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On March 22, Wilbur Ross — President Trump’s commerce secretary — appeared before a House committee. Before doing so, Ross took an oath to tell the truth.

It seems clear that he then told a straight-up lie.

“The Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request for inclusion of the citizenship question,” Ross told the committee. He was referring to a much-debated question that the Trump administration was proposing to add to the 2020 census, asking people whether they were American citizens. The Commerce Department oversees the census. But the Justice Department, Ross claimed, “initiated” the question, because it believed that knowing where citizens lived could somehow help the federal government protect the voting rights of African-Americans.

Let’s first pause for a moment on the absurdity of that explanation. The Trump administration and other Republican leaders have been trying in recent years to make it harder for minorities to vote, by closing polling places where they live, reducing voting hours and adding stringent I.D. requirements. And now Ross was suggesting that Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department — as New York magazine’s Eric Levitz points out — actually cared deeply about black voter turnout.