The Trump administration formally denied in a new filing that a longtime Republican redistricting specialist was involved in formulating a question about citizenship for the 2020 U.S. Census, as the U.S. Supreme Court mulls whether to allow that option on the national survey next year.

Attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice wrote in the new filing that new claims from those suing over the citizenship question were “more like the product of a conspiracy theorist than a careful legal analysis.”

The new filing was in response to allegations levied last week that two witnesses from the Trump administration falsely testified about the origin of the citizenship question and the reasoning for including it on the census.

Those allegations were made by the American Civil Liberties Union, New York Civil Liberties Union, and law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer all of which are representing the New York Immigration Coalition in a lawsuit against the citizenship question.

The question was struck down by a federal judge in Manhattan earlier this year, but that decision has since been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court heard arguments on the case in April, and was previously expected to hand down a decision on the matter in the coming weeks.

But now the future of the litigation is unclear after the new allegations surfaced last week. Perry Grossman, an attorney with NYCLU, said the whole situation appears to be unprecedented and, consequently, legally unpredictable.

“It's incredibly unusual,” Grossman said. “Saying what it means with any certainty is very hard to predict. I can certainly say what I hope it would mean, which is that it reinforces the case we've made all along.”

They've alleged that the Trump administration devised a scheme to ask about citizenship on the next census in an effort to lower turnout for the survey in areas with a large immigrant population, such as New York. That way, those states may lose seats in Congress and the Electoral College, which could give Republicans an advantage in future election cycles.

The Trump administration has claimed that it is seeking to ask about immigration status on the census as a means for the U.S. Department of Justice to enforce the federal Voting Rights Act.

Attorneys for the New York Immigration Coalition alleged last week that Thomas Hofeller, a Republican redistricting specialist, was involved in early conversations about how to formally request that a question about citizenship be added to the census. Hofeller died last year, but attorneys said his digital files, produced in unrelated litigation, support their claims.

The documents show, according to those attorneys, that Hofeller was involved in an initial draft of a letter sent from the Justice Department to the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2017. The letter, which was signed by DOJ official Arthur Gary, formally requested that the agency ask about citizenship on the next census.

The Trump administration denied Hofeller's involvement in a new filing this week.

“Neither Hofeller nor his unpublished study played any role whatsoever in the drafting of the Gary Letter,” the filing said. “There is no smoking gun here; only smoke and mirrors.”

The study referred to in the new filing apparently looked at what the difference would be for redistricting if citizen voting age population data was used, rather than total population count. Hofeller was commissioned for the research by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website.

The study concluded, among other things, that adding a citizenship question to the census “would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” and “would clearly be a disadvantage for the Democrats,” according to attorneys for the New York Immigration Coalition.

They had claimed in their filing last week that the letter signed by Gary contained “striking similarities” to language used by Hofeller in the study. They also said a paragraph from Hofeller's digital files matched verbatim with one found in documents allegedly used to write the Gary letter.

Those connections, they argued, show Hofeller was involved in formulating the rationale for requesting the citizenship question, and that the federal government was covering for the political benefits of asking about immigration status.

The Trump administration essentially said in its new filing this week that the claims were a stretch of the imagination and had no basis in fact.

“How those statements are 'strikingly similar' is, to put it mildly, not self-evident,” the filing said. “Plaintiffs' remaining examples are of a piece, and their pattern-matching exercise reads more like the product of a conspiracy theorist than a careful legal analysis.”

It was previously found that John Gore, another official at the DOJ, had ghostwritten the letter signed by Gary and sent to the Commerce Department. Gore allegedly based his version on an initial draft by A. Mark Neuman, a member of Trump's transition team. The plaintiffs alleged that Hofeller helped contribute to Neuman's draft, which was passed on to Gore.

Neither Gore nor Neuman had ever mentioned Hofeller during their testimony in the case as being involved with formulating the citizenship question. The Trump administration claimed in their new filing that Hofeller was never brought up because neither he, nor Neuman, made suggestions for the Gary letter.

“Of course the reason Gore did not identify Neuman or Hofeller as people who provided input on the Gary Letter is that neither Neuman nor Hofeller provided any input on the Gary Letter,” the filing said. “Plaintiffs have identified no evidence to the contrary.”

The Trump administration said plenty of other documents, including briefs filed in previous litigation, also contain close similarities to the Gary letter, and that the plaintiffs could not show the arguments were derived specifically from Hofeller's study.

The filing also argued that, even if the letter from Neuman contained a verbatim paragraph found in Hofeller's files, that doesn't mean Hofeller influenced the final letter written by Gore at any point.

“Even assuming Hofeller gave Neuman a paragraph from one document on his hard drive, it would not even arguably show that he also gave an entirely separate document (the study) to Neuman, much less that Hofeller (or anyone else) gave it to Gore,” the filing said.

The parties are scheduled to discuss the filings in a conference with U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman on Wednesday in Manhattan. The New York Attorney General's Office, which was part of the initial litigation but hasn't been involved in the new filings, is expected to appear by phone.

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