Leaked Emails: Stephen Miller Pushed For Negative Coverage Of Marco Rubio

Topline: White House aide Stephen Miller—responsible for some of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policies—attempted to get Breitbart to publish negative stories about then-presidential candidate Marco Rubio in 2015 because he previously supported bipartisan imigration reform, according to the latest batch of leaked emails reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

• The emails were sent while Miller was an aide to then-Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions and before Miller joined the Trump administration in 2016. 
• Katie McHugh, a former Breitbart editor turned critic of the far right, leaked the emails between her and Miller to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
• This is the second story about those emails. The first, published Tuesday, showed how Miller frequently linked to white nationalist articles and websites.
• In a statement Tuesday, White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Axios that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “ long-debunked far-left smear organization.” She also told NBC News that the story is “clearly a form of anti-Semitism to levy these attacks against a Jewish staffer.”
• Neither the White House nor Rubio did not immediately respond to request for comment from Forbes. 

Here is how Miller pushed for negative coverage of Rubio, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

• On July 7, 2015, McHugh published a story on Breitbart with a headline reading “Rubio’s Gang of Eight Bill Would Have Rewarded Sanctuary Cities Harboring Illegals.” 
• The Gang of Eight refers to a bipartisan group of eight senators, including Rubio, who in 2013 sponsored a wide-ranging immigration reform bill that contained a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The bill failed to pass the House of Representatives.
• The article was based on an interview and heavily quoted Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the think tank Center For Immigration Studies, which the Southern Poverty Law Center designated a hate group in 2016 (CIS contests this).
• McHugh contacted Vaughan for an interview hours after Miller sent a CIS study she authored. Miller frequently sent McHugh links to CIS research. 
• In her email to Vaughan, which asked why “GOP candidate Marco Rubio hasn’t publicly retracted his support for Gang of Eight,” McHugh cc’d Garrett Murch, another aide in Sessions’ office.
• After the story was published, Miller emailed McHugh to call it “phenomenal and important” and pushed her to continue targeting Rubio over immigration. 

Here is the email exchange in which Miller, responding to the Gang of Eight story, asks McHugh to focus on Rubio, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Miller: “Really important that you got the Rubio hit in there[.]”

McHugh: “He needs to be hammered constantly on this.”

Miller: “Yes. Every day.”

Crucial quote: “We used [CIS material] to spin a narrative where immigrants of color were not only dangerous, violent individuals but also posed an existential threat to America,” McHugh told the Southern Poverty Law Center about Miller’s pitches to Breitbart. "We never fact-checked anything. We never called up other organizations to get any other perspective about those studies."

Key background: Miller was appointed as a senior advisor to Trump after he was elected in 2016 and has since sought to quietly influence the president’s immigration policy. He is behind Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which he has fervently defended and which led to the separation of families at the U.S./Mexico border and the travel ban against people from some Muslim-majority countries. He has previously denied that he holds racist views, after promoting policies against both illegal and legal immigration.

Chief critics: Congressional Democrats are pushing for Miller to resign, including Representatives Ihan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the leaders from the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus, Congressional Hispanic Caucus and Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.