Newly unearthed emails sent by White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller throw into sharp relief Miller’s efforts to peddle white nationalist propaganda shortly before he joined the Trump campaign.
Hatewatch, a blog run by the Southern Poverty Law Center, published on Tuesday a series of emails dated 2015 between Miller, who was an aide to ex-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) at the time, and former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh that discuss immigration and “immigrant crime.”
In one of the emails provided to Hatewatch by McHugh, Miller cited the white nationalist site VDARE while urging the Breitbart writer to publish an alarmist story about the possibility of Mexican survivors of Hurricane Patricia receiving temporary protected status in the U.S.
In another email, Miller suggested that Breitbart compare Pope Francis’s pro-immigration comments to the events that unfold in the French novel “Camp of the Saints,” which depicts Indian refugees as violent invaders of France under the leadership of a nonwhite “turd eater.”
“You see the Pope saying west must, in effect, get rid of borders,” Miller wrote on September 6, 2015. “Someone should point out the parallels to Camp of the Saints.”
McHugh also told Hatewatch that Miller had flagged to her an article from American Renaissance, a white nationalist site that peddles bunk race science, during a phone call while they were discussing “immigrant crime.”
“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,” Breitbart spokesperson Elizabeth Moore said in a statement to Hatewatch. “Having said that, it is not exactly a newsflash that political staffers pitch stories to journalists – sometimes those pitches are successful, sometimes not.”
Moore also said that while “no one” in Breitbart’s senior management has read “Camp of the Saints.”
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham attacked the SPLC in response to the report, saying that the organization is “beneath public discussion.”
“We have not seen the report,” she said in a statement. “The SPLC, however, is an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization that has recently been forced – to its great humiliation – to issue a major retraction for other wholly fabricated accusations.”
An unnamed White House official has been going around to various outlets, including TPM, claiming that the report is “clearly a form of anti-Semitism to levy these attacks against a Jewish staffer.”
