Documents Prove Trump Admin Wanted To Use Citizenship Question On Census To Gerrymander Districts

Newly-released documents that were obtained by the House Oversight Committee reveal that the Trump administration wanted to use a citizenship question on the 2020 census forms in order to undercount immigrants so that they could gerrymander districts to favor Republicans. This is a massive revelation that should be front page news all over the place, but the media has barely made a whisper about this major story. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The house oversight and reform committee has released memos this week, showing that Donald Trump's administration wanted to add the citizenship question to the 2020 census in order to use that information to help Republicans gerrymander and pick up a couple more seats following the 2020 census. Now it's important to remember that this citizenship question did not in fact, make it onto the census. Even John Roberts, chief justice of the Supreme court struck it down. Uh, he actually wrote the majority opinion saying, sorry, this isn't gonna fly. But these new memos that have been released by the house oversight and reform committee, not just expose what was really behind the citizenship question, something we had all long assumed, but it also shows that former commerce secretary Wilbur Roth, Ross very clearly, you know, based on what we have now lied under oath to Congress. See, this is actually a pretty massive story here, folks.

And unfortunately it kind of popped yesterday and then disappeared already, right? 24 hours later, nobody gives a about it anymore. And that to me is one of the most frustrating parts of this article. We have the memos from lawyers working with the commerce department under Wilbur Ross and what they said, one of these lawyers, uh, uh, U Meer U Meer, um, what he did, he wrote these memos U Meer did. And he sends him over to the folks at the commerce department telling them, listen, you can't put this question on there, right? It, this is likely unconstitutional. You can't do this, you can't do this. You can't do this. That's what O Myer's memos were telling folks at the commerce department, but then suddenly he caved and he said, all right, fine. You know what? Put it in. Let's just do it. And of course in those memos, it also explains like we need to do this to help get the Republicans, the extra seats, but Wilbur Ross, little, little while back had testified before Congress that listen, we were only putting this citizenship question there, you know, based on a report that we had produced showing of course that, you know, we, we just need to make sure that we count everybody, but now we have the memo showing they only wanted the citizenship questions so that they could Gerry Mander and give Republicans a couple more seats, which of course directly contradicts Wilbur Ross's testimony to Congress, which to me looks a hell of a lot like lying under oath.

So will we ever get criminal charges against Wilbur Ross? Probably not. As I said, everybody's already moved on from this story. And it's been out for like 24 hours. Nobody cares anymore. Right? We have the former commerce secretary of the United States under Donald Trump, in my opinion, clearly lying under oath.

We have the memos to back it up memos to prove it right. We've got the evidence. We could have a very real trial here, right? Let Wilber Ross have his defense. If he can prove that he didn't know about the memos, then you know, totally innocent. He didn't lie, but I don't think he can because all of his people were involved with these memos to the point where one of them even drafted the order that Wilber Ross used to cite the report to justify putting the citizenship question in the census. This whole thing stinks to high heaven, but again, nobody seems to care about it. So I seriously doubt that Wilber Ross is going to face any form of justice for what he did here.