Stephen Miller undaunted despite leak
Top Trump aide undeterred after emails tying him to white nationalist talking points were released.
WASHINGTON — In case there were any doubts over his White House standing, Stephen Miller offered his critics the ultimate power move this week as he boarded Air Force One to accompany President Donald Trump to a campaign rally in South Florida.
Miller’s reserved seat was another sign that the White House senior adviser has suffered no internal consequences in the two weeks since a social justice website published a trove of his old emails that showed him promoting political material and talking points linked to white-supremacist groups.
The disclosures in the report from the Southern Poverty Law Center have prompted scores of Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups to publicly demand his resignation over what they view as smoking-gun evidence that the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies are rooted in white nationalist ideologies.
But the White House has vigorously defended Miller, one of Trump’s longestserving and most influential aides, and congressional Republicans are staying mum, signaling that they will not break with the president over the revelations at a time when Trump is eager to demonstrate momentum in stemming illegal immigration.
“If Republicans did not distance themselves from Trump after Charlottesville, they are not going to distances themselves over leaked emails by a staffer sent before Trump was elected president,” said GOP strategist Alex Conant, a former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., referring to the president’s remark that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly white supremacist march in Virginia in 2017.
Much of the anti-immigration views that Miller promoted in his private correspondence with a reporter at the far-right Breitbart News during Trump’s campaign in 2015 and 2016 reflected views that Miller, who had served as an aide to Jeff Sessions when Sessions was a Republican senator from Alabama, had promoted for years in meetings with lawmakers, Conant added.
“The more controversial positions such as why immigrants are bad for American culture — that’s what he believes, and a lot of that is what the president believes, too,” Conant said. “Those are arguments he made in rooms with other Senate staffers. It’s not a surprise at all.”
Indeed, Miller’s track record as a key architect of many of the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policies — including a ban on travelers from majority-Muslim countries and punitive actions against immigrants who receive public assistance — have in a sense inoculated him from attacks from fellow Republicans over his emails.
The chairs of House caucuses representing racial minorities and liberals issued a joint statement calling Miller a “white nationalist,” and more than 50 social justice groups signed an open letter to Trump accusing Miller of “stoking bigotry, hate, and division.”
The SPLC said its reports were based on hundreds of Miller’s emails provided to the organization by Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart staffer who collaborated with Miller on stories during the campaign.
The emails illuminate Miller’s fixation on crimes committed by immigrants and people of color, as well as his eagerness to push narratives sourced from fringe white supremacist and conspiracy-theory websites such as VDARE and Infowars.
Miller touted story lines that echoed the far-right vision of “white genocide” — the extremist belief that immigration from nonwhite parts of the world poses an immediate and existential threat to the racial integrity of white people, a belief that has motivated the shooters behind a number of far-right terrorist attacks recently.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham denounced the SPLC as a “far-left smear organization,” and her deputy Hogan Gidley, citing Miller’s Jewish heritage, said Miller “loves this country and hates bigotry in all forms.”