Bill Barr's brazen new dodge: He hopes to blackmail Congress over census info

SOPHIA TESFAYE
JUNE 12, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)
Several Cabinet department heads in the Trump administration have fought against efforts of congressional oversight in recent weeks. Perhaps none have been so brazen, or so seemingly corrupt, as Attorney General William Barr’s latest move to avoid scrutiny.

On Tuesday, House Democrats passed a civil enforcement resolution that effectively holds Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn in contempt of Congress. The vote came 24 hours after House Judiciary Committee chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., reversed his planned contempt vote against Barr after reaching a last-minute deal with the Department of Justice to hand over some underlying materials from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. With Tuesday’s vote, congressional committee chairs can now enforce subpoenas in court if their requests go ignored.

Barr responded to Tuesday’s vote by again threatening to withhold documents requested by Congress — but in a totally unrelated case.

The House Oversight Committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday to hold Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide documents related to the 2020 census in response to congressional subpoenas. In a blatant attempt to stop this oversight effort, the Justice Department on Tuesday threatened to withhold the documents on its efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, by fair means or foul, unless House Democrats abandon their vote to hold Barr and Ross in contempt.

In a Tuesday letter to Oversight Committee chair Elijah Cummings, D-Md., Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd demanded that the committee halt the issuing of the subpoenas and delay its contempt vote until Trump makes a determination on the materials the committee wants. Boyd argued that the requested documents are covered by either deliberative process privilege, attorney-client privilege or by the "attorney work product" component of executive privilege....more