WASHINGTON– A U.S. House committee voted yesterday in favour of holding two of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers in contempt of Congress for defying congressional subpoenas related to an effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 U.S. Census.

By a 24-15 bipartisan vote, the House Oversight Committee recommended the full House of Representatives find Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt. For Barr, the top U.S. law enforcement official, it was the second time a House panel had made such a recommendation against him. Trump earlier in the day asserted executive privilege to keep under wraps documents related to his administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, defying a subpoena from the committee, chaired by Democrat Elijah Cummings.

“The president’s assertion does not change the fact that the attorney general and the secretary of commerce are sadly in contempt,” Cummings said during a nearly seven-hour meeting of the Democratic-led investigative panel. A Justice Department spokeswoman said in a statement that the committee was playing “political games” and that the agency had tried for months to accommodate the committee’s demands for documents. Ross called the vote an “empty stunt.”(Reuters)…[+]