Now that the Trump administration's efforts to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census have been shot down by the courts—due to widespread lying by Trump officials about the intentions of their effort—the ACLU wants to see officials who lied to the court receive stiff sanctions for those acts. On Tuesday evening, the group filed a request that it be given 60 days of discovery powers in order to "determine the scope of potentially sanctionable conduct."
The short version? The ACLU says multiple Trump administration officials in the Departments of Justice and Commerce lied to the court about their own actions, and that several at least appear to have withheld relevant internal documents about the case.
"This Court has before it irrefutable evidence that Defendants—led by senior officials
and agents of the Commerce Department, including Mark Neuman, Earl Comstock, Peter
Davidson, James Uthmeier, and Christa Jones—knowingly, and repeatedly, engaged in litigation
conduct that is nothing less than a fraud on the Court," the ACLU writes. "Defendants and their senior officials concealed facts about the case's central issues through a concerted campaign of delay and obfuscation. [...] Defendants steadfastly denied that Secretary Ross' decision to add a citizenship question to the census harbored discriminatory motives, or that the decision had anything to do with curbing the political power of minority immigrant communities through redistricting." The court now knows, from multiple other points of evidence, that this was a lie.
That five separate Trump officials misled the court suggests a coordinated effort on the part of the government to mislead the federal judge responsible for the case. And the ACLU notes that the involvement of senior government officials makes it "of utmost importance" that they be brought to account for those attempts.
That the government lied to the courts in defending the administration's census fiddling is no longer in doubt; even the Supreme Court acknowledged as much. Now it is up to the judge to determine what sanctions to hand down for that conduct, and against whom. Given the fury with which federal judges typically respond to fraudulent testimony in their courtrooms, the ACLU's request that it be given additional discovery to sort out the origins and extent of those lies seems likely to be granted.