Newsom says Mitchell was not a “Defendants’ agent” when somebody asked him to write the Congressional district lines the Legislature adopted for Prop. 50.
Governor Newsom does not want the Proposition 50 mapmaker, data guru Paul Mitchell, to testify next week in the hearing on whether racial data was used, illegally, to create the 52 new Congressional Districts that voters approved in last month’s special election. In a filing mandated by the Court before 5 p.m. last night, Newsom says Mitchell, who refused to testify 100 times a few days ago at his deposition on the racial data issue, should not be considered an agent of Newsom (the main proponent of Prop. 50), or the Legislature, because he did not “work for the legislature”, and is not a formal “party” to the lawsuit. Let that sink in. Newsom says Mitchell did not work for the Legislature.
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While the U.S. Department of Justice is questioning the claim of “legislative privilege” in the case and is now asking the Court to compel Mitchell’s further testimony on racial bias in the mapmaking, Newsom says he has “no power” to produce Mitchell as a witness, has none of Mitchell’s documents and evidence in his possession, and cannot waive any claim of privilege to not speak that Mitchell asserts on behalf of the Legislature, because Mitchell is on his own, with his own lawyer, and is a “non-party witness.”
Other oppositions filed late yesterday against Mitchell giving evidence on racial bias in the mapmaking were filed by the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and LULAC. They repeat reasons to the Court why Mitchell should be allowed to gag himself and not disclose the evidence of racial number crunching behind Proposition 50, which remains a big secret, but they also expand arguments on “Mitchell really didn’t work for the Legislature” and is therefore a non-party witness who can’t be forced to testify at this stage of the litigation without being subject to, for example, formal subpoena again. This argument may have some “blue smoke” technical merit but only that, as the DOJ did in fact subpoena Mitchell a couple times for the deposition in which he refused to testify, a fact that the Newsom Defendants seem to ignore, and which will not be lost on the Court, which appears to actually want to hear what Mitchell has to say.
Click here to read the full article at James V. Lacy’s Substack
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