White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller worked closely with Breitbart News to advance his conservative immigration agenda and attack political rivals before and during the 2016 Republican primaries, according to a batch of emails between Miller and a former Breitbart editor.
The emails, released Tuesday by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s publication Hatewatch, indicate that Miller gave direction to the populist website, and Breitbart carried out his wishes by, among other things, criticizing the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., parroting Miller’s preferred language in its anti-immigration stories and following his advice on where stories should appear on Breitbart’s home page.
In a previous tranche of emails from Miller to former editor Katie McHugh, the SPLC last week reported that Miller had fed anti-immigrant stories to Breitbart in 2015 while citing a variety of sources tied to white nationalists and white supremacist organizations.
The disclosure prompted several Democratic members of Congress to call for Miller’s resignation. The White House has stood by Miller.
Miller began advising Breitbart and McHugh in early 2015, when he was an aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., the emails show.
He is now President Donald Trump’s chief adviser on immigration matters and is considered the architect of some of the president’s most restrictive policies.
The new batch of emails, which McHugh turned over to the SPLC, indicate Miller’s direct influence on Breitbart, a virulently anti-immigrant site once headed by Steve Bannon.
Man who threatened to ‘put a bullet’ in Rep. Omar pleads guilty
It began with a hate-filled call to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington office in March, officials said.
“Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?” Patrick W. Carlineo Jr. asked a member of Omar’s staff on that call, according to a criminal complaint. “Why are you working for her, she’s a (expletive) terrorist. Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her (expletive).”
“I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull,” the staff member also recalled Carlineo, 55, saying, according to the complaint.
On Monday, Carlineo, of Addison, New York, outside Buffalo, pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, and to possessing guns illegally.
Omar responded to Carlineo’s guilty plea in Federal District Court in Buffalo by urging leniency when he is sentenced. In a letter she posted on Twitter on Tuesday, Omar addressed the judge who will sentence him, asking “for a system of compassion to be applied.”
“Threatening assassination of a public official in our country is dangerous to both the individual and our republic,” Omar wrote, describing the crimes that Carlineo admitted to as “grave” and adding that “threats of political violence and hate speech” were “not unique” to him.
“They are an increasing feature in our public sphere,” Omar, a Somali refugee whose family received asylum in the United States when she was a teenager, added. “We will not defeat it with anger and exclusion. We will defeat it with compassion.”
PG&E scales back potential power shutoffs, most of the Bay Area won’t be involved
SAN FRANCISCO — Pacific Gas & Electric scaled back the scope of potential power shutoffs this week, stating that most of the Bay Area would escape the effects of shutoffs planned to begin Wednesday, with only about 150,000 customers in 18 counties facing possible outages.
Earlier warnings had suggested that as many as 303,000 customers — or about 900,000 people — across Northern California would lose power. Customers in six counties in and around the Bay Area — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Mateo — no longer will be affected by the latest shutdown.
“We were able to reduce scope overnight due to favorable weather conditions,” Mark Quinlan, a PG&E senior director overseeing the shutoff, said at a Tuesday evening news conference. “If conditions change, we will pivot and change with the weather.”
Drying vegetation and gusty winds prompted the National Weather Service to upgrade a “fire weather watch” to a “red flag warning” that would take effect around 4 a.m. Wednesday and last through Thursday across the North Bay Mountains, East Bay Hills and Diablo Range. In parts of the East and North Bay, forecasts called for north-northeast winds of 20 to 30 mph, with gusts of 35 to 45 mph.
Although local officials publicly cheered the news that the power would stay on, they also expressed frustration with the frequent changes in guidance from PG&E, noting that since Monday, the utility’s projections for the number of customers involved has oscillated wildly, nearly doubling — from 180,000 to 303,000 — before dropping down again.
Also in the nation …
A 16-year-old boy was arrested early Sunday morning on suspicion of using a remote-controlled car to transport methamphetamine across the border near the Otay Mesa Port of Entry, authorities said. … A federal judge said she intends to rule no later than the end of the day Monday on whether former White House counsel Don McGahn must testify under subpoena to Congress, after the House Judiciary Committee asked her to accelerate a decision because it aims to call him after the current round of public impeachment hearings finish in December.
First Published: November 20, 2019, 6:55 a.m.