In a blow to the Commerce Department’s claim that asking about citizenship status on the U.S. census is not at all politically motivated, several lawyers have produced evidence that the endeavor was concocted by a Republican strategist. Files found on the hard drives of the late Thomas Hofeller, the “Michelangelo” of gerrymandering, reveal he pushed the Trump administration to make the citizenship question, a first in census history, a key policy goal. Per the documents, he also personally drafted a letter on behalf of Commerce and DOJ officials arguing that adding a citizenship question upheld the Voting Rights Act. And perhaps most damning of all, in conjunction with the results of a 2015 study he conducted for a Republican mega-donor, he explicitly noted that the question “would be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”

According to the filing, the Washington Free Beacon commissioned Hofeller to analyze the effect on congressional districts if the census were reworded to count only eligible voters, and not the total population. In his report, which remained unpublished, Hofeller found that not only would Republicans benefit from the move, it would “clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats.” His analysis centered on Texas, an increasingly purple state, where nixing Latino noncitizens would shrink the size of districts in places such as El Paso, South Texas, and the Rio Grande. That would allow the Republican-held state legislature to consolidate several Democratic districts into one, which would, in turn, “[strengthen] the adjoining GOP districts.” It was a perfect strategy to maintain GOP power, wrote Hofeller. But “without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire, the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable.”

The data from the report—as well as its “content, language, and structure”—wound up in a joint Commerce-DOJ letter to Commerce chief Wilbur Ross requesting that the agency revisit the citizenship question. Hofeller’s name, however, did not appear in the vast majority of filings surrounding the case. When asked whether he had relied on Hofeller’s input to draft the letter, senior Commerce adviser Mark Neuman said he was minimally involved. DOJ official John Gore, who ended up sending the letter, did not mention Hofeller as an influence at all. Documents on the hard drives, however, suggested otherwise. Per the Times:

The first involves a document from the Hofeller hard drives created on Aug. 30, 2017, as Mr. Ross’s wooing of the Justice Department was nearing a crescendo. The document’s single paragraph cited two court decisions supporting the premise that more detailed citizenship data would assist enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.