Contempt-shmontempt. Who cares? The Justice Department and Commerce Department don't give one lick that the House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed documents regarding the 2020 census citizenship question and is now threatening to hold Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress.
TPM reports that both agencies are continuing to deny House Oversight of even a single document the panel requested regarding the suggested addition of the citizenship question. Oversight Chair Elijah Cummings made one last effort at comity earlier this week with an offer to delay the contempt votes so the agencies could come into compliance, but on Thursday night the agencies rejected that offer.
Cummings said that his panel had given Barr and Ross "every opportunity," but that they had opted not to cooperate and instead preferred to be held in contempt of Congress. “They produced none of the documents we asked for, they made no counter-offers regarding these documents, and they seem determined to continue the Trump Administration’s cover-up,” Cummings said in a statement.
The committee is trying to obtain access to the communications between Ross and his staff regarding the addition, along with contacts between the Commerce Department and the DOJ about drafting of the question. The panel would also like to ask additional questions of the Justice Department official who drafted the question, John Gore, who gave a voluntary interview earlier this year but is declining to sit for another one at the direction of a Justice Department attorney. The department has deemed the Gore communications privileged and is demanding that he be allowed to have a Justice Department attorney present at any subsequent interview.