(JTA) — White House senior adviser Stephen Miller hit back at accusations that he is a white supremacist.
“Not only am I not anything of the sort, but I find the accusation to be profoundly offensive and completely outrageous,” Miller told Trish Regan during an interview Friday on Fox Business. “It is an attempt on the part of the Democratic Party to attack and demonize a Jewish staffer. And make no mistake, there is a deep vein of anti-Semitism that is running through today’s Democratic Party.”
Miller responded to the letter sent on Friday by 25 Jewish Democratic House members urging President Donald Trump to dismiss Miller, focusing on his hard-line views on immigration and referencing recently leaked emails in which he promoted white nationalist materials to the right-wing Breitbart News website.
“There is nothing wrong with my emails. There is nothing wrong with anything I said. Unless being proud to be an American and standing up for Americans is a crime,” Miller said in the interview.
“They are trying to cover up the fact that there is this vein of anti-Semitism that pulses through the Democratic Party,” Miller said, referencing Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “very stained and sordid history of anti-Semitism” and accusing Democrats of “breaking bread with (Nation of Islam leader) Louis Farrakhan.”
Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, a Bernie Sanders campaign surrogate, has been criticized for failing to immediately reject Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, though she has never attended one of his speeches. She joined Women’s March co-chair Tamika Mallory, a Farrakhan supporter, in stepping down from the march’s board, in part over Mallory’s support of Farrakhan. Democratic candidate Cory Booker also has been criticized for meeting in the past with Farrakhan, though he said in July he would not meet with him anymore.
“I think the fact that they are continuing to accuse a Jew of being a white nationalist is inherently anti-Semitic,” he said, adding that “To say to a Jewish person that you hold the very ideology that has persecuted your own family is so profoundly inappropriate.”
Miller has helped craft the president’s controversial immigration policies, including the ban on citizens of certain Muslim majority countries and the family separation policy on the southern border.
