Stephen Miller Under Fire Over Leaked Emails

Stephen Miller is weathering the biggest controversy of his tenure as a top adviser to President Trump, thanks to a stash of leaked emails he sent to a reporter for Breitbart News in the runup to the 2016 election. Hatewatch, affiliated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, has begun a series on the 900 emails, the vast majority of which deal with race and immigration. The SPLC accuses Miller of promoting white nationalism and content from racist sources. "When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites," per the report. "On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States." Miller has not commented, but the White House says the SPLC "is an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization" and is "beneath public discussion," reports the Hill.

Miller sent the emails to reporter Katie McHugh, then a young reporter affiliated with the anti-immigration movement. She was fired from Breitbart in 2017 over anti-Muslim tweets and has since renounced her ties to the far right. McHugh gave the emails to the SPLC. Getting attention:

• Miller sent links to McHugh from white nationalist websites such as VDARE and encouraged her to pull material on interracial crime from another, the American Renaissance.
• Miller encouraged McHugh to write critically—to "create a counternarrative," per the SPLC—about the removal of the Confederate flag from Amazon retailers after a church shooting in South Carolina.
• He encouraged her to write about The Camp of the Saints, a novel popular with white nationalists and widely seen as a racist.

Because Miller is regarded as a chief architect of Trump's immigration policies, critics are calling for his resignation. "As I said earlier this year: Stephen Miller is a white nationalist," tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar. "And now we have the emails to prove it. This type of racism and hatred has no place in our government." It's not only from the left: At the conservative Washington Examiner, Tiana Lowe writes that Miller must go. He "was egging on McHugh to bring unabashedly racist online narratives about immigration into a more mainstream publication," writes Lowe. "Interns have been fired for less than this." (More Stephen Miller stories.)