DOJ threatens executive privilege to block access to census docs

[DonViejo]

Source: Politico



By ANDREW DESIDERIO 06/11/2019 04:02 PM EDT

The Justice Department on Tuesday advised President Donald Trump to invoke executive privilege to block House Democrats’ access to documents about efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

In a letter to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd threatened the blanket assertion of privilege if the panel proceeds with a scheduled vote on Wednesday to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress, calling such proceedings “premature.”

“In the fact of this threatened contempt vote, the attorney general is now compelled to request that the president invoke executive privilege with respect to the materials subject to the subpoena to the attorney general and the subpoena to the secretary of the department of commerce,” Boyd wrote.

Last week, the Justice and Commerce departments rejected House Democrats’ subpoenas for additional documents about the addition of a citizenship question, prompting Cummings to schedule a full committee vote to hold Barr and Ross in criminal contempt of Congress.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/11/justice-executive-privilege-census-1360582

[CurtEastPoint]

1. What kind of government do we have now, where secrecy and deceit are the rule?

[iluvtennis]

5. Exactly.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. How in bloody fucking hell can census discussions have executive privilege?

[CurtEastPoint]

6. EXACTLY! The LAST possible topic to hide. Military? Security? Okeydokey. Census? Fuck no.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. My question exactly. . . . nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. doesn't matter the issue

The message is....if the House votes for contempt of Barr, anything the House requests of the DOJ is gonna be denied, EVERYTHING will be a battle.

Procedural blackmail.
and a revelation that Trump and barr, no doubt egged on by all those Federalist society lawyers, will continue to flout the Constitution.

THEY are the Constitutional Crisis, and it sounds as if they think they have SCOTUS in their pocket.

[dixiegrrrrl]

10. It's a game Barr is playing

If the House promises to NOT hold him in contempt (too late, they did, today)
he will "give" them the information/documents that they want so they can do their job of Oversight.

For some reason, Trump likes "executive privilege" and wants to apply it to everything and anything.

He had an attorney, Emmett Flood, who was exec. Priv. specialist.
Flood quit last week. Quite probably because of exactly this crap, which no respectable attorney would get involved with.

Seems that FuBarr thinks he can use Trump as a club to beat the House into submission.

[rurallib]

3. how in the hell can documents on asking a census question possibly qualify

for executive privilege? Good lord what a pack of criminals.

You would like to think any sentient being - a congress member, a judge, a voter - would consider this insane once they picked themselves off the floor from laughing.

[Brainfodder]

4. Transperancy still a thing?

Please have it removed otherwise, I figure someone knows someone in charge of something?

[pat_k]

8. Role of Thomas Hofeller (gerrymander king) in adding that question revealed...

... in the documents his daughter turned over to Common Cause.

New York Times
Deceased G.O.P. Strategist’s Hard Drives Reveal New Details on the Census Citizenship Question
By Michael Wines
May 30, 2019

WASHINGTON — Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats. And months after urging President Trump’s transition team to tack the question onto the census, he wrote the key portion of a draft Justice Department letter claiming the question was needed to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act — the rationale the administration later used to justify its decision.

Those documents, cited in a federal court filing Thursday by opponents seeking to block the citizenship question, have emerged only weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of the citizenship question. Critics say adding the question would deter many immigrants from being counted and shift political power to Republican areas.

The disclosures represent the most explicit evidence to date that the Trump administration added the question to the 2020 census to advance Republican Party interests.
. . .