# John Gore **John M. Gore** is a Republican election lawyer who led the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in 2017 and 2018. He wrote the December 2017 letter asking the Commerce Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The letter said the question was needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act. In [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] (2019) the Supreme Court found that reason "contrived," and blocked the question for the 2020 census. ## Background Gore graduated summa cum laude from the University of Colorado (2002) and with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law (2005). He clerked for Judge Bruce Selya of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, then joined the law firm Jones Day as an appellate lawyer. At Jones Day he specialized in election and civil-rights defense work for Republican state governments: - **Redistricting:** defended Republican legislative maps against racial-gerrymandering claims, including a Virginia plan a court later struck down for relying too heavily on race. - **Florida voter purge:** represented Gov. [[Rick Scott]]'s administration over its 2012 effort to remove suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls. A federal appeals court held in 2014 that the purge violated the 90-day rule in the [[National Voter Registration Act]]. A *Miami Herald* analysis found Hispanics and Democrats were overrepresented on the purge list. - **North Carolina's HB2:** represented the University of North Carolina when the Obama Justice Department sued over the state's 2016 law restricting transgender people's use of public bathrooms. ## At the Justice Department Gore joined the [[Department of Justice]] in January 2017 as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. He ran the division as acting assistant attorney general until a Senate-confirmed head arrived in 2018, then served as its principal deputy until he left in August 2019. **Texas voter ID.** In 2017 Gore wrote the filing that withdrew the Justice Department's claim, made under the Obama administration, that Texas's voter ID law was passed to discriminate against minority voters. According to ProPublica, he asked career attorneys who had worked the case for years to sign it. **The census letter.** Emails obtained by ProPublica show that in early November 2017 Gore sent a career official a draft under the subject line "Close Hold: Draft Letter." The official, Arthur Gary of the Justice Management Division, signed and sent the final letter on December 12, 2017. He later wrote that it went out "at the request of leadership, working with John." Gore's drafting started from a template. In a March 2019 interview with the [[House Oversight Committee]], he disclosed that around October 2017 [[Mark Neuman]], an informal census adviser to Commerce Secretary [[Wilbur Ross]], had given him a draft request letter. Commerce's general counsel had asked the two of them to meet. A Justice Department lawyer at the interview stopped Gore from answering questions about what the draft said or how much he relied on it. Papers found after the death of the Republican mapmaker [[Thomas Hofeller]] showed that the draft's Voting Rights Act paragraph matched, word for word, a document Hofeller had written on August 30, 2017. **Testimony.** In an October 2018 deposition Gore testified that a citizenship question was "not necessary" to enforce the Voting Rights Act. He had not mentioned Neuman as a source for his draft. After the Hofeller files surfaced, the Justice Department said Gore "had never heard" of Hofeller's 2015 study and that it "played no role" in the request. ## Congress and the courts - **Hearings.** In 2018 lawmakers from both parties criticized Gore for skipping an Oversight Committee hearing he had been invited to. At a later hearing he declined to go beyond what was already public. - **The subpoena.** The committee subpoenaed Gore for a deposition in April 2019. Attorney General [[William Barr]] ordered him not to appear because the committee would not allow a Justice Department lawyer in the room. That order was one of the grounds for the House vote of July 17, 2019, holding Barr and Ross in criminal contempt of Congress. - **Sanctions.** Plaintiffs in the New York census case accused Gore and Neuman of giving false testimony. In May 2020 Judge Jesse Furman declined to impose sanctions over the testimony, finding no "clear and convincing evidence of bad faith." He said that conclusion was "not based on a finding that Plaintiffs' troubling allegations are wrong." Gore denied the allegations. ## After government Gore returned to Jones Day as a partner in Washington. His firm profile lists him among the lawyers for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and [[JD Vance]] in [[National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC]], the case in which the Supreme Court struck down limits on coordinated spending between parties and their candidates in June 2026. ## Why it's on the map Gore's career runs through the legal machinery of who gets to vote and how votes are counted. Before government he defended Republican maps and a noncitizen voter purge. In government he reversed the Justice Department's position on a voter ID law and wrote the census request. After government he helped win a case that removed limits on party spending coordinated with candidates. The census letter is where it all came together. The Civil Rights Division, created to enforce voting rights, was used to justify a question whose original architect, Hofeller, had concluded it would favor "Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites." ## See also - [[Census Citizenship Question]] · [[Department of Commerce v. New York]] - [[Mark Neuman]] · [[Thomas Hofeller]] · [[Wilbur Ross]] · [[William Barr]] - [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] · [[Executive Privilege]]