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Leaked emails show Stephen Miller shared white nationalist links with a Breitbart editor
Miller is one of Trump's top advisers and has crafted some of the administration's most notable and controversial immigration policies.
www.businessinsider.com
Stephen Miller shared white nationalist links with a Breitbart editor in 2015, newly released leaked emails show
A trove of emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch project showed White House senior adviser Stephen Miller exchanging white nationalist emails and ideas with former Breitbart editor and reporter Katie McHugh.
- A trove of emails leaked to the Southern Poverty Law Center showed White House senior adviser Stephen Miller exchanging white nationalist links and ideas with former Breitbart editor Katie McHugh.
- Miller is President Donald Trump's top adviser on immigration and has crafted some of the administration's most notable and controversial immigration policies.
- The emails, more than 900 of which McHugh provided to the SPLC, date back to between 2015 and 2016, when Miller was a policy adviser for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama.
- Miller sent McHugh links to white nationalist sites V-Dare and the American Renaissance.
- He also encouraged McHugh to make parallels between immigration and the explicitly racist 1970s novel "Camp of the Saints," and praised former President Calvin Coolidge's race-based immigration quotas.
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Miller, who has been in the White House since January 2017, has kept a low public profile but has served as President Donald Trump's top adviser on immigration, and has crafted some of the administration's most notable policies.
The 32-year old official is credited with being the architect behind several of the Trump administration's controversial immigration policies. These include the travel ban on several majority-Muslim nations, and the zero-tolerance border policy that resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents for weeks or even months at a time.
The emails, more than 900 of which McHugh provided to the SPLC, date back to between 2015 and 2016, when Miller was a policy adviser for then-Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama and discussed story ideas with her surrounding immigration and race.
McHugh has since been fired from Breitbart over explicitly anti-Muslim tweets in 2017, and no longer considers herself part of the right-wing.
While most of the emails were sent from an address identified as Miller's personal Hotmail account, others originated from his official government account associated with the US Senate.
Here's a sampling of some of Miller and McHugh's exchanges:
Miller lamented the movement to take down Confederate monuments throughout the South
- In March 2015, Miller wrote to McHugh about immigration, "they want people to feel helpless, retreat into their enclaves, and detach. Our job is to show people they can still control their destiny. Knowledge is the first step."
- In September 2015, Miller sent McHugh links to stories from V-Dare, an explicitly white nationalist publication that pushes the "white replacement" theory, about how Hurricane Patricia could result in Mexican nationals seeking temporary protected status (TPS) in the US.
- In another email from September 2015, Miller encouraged McHugh to make parallels between immigration and the explicitly racist 1970s novel "Camp of the Saints," which tells the story of a group of Indians who "eat feces" invade France, kill people, and rape women. The book has been widely cited by proponents of the white replacement theory to illustrate the dangers of immigration.
- McHugh and Miller discussed the novel in the context of Breitbart writing a story about non-white students driving down average SAT scores. "On the education angle? Makes sense. Also, you see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders. Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints," Miller said.
- In a July 2015 phone conversation, Miller encouraged McHugh to cite an article from another white nationalist publication, the American Renaissance, regarding DOJ crime statistics that separated Hispanics and whites.
- "Miller asked me if I had seen the recent 'AmRen' article about crime statistics and race. I responded in the affirmative because I had read it. Many of us [on the far right] had read it. I remember being struck by the way he called it 'AmRen,' the nickname," she told Hatewatch.
In a statement to Hatewatch, a Breitbart spokeswoman said, "the SPLC claims to have three- to four-year-old emails, many previously reported on, involving an individual whom we fired years ago for a multitude of reasons, and you now have an even better idea why we fired her. Having said that, it is not exactly a newsflash that political staffers pitch stories to journalists – sometimes those pitches are successful, sometimes not."
- In June 2015, Miller expressed anger and dismay with the movement across the South to take down monuments dedicated to Confederate generals, writing, "what do the [Confederate monument] vandals say to the people fighting and dying overseas in uniform right now who are carrying on a seventh or eighth generation of military service in their families, stretching back to our founding?"
- A couple days later, he wrote, "when will the left be made to apologize for the blood on their hands supporting every commie regime since stalin?"
- In October 2015 emails, Miller pushed McHugh to write a story emphasizing the mixed-race identity of a gunman who shot and killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, writing, " "[Harper-Mercer] is described as 'mixed race' and born in England. Any chance of piecing that profile together more, or will it all be covered up?"
- In a follow-up email, he told McHugh "Your eds need to make that the LEDE," about a line in her story purportedly linking Harper-Mercer to a Myspace user who praised Islamic terrorism.
- Across multiple emails, Miller praised former President Calvin Coolidge, who signed the Immigration Act of 1924 establishing extremely strict, race-based quotas on immigration that persisted until 1965 legislation. In 1921, Coolidge wrote "there are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons."
- "This is a good chance to expose that ridiculous statue of liberty myth. Poem has nothing to do with it. Indeed, two decades after poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration. No one said he was violating the Statue of Liberty's purpose," Miller wrote in a September 2015 email.
- At the beginning of Immigrant Heritage Month in June, Miller sent McHugh an MSNBC story and added, "this would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th century."
- In a November 2015 email, Miller also mocked the lawsuit of a 14-year-old Muslim boy in Texas arrested for bringing a homemade clock to his school, writing, "Like the mystics of old, the one sure way to get rich in modern America is to offer yourself up as virtue signal to those seeking to prove themselves members in good standing of the national religion – diversity."
The Breitbart representative added, "it is no surprise to us that the SPLC opposes news coverage of illegal-immigrant crime and believes such coverage is disproportionate, especially when compared to the rest of the media" and said "no one in our senior management has read the book 'Camp of the Saints."
Insider has reached out to the White House for comment. This post will be updated if we receive a response.
