Today, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to hold Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt of Congress for defying bipartisan subpoenas authorized by the Committee on Oversight and Reform and withholding key documents regarding the Trump Administration’s illegal pretext for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census.
Since the Committee issued bipartisan subpoenas on April 2, 2019, the Departments of Justice and Commerce have refused to produce key unredacted documents.
The Administration originally claimed that it would not produce documents while the Supreme Court was considering this case—a baseless argument that was rejected by the Committee.
But now, the Administration is still refusing to produce the documents even though the Supreme Court ruled last month that the Administration’s actions were illegal—and that its “voting rights” claim was a “pretext,” “contrived,” and “incongruent with what the record reveals.”
This article originally appeared in the Pasadena Journal.
