Shortly before 9 a.m. Thursday, Steve Castor strolled up to a House Oversight and Reform Committee office and greeted the reporters and photographers staking out a deposition that was not to be.

“Nobody's coming today,” said Castor, a top Republican lawyer on the committee. Within a half hour, he left. The absence of Justice Department attorney John Gore was noted—and not at all surprising.

Committee investigators had hoped to question Gore, a top official in the Justice Department's civil rights division, about the Trump administration's push to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. But on the eve of the deposition, the Justice Department's top congressional liaison told the committee that U.S. Attorney General William Barr had directed Gore not to appear, deepening the Trump administration's defiance of House subpoenas and other demands for information that President Donald Trump has decried as partisan.