Newly released documents confirm that racist weasel and senior Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller was regularly kept in the loop regarding the Trump campaign’s “outreach” to Russia, an effort which Trump has dismissed as “fake news” that “didn’t happen.”
George Papadopoulos told his Trump campaign colleague Stephen Miller, now a top White House official, about his efforts to coordinate a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reported Friday
According to the Times, Miller is the unnamed “senior policy adviser” described in emails that were included in the recently unsealed charges against Papadopoulos.
Papadopoulos, the campaign's emissary, made it clear that the Russians were virtually salivating at the idea of meeting with Trump, emailing Miller that “the Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready.”
Two days later, after a London-based professor with ties to the Russian government told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, he followed up with another message saying he had “some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.”
This is the first time Miller has been identified as the “senior policy advisor” who received these emails. He also had a face- to- face meeting with Papadopoulos in which the latter reaffirmed Putin’s eagerness to meet with Trump.
What makes this news particularly interesting is that Miller drafted the initial memo urging that FBI director James Comey be fired. As Josh Marshall at TPM points out:
Miller was also one of the advisors pressing hard for President Trump to fire James Comey. Indeed, Mueller’s investigators just interviewed Miller, apparently mainly about the Comey firing. Miller was one of the small group of Trump lickspittles who accompanied the President on the lost weekend at Bedminster when he stewed over Comey and resolved to fire him on his return. He also wrote a first draft of Trump’s firing letter, which the grownups back in Washington, horrified, dramatically revised. In short, Miller’s hands are all over the Comey firing. Now that we know he was in the loop for the Russia contacts, we know that in seeking to fire Comey he was at least in part seeking to kill an investigation into himself.
That would be called “obstruction of justice.”
The other point raised by Marshall is that in addition to being one of the highest ranking members of Trump's “inner circle” (making Trump’s own claims of “lack of knowledge” preposterous), Miller was brought into the fold by Jeff Sessions. Miller was Sessions' speechwriter, specializing in race-baiting screeds. Sessions is already on record as lying under oath to Congress about his contacts with Russia during the campaign.
We still don’t have a terribly good explanation of how Jeff Sessions got on the Russia bandwagon, how he ended up having as multiple private conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak over the course of 2016, including one private meeting in Sessions’ senate office in September. Miller seems like at least one likely conduit. At a minimum, Miller getting updated on Papadopoulos’ adventures makes it much less credible that Sessions knew nothing about the channels opening up between the campaign and Russia.
Meanwhile, Trump spent Veterans Day on foreign soil praising Vladimir Putin, denigrating American Intelligence Agencies as “political hacks,” and denying any Russian involvement in enabling his election.