Kris Kobach discussed the question of census citizenship as part of the Trump 2016 campaign: NPR

More than a year before the Trump administration officially requests the Census Bureau to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, Kris Kobach discussed the inclusion of this issue with officials in the 2016 election campaign of President Trump.

Kobach unveiled the latest information on behind-the-scenes discussions on the controversial census issue, during an interview earlier this week as part of an investigation by the Oversight and Reform Committee. Bedroom. Democrat staff members of the committee released excerpts from the transcript on Friday.

The revelation brings back the origins of the issue within the administration from the last race to the presidency. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau and approved the addition of the issue, had previously testified before Congress that the Department of Justice had "launched" the request for question in December 2017. Ross then backtracked, stating that he had begun to look into the matter. "shortly after", he was appointed in February 2017, while noting that "other senior government officials had already raised" the issue.

In his meeting with members of the House Oversight Committee, Mr. Kobach also confirmed that shortly after the President's inauguration in January 2017, he met with Mr. Trump on this subject, under the name of Kansas City Star. first reported. Kobach said that he had also discussed it with Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of the White House and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff of the president.

Kobach pressure for an "essential" issue of the census

Excerpts from Kobach interview arrive at home supervisory committee is preparing to vote on a resolution condemning Ross and US Attorney General William Barr in defiance of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas demanding the release of some internal documents on the issue of citizenship.

At the end of the month, the Supreme Court is expected to announce a decision on the Trump administration's ability to add the following question: "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" to the forms for the national enumeration next year.

Kobach and Bannon did not immediately respond to NPR's requests for comment, nor did the spokesman of the law firm in which Priebus is currently employed.

More than two dozen states and cities, as well as other groups, have filed a lawsuit for the withdrawal of the citizenship issue, which, according to Census Bureau research, will greatly alarm probably households of non-citizens to participate in the enumeration provided by the Constitution of each inhabitant of the United States. This could have major implications for census counts, every ten years, used to guide the distribution of estimated federal funding of $ 880 billion per year for schools, roads and other public services in local communities, as well as only to distribute the seats of the Congress and the votes of the electoral college. the states.

The Trump administration has said it wants to include this issue in order to gather answers that could be used to better protect the voting rights of racial minorities. But federal judges in New York, California and Maryland dismissed this explanation as the real reason for the administration's push. They have issued decisions that are currently blocking projects on the issue, and the Supreme Court is reviewing the decision in New York.

The plaintiffs in one of two New York-based lawsuits have recently advanced allegations that recently discovered cases of a dead Republican strategist dismember show that the administration wants to use the question for draw new voting districts that will benefit Republicans and non-Whites.

Kobach explained his reasoning for a question on citizenship in a July 2017 email released by the Trump administration as part of the lawsuit.

"It is essential that a simple question be added to the next census of 2020," Kobach wrote to Ross.

Kobach explained to Ross how a citizenship issue could be used to address "the problem that aliens who do not" reside "in the United States are always counted" in the census numbers used to reconstruct congressional seats. He then proposed wording for a census question on the status of US citizenship that would require a non-citizen to identify himself as a "legal permanent resident (holder of the green card)" or "citizen of the other country who does not hold the green card (eg holder of a temporary visa or falls into another category of non-citizens). "

The wording of the question on citizenship that Ross finally approved in March 2018 does not ask for a person's immigration status. But this week, Kobach told the congressional investigator that he was "pretty sure" that Ross had not said "absolutely no" when he was presented with the version Kobach's question of citizenship.

"Sure he had said no, I do not know, no matter, you know, I think it's a bad idea, I'd probably remember it," Kobach said.

The Public Affairs Bureau of the Commerce Department declined to comment on the case.

In his testimony before Congress, Ross pointed out that he had finally rejected Kobach's suggestions.

"My only decision in response to Mr. Kobach's ideas was to completely reject the proposed configuration for the citizenship issue and the reasons for its preferred configuration," Ross wrote in a footnote of a letter. addressed to Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland. who now chairs the House oversight committee. "I've always been and will always be determined to count everyone once, only once and in the right place."

Another internal email provided by the administration for prosecutions shows, however, that a Commerce Department official, on whom Ross insisted on obtaining a citizenship question during the census, was afraid to contact Kobach directly after Ross had mentioned it at a meeting in September 2017.

Blocked by the White House

Investigators from the House Oversight and Reform Committee attempted to gather additional information about Kobach's communication with the White House on the issue of citizenship. But in a note released Friday, members of the Democratic Committee say that the White House "intervened directly and aggressively" in Kobach's interview. Mr. Kobach served as vice-chair of Election Fraud Commission, now missing from President Trump, as of May 2017, but committee members say he was a "citizen" private "in the early months of the administration and during the presidential race.

The White House declined to comment on the article, but in a letter to Cummings in May, White House deputy councilor Michael Purpura said that Kobach's conversations with Trump and his top advisers were "confidential" in order to allow officials to express themselves freely. shaping policies and making decisions.

"These aggressive White House efforts to prevent Mr. Kobach from cooperating with the Committee raise important new questions about what the Trump administration is hiding – and why," Cummings said in a written statement. "They also questioned the Trump administration's claims that the decision to add the issue of citizenship had been" taken at the departmental level "rather than at the White House. "

The Republicans of the committee rejected the inquiry into the issue of citizenship, which they described as an attempt to influence the Supreme Court's review of the case.

"The testimony of Kris Kobach shows that he was a peripheral and unimportant actor in the decision-making process and that the Commerce Department did not rely on Kobach to make his decision," he said. Charli Huddleston, spokesman for the Republican Committee, written statement.