WASHINGTON – Former Division of Homeland Safety appointee Miles Taylor claims in an upcoming ebook that senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller requested then-Coast Guard commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft if the US might use drones to slaughter migrants at sea.
One drawback: Each males purportedly concerned within the dialog say it by no means occurred, they solely instructed The Put up this week.
The disturbing allegation was reported Monday by Rolling Stone, which reviewed Taylor’s tome “Blowback” forward of its July 18 launch.
“Taylor writes about an April 2018 dialog wherein Miller allegedly advocated an assault on a migrant ship headed for the USA,” the journal wrote. “Miller, Taylor writes, argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they weren’t protected underneath the US Structure as a result of they had been in worldwide waters.”
The ebook additional claims Miller requested Zukunft “Why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate” a ship stuffed with migrants, to which the admiral allegedly replied: “As a result of, Stephen, it might be in opposition to worldwide regulation,” in keeping with Rolling Stone.
Different media retailers have picked up the story, with Self-importance Truthful going as far as to argue the story “shouldn’t come as a shock” as a result of Miller is “one of the vital evil individuals to have labored for Donald Trump.”
Whereas Miller has been a divisive determine and goal of the left for his instrumental function in a lot of the Trump administration’s hardline border safety insurance policies, he vehemently denied the allegation in an announcement to The Put up.
“Those that uncritically regurgitated this writer’s malicious and preposterous lies ought to now really feel deep humiliation,” Miller mentioned. “Their humiliation ought to be exceeded solely by the disgrace felt by these answerable for publishing this work of vile defamation from a person determined for a relevance he won’t ever know or discover.”
The reporting was additionally repulsive to Zukunft, who mentioned he was blindsided by the allegation.
“To Stephen Miller’s protection, at no level did he even intimate that, ‘Hey, perhaps we should always’ – you understand, a flippant comment that we might use drone know-how to take out harmless migrants simply looking for a greater life,” he mentioned.
Although Miller stays loyal to Trump, endorsing him for the 2024 Republican presidential ticket, Zunkunft, like Taylor, endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 regardless of working underneath the Trump administration till his retirement in 2018.
Whereas Rolling Stone reported Zukunft mentioned he had “no recollection” of the dialog, the retired admiral instructed the Put up his principle of the place the declare could have arisen, including that he gave the identical clarification to the journal’s reporters.
When requested by Rolling Stone to reply to Zunkunft’s denial, Taylor replied: “The dialog occurred.”
Zukunft, who mentioned Taylor by no means known as him to confirm the declare earlier than together with it in his ebook, proffered that it might have been a false impression by somebody eavesdropping on a dialog he had with Miller aboard a Coast Guard airplane getting back from a DHS journey to Florida within the spring of 2018.
“On the flight again, Stephen Miller is within the airplane with me and a few of his employees and a few of mine. We’re having a really deep philosophical dialogue that lasted properly over an hour for the flight again to DC about border safety,” he mentioned. “And my strategy was, you understand, we have to look past the border and have a look at if can we do extra within the supply international locations in Central America, the place individuals vote with their ft and depart and enter the USA illegally.”
“And so this went backwards and forwards, however at no time did Stephen Miller even counsel that we might use drones to shoot up migrant vessels. And if he had mentioned one thing like that, I might have put him down on the spot,” he added.
So how, then, did the egregious rumor unfold?
“There have been different individuals on the airplane and so I’m unsure what was picked up what which will have led to Miles Taylor placing this in a ebook and attributing that to Steve Miller,” Zukunft mentioned. “There may need been overheard discussions about utilizing armed helicopters – to not use lethal power, however simply to disable drug-laden vessels – however at no level was there any dialogue about utilizing any kind of deadly power in opposition to boatloads of migrants.”
Taylor stays greatest recognized for billing himself as a “senior Trump administration official” in an nameless New York Instances op-ed from September 2018 wherein he claimed to be “working diligently from inside to frustrate components of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.”
Regardless of serving a stint of lower than one yr as chief of employees to then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and then-acting secretary Chad Wolf, Taylor was not extensively recognized in Washington.
When Taylor lastly revealed himself because the op-ed’s writer, then White Home press secretary Kayleigh McEnany known as him a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer” who “was ineffective and incompetent throughout his time as DHS chief of employees, which is why he was promptly fired after solely serving on this function for a matter of weeks.”
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