Harry Siegel, at the New York Daily News, has quite the story.
After the immigration executive order was issued, barking mad Trump adviser Stephen Miller called up U.S. Attorney Robert Capers at home, and told Capers how to defend the order in court.
In the chaotic hours after President Trump signed on a Friday afternoon the sloppily written executive order meant to fulfill his Muslim ban campaign promise, Stephen Miller called the home of Robert Capers to dictate to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District how he should defend that order at a Saturday emergency federal court hearing.
That’s according to a federal law enforcement official with knowledge of the call, which happened as Department of Justice attorneys cancelled plans, found babysitters and rushed back to their Brooklyn office to try and find out what exactly it was they were defending and who was being affected by it — how many people were already being held in America, how many were being barred from arriving here and the exact status of each person.
Y’know, the information a competent administration would have been prepared to collect before implementing the order.
The Eastern District declined to comment on any contact between Capers and Miller, the 31-year-old former Jeff Sessions aide and America First true believer with no legal background of his own, who a few months ago was warming up Trump’s campaign crowds and is now writing executive orders for the President to sign.
Stephen Miller called Brooklyn U.S. Attorney at home and told him how to defend travel ban in court, Harry Siegel, New York Daily News
Miller has been blamed for the chaos resulting from quickly putting out the order, without proper review, in the first place.
"Why did Stephen Miller fight so hard to put out this order on Friday without talking to any of the other agencies?" Scarborough asked Monday during MSNBC's "Morning Joe," referring to the president's immigration executive order.
"It was Stephen Miller sitting in the White House saying, 'We're not going to go to the other agencies. We're not going to talk to the lawyers. We're going to do this all alone,'" Scarborough continued.
"You've got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell."
Scarborough said Washington is in an "uproar" this morning because Miller decided "he was going to do this without going through the regular agency process."
Scarborough singles out Trump aide Stephen Miller for 'power trip', Rebecca Savransky, The Hill
Miller, who developed detailed knowledge of the nation's immigration laws while working on the staff of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, spent much of Saturday making policy decisions based on a strict interpretation of the immigration order and instructing senior Homeland Security officials on how to implement the plan.
Trump’s orders for stopping travelers from seven countries, blocking Syrian refugees and banning all refugee admissions for 120 days were pushed through at breakneck pace instead of what is usually a careful process of review by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies for major changes to immigration policy. Instead, Homeland Security officials were given little time to review the order before it was made public.
On one of the order’s most controversial and confusing parts, the status of permanent residents, Bannon and Miller at one point overruled an interpretation by Homeland Security officials in favor of a more limited policy that blocked green card holders until they apply for a waiver from the ban, the officials said.
Travel ban is the clearest sign yet of Trump advisors' intent to reshape the country, Brian Bennet, Los Angeles Times