On the day before the Fourth of July, U.S. Justice Department lawyer Joshua Gardner stepped away from a summer vacation to dial into a conference call with a federal judge in Maryland. On the line for Gardner, in a way, was his standing—his credibility—with U.S. District Judge George Hazel.

Hazel was puzzled by something he saw on social media—a tweet from President Donald Trump that said his administration wasn’t backing down from its quest to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The tweet raised questions about whether the administration might defy a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling—and, for Gardner’s purposes, it appeared to contradict statements he’d made to Hazel just a day earlier about the government dropping its plans to add the question to the decennial survey.

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