US House committee votes to hold two Trump officials in contempt of Congress as census spat intensifies
US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump react to remarks from Poland's President Andrzej Duda during a Polish-American reception in the East Room of the White House in Washington, US., June 12, 2019.
Trump earlier in the day asserted executive privilege to keep under wraps documents related to his administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, defying a subpoena from the committee, chaired by Democrat Elijah Cummings. Traditionally, executive privilege has only rarely been invoked by presidents to keep other branches of government from getting access to certain internal executive branch information. Trump last month also invoked it to block a House panel from getting an unredacted copy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to boost Trump’s candidacy.
Democrats on the Oversight Committee were joined in supporting the contempt citations for Barr and Ross by Republican Representative Justin Amash, who is also the sole House Republican to call Trump’s behaviour “impeachable.”The fight over adding a citizenship question to the census presents high stakes for both Trump’s fellow Republicans and the Democrats, with the 2020 US elections looming.
Groups challenging the citizenship question on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to delay ruling on the case so that newly uncovered evidence they allege shows how the administration concealed its true motives can be assessed. However, committee Democrats have said documents show Ross “began a secret campaign” to add the question shortly after taking office and months before being formally asked to do so by the Justice Department.
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