-265-R22, Aug. 4, 2022) says the Postal Service awarded a security contract in 2014 to Command Security Corporation, for four years with three two-year renewal options and an estimated total cost of about $250 million. Prosegur Services Group bought Command Security in 2019 and took over the contract. The audit covered guards at about 57 postal locations. It found that 35 of 115 guards reviewed, 30 percent, worked without the proper security clearances, and that officials at three sites did not record guard hours and could not verify the hours billed. Four years plus three two-year options would have run out around 2024, so today's guards work under an extension or a successor contract that the Old Goat has not seen; Raw Story does not give a contract number.
So "Trump's people hired Prosegur" does not fit the record. The firm has held postal guard work since at least 2019, and the contract it took over was awarded in 2014, across three administrations. What is reported as new is the scale: guards at more than a dozen additional facilities this summer and fall.
REPORTED. The "Democratic cities" framing also fails on the available facts. Albergo himself told Raw Story deployment follows facility size, with armed guards most common at sites of 1,000 or more employees, not crime risk. Large processing plants sit in big metros, which tilt Democratic, so the pattern would look political without being targeted. The cities Raw Story names include Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Indianapolis, Phoenix, San Diego, Tampa, Topeka and Olathe, Kansas, and a Charlotte-area plant. The Postal Inspection Service told Raw Story the deployment "is not specific to elections" and that it uses a mix of armed and unarmed contract guards alongside career postal police. Prosegur's spokesperson said it "could not find any incidents or complaints" of the kind Raw Story asked about.
The Money Nobody Can See
DOCUMENTED. The Old Goat searched USAspending.gov on Oct. 11 for Prosegur contracts, subawards, and postal-guard keywords. It returned State Department embassy guard and alarm work, such as a $1.33 million Lisbon guard contract, and nothing from the Postal Service, which does not appear to report its contracts there. Raw Story's own estimate, from a $23 hourly wage and the reported hours, is about $50 million a year in wages alone, before benefits and profit. That is Raw Story's arithmetic, not a contract figure. With the amount redacted and no public contract database, the public cannot check the cost or the terms.
What the Old Goat Thinks It Means
This part is opinion, labeled as opinion. The real story is thinner than the newsletter and still worth telling. A firm with a documented human-rights exclusion and an inspector-general finding that 30 percent of sampled guards lacked proper clearance is staffing armed posts at the buildings where ballots, among much else, pass through, and the union says it is expanding, with the pay and the oversight both hidden. The Old Goat's INFERENCE is that this is a procurement-transparency and training problem that predates the election, and that the election window turns it into a trust problem. He does not claim the guards touch ballots, interfere with mail, or were placed to do so. No source says they were.
The questions that would settle it are plain: the contract number and value, the guard training and clearance rules in force now, and whether the Postal Service's own career police have lost posts to the contractor. The Postal Inspection Service and the Inspector General can answer all three.
The strongest charge against the guards is in the 2022 audit, not the newsletter.
The Old Goat will update this page when a contract number, a value or a response from the Postal Service appears.