Dems: Trump DOJer Reveals New Info About Draft Of Census Citizenship Request

Source: Talking Points Memo



By Tierney Sneed
March 14, 2019 2:03 pm

The Justice Department official behind a December 2017 request for a census citizenship question told lawmakers that he received a draft of the request from a Trump transition official who did not work for the administration, House Democrats said Thursday.

They released a portion of a transcript of an interview with Trump-appointed DOJ official John Gore on Thursday, as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was beginning testimony about the census question in front of the House Oversight Committee.

According to Democrats’ summary of the interview, Gore said he received the draft of the request “around the same time he was preparing” the Dec. 12, 2017 letter that became the official request. It came from Mark Neuman, a former census official who worked for the Trump transition team but did not ultimately serve in the Trump administration.

A DOJ lawyer accompanying Gore in the interview stopped him from answering questions about the content of the draft provided by Neuman, or about how much Gore used it to write the letter the Department ultimately sent, according to the documents released by the Democrats.

Read more: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/census-citizenship-question-doj-draft-gore