FILE PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the “2019 Prison Reform Summit” in the East Room of the White House in Washington, U.S., April 1, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas/
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House Democrats filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to enforce subpoenas against Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as part of their investigation into the Trump administration’s handling of the U.S. 2020 Census.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee in July held Barr and Ross in criminal contempt for defying the panel’s subpoenas as lawmakers probe the administration’s attempt to add a controversial citizenship question to the government’s population count.
Since then, Barr and Ross “have doubled down on their open defiance of the rule of law and refused to produce even a single additional document in response to our Committee’s bipartisan subpoenas,” U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney, the panel’s chairwoman, said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
House Democrats are investigating Trump’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the decennial census that critics said would discriminate against racial minorities. The survey, conducted every 10 years, is used to allocate federal funding and political representation, among other administrative actions.
Trump had planned to use an executive order to add the question to the census after the U.S. Supreme Court in June blocked his effort to add it, but the president later dropped the idea.
The clash is one of several power struggles between Democrats, who control the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Republican president, who has vowed not to cooperate with congressional oversight.
House Democrats are also leading the impeachment inquiry into Trump’s handling of Ukraine as well as other probes, including possible obstruction of the federal probe into Russian political interference in 2016, Trump’s finances and any potential conflicts of interest, and others.
Representatives for the White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, while representatives for the Justice Department could not be immediately reached.
Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis