Justice Dept. to Replace Lawyers in Census Citizenship Question Case

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced on Sunday that it was replacing the legal team defending the Trump administration’s effort to place a citizenship question on the 2020 census, a change that is all but unprecedented in legal battles as consequential as the one over the head count.

The department said in a statement that it was “shifting these matters to a new team of Civil Division lawyers going forward.” It offered no explanation for the en masse change, which came on the heels of an extraordinary week in a yearlong clash that raised concerns about whether the department’s arguments for adding the question could be believed.

And it strongly suggested that the department’s career lawyers had decided to quit a case that at the least seemed to lack a legal basis, and at most left them defending statements that could well turn out to be untrue.

“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, said on Sunday.

The switch appeared to signal even deeper problems for the administration’s effort to include the question on the next census, a proposal that critics have assailed as an ill-disguised plot to manipulate the final head count in ways that would benefit the Republican Party.

The department’s lawyers had for months defended assertions by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross that the Justice Department sought to add the question so that it could acquire better data to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Three federal courts ruled that that explanation was clearly an excuse for some other goal, and last month the Supreme Court agreed, saying the question could be asked only if the department came up with a believable rationale.

The Justice Department abandoned the fight after that ruling, telling a federal judge that the battle was over “for once and for all,” only to be blindsided last week by President Trump, who said on Twitter that the statements were “fake.” Mr. Trump suggested that the head count could be delayed until he found a way to add the citizenship question, perhaps by printing an addendum that could be tacked onto the questionnaire.

“The tweet this morning was the first I had heard of the president’s position on this issue, just like the plaintiffs and Your Honor,” Joshua Gardner, a lawyer working on the census issue, told George Hazel, a United States District Judge in Maryland, on Wednesday. “I do not have a deeper understanding of what that means at this juncture other than what the president has tweeted. But, obviously, as you can imagine, I am doing my absolute best to figure out what’s going on.”