YOU’RE FIRED

DOJ Ditches Lawyers in Census Citizenship Question Case

The legal team defending the Trump administration’s effort to place the question on the form has been replaced.

Donald Trump is clearly very unhappy with how his legal case to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census is going. The Justice Department announced Sunday that it’s ditched the lawyers defending the Trump administration’s effort to force the question on to the form and replaced them with a new team. The department said it was “shifting these matters to a new team of Civil Division lawyers going forward” without offering any explanation for the highly unusual wholesale change. Legal experts suggested the outgoing legal team may have decided to quit rather than defend the case. “There is no reason they would be taken off that case unless they saw what was coming down the road and said, ‘I won’t sign my name to that,’” Justin Levitt, a former senior official in the Justice Department under President Barack Obama, told The New York Times.