Justice Department lawyers may soon pay a high price for lying to the courts [View all]

[Fritz Walter]

ACLU filed a "remarkable" brief in federal court on Friday: drumpf's Justice Department entangled itself in an entirely different web of deceit. Additionally, the brief references a forthcoming motion for sanctions against the government attorneys who litigated this case. In addition to the lie about the citizenship question -- in which the Trump administration implausibly claimed that it added the question to aid Voting Rights Act enforcement -- they also lied about the deadline for printing census forms.

According to a Think Progress story published on Sunday, July 7,

While the New York case was making its way through the courts, the Justice Department repeatedly made another claim that turns out to be false (or, at the very least, that the Trump administration itself now claims to be false). The ACLU brief filed on Friday lists twelve separate occasions where Trump administration lawyers claimed that “the census forms must be finalized for printing by the end of June 2019.”

Because of this claim by Trump’s Justice Department, courts processed this case on an unusually expedited basis. Among other things, the Supreme Court invoked a rarely used procedure that bypassed review by a federal appeals court and allowed the nation’s highest court to review a trial court’s decision directly.

Not long after the Trump administration lost in the Supreme Court, however, it started singing a different tune. Though Justice Department lawyers initially signaled that they were giving up the fight to defend the citizenship question, they were later contradicted by President Trump himself. On July 3, they told a federal judge that they’ve been “instructed to examine whether there is a path forward, consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision, that would allow us to include the citizenship question on the census.”

In their brief, the ACLU invokes a doctrine known as “judicial estoppel”: essentially the Justice Department should be held to its previous claims about a June deadline. “'Estoppel' doctrines prevent parties from making one claim, then contradicting themselves when that claim proves disadvantageous."

The story also includes a link to the ACLU brief, which is worth reading.

This should be at the top of the news for the next few days. OK, OK: USA beat the Netherlands in the World Cup. Yay!

But after that story, this one should be the most prominent.