New: Leaked Emails Show Trump’s White Supremacist Adviser Stephen Miller Planted Tons of Stories at Breitbart “News”
The SPLC is continuing their report on White House senior policy adviser (and outright white supremacist) Stephen Miller’s leaked emails, and today they’re highlighting the disturbing fact that Miller was actually giving editorial orders to Breitbart “News.”
Miller viewed the highly trafficked Breitbart as a way to promote his nativist, anti-immigration policies and to attack political enemies before millions of readers. And, while politicians and their staff commonly seek to influence news coverage, the dynamic on display in Miller’s emails to Breitbart suggests the conservative outlet was “not playing by the same rules that legitimate news organizations play by,” said Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of the Columbia Journalism Review.
“This is not remotely how a professional news organization functions,” Pope told Hatewatch, regarding Miller’s often-direct editorial instructions. “What is scary here is Trump, and his team, and also Trump supporters – hold up this kind of cheerleading news organization as an example of how journalism should be done, and it’s clearly not.”
The emails examined by Hatewatch demonstrate a pattern of influence by Miller. On April 10, 2016, he sent an email with the subject line “aggregate?” to Breitbart with a tweet by conservative commentator Matt Drudge. In his tweet, Drudge questioned the integrity of Colorado’s Republican caucus system in which Ted Cruz won a majority of delegates and which Trump had criticized as being “rigged.” Breitbart soon turned Drudge’s tweet into the story Miller apparently envisioned, “Matt Drudge: ‘Hello Colorado Republicans, even Iraqis get a vote.’”