A treasure trove of data that deepened a nationwide partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats might never have been found had Stephanie Hofeller not been searching the belongings of her father, a GOP strategist, for scrapbook mementos.
When Thomas Hofeller died in August 2018, his daughter hadn’t spoken to him in four years. She had, however, left some of her own belongings, from pictures and jewelry boxes to computer files, in his home, and she wanted to see if they remained.
While looking through them, she discovered 75,000 files on four hard drives and 18 thumb drives that pushed her into the center of a political firestorm and roiled the Trump administration’s legal fight to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census.
The documents, revealed for the first time in court filings last week, led a government watchdog group to accuse North Carolina Republicans on Thursday of misleading a federal court about their ability to draft new state voting maps in time for a special election in late 2017. That left legislative boundaries that had been deemed unconstitutionally gerrymandered in place for roughly a year.
Though Thomas Hofeller’s records have not yet been released to the public — it’s unclear whether they ever will be — their existence has raised questions about what other secrets they might contain. Hofeller was an expert in drawing the boundaries of voting districts, an increasingly fraught topic as the two biggest U.S. political parties fight for dominance in both Washington and state legislatures around the country.
It was in October, roughly two months after Thomas Hofeller’s death from cancer, that his daughter found the devices, she told attorneys in a deposition last month. She and her father did not have a good relationship, she said, and they had last spoken in July 2014.
After learning of his death in late September, Stephanie Hofeller traveled to Raleigh, N.C., to visit her mother, Kathleen Hofeller, and search for keepsakes. When she first walked into her father’s room at the retirement community apartment, she told attorneys, she was “overwhelmed with emotion.”
Noticing a childhood jewelry box, she decided to look around, thinking “there was a chance that there might have been something specifically for me as in a note or a message of some sort.” That led her to the drives, located on a shelf, which she remembered leaving pictures and documents on while visiting her father years before.
With her mother’s approval, Stephanie Hofeller took the storage devices; she was told her father’s business partner had already taken computers and records related to his work. As she looked through the files later, “there were a lot of news articles that I actually read through that he had saved, maybe articles even that mentioned him specifically and, of course, I was interested in preserving that,” she told the attorneys. “I wanted, you know, a scrapbook of my father.”
When she later contacted Common Cause, a government watchdog group that has mounted challenges to voting maps, to seek an attorney for help settling a dispute over her father’s estate, Stephanie Hofeller mentioned the files in passing. She believed they were only backups to documents stored elsewhere and was more focused on finding a lawyer unconnected with her father.
“In matters that concern a man as a person, often when you’re dealing with people that only know him in a professional context and have a great deal of their personal and professional life mingled with that image, when you begin to speak about that person as if they were a human being with multitudes of emotions, contradictions, all of those things, often people get hostile,” Stephanie Hofeller said when attorneys in the deposition asked why she contacted Common Cause.
Months later, in February 2019, she received a subpoena for the documents from Arnold & Porter, a law firm representing Common Cause in a state court challenge to North Carolina’s voting districts.
After discussing the subpoena with her mother and receiving permission to turn over the drives, Stephanie Hofeller did so. She said in May that she wanted to give the devices to Common Cause not as evidence but as a way to provide insight into the mapmaking process.
“I knew that if I presented them this way that they would be preserved, that their integrity would be preserved and everything there, including my files, including other matters completely unrelated to this, that those would be a snapshot in time,” Stephanie Hofeller said during her deposition.
The fallout from the tranche of documents has reached not only the gerrymandering case in North Carolina, but also the halls of the Supreme Court, which in April heard oral arguments in the legal challenge over the citizenship question. At the time, the conservative justices seemed likely to side with the Trump administration in the case.
But last month, an immigrant rights group disputing the legality of the question argued in a court filing that the newly discovered documents from Thomas Hofeller show the Trump administration concealed its motive for asking about citizenship on the census questionnaire.
The files indicated Thomas Hofeller “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question” to the census, which would give “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites” an electoral advantage, the group said.
The Justice Department hit back against the allegations, describing them as part of an “11th hour campaign to improperly derail the Supreme Court’s resolution” of the case. Justices are expected to rule on the matter by the end of June.
