It is rather terrifying, particularly because the media are so focused on
Russiagate and Trump's tweets, that the real damage is being ignored. People
really don't understand that the whole government is being dismantled.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2018 10:50 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: "There Won't Even Be a Paper Trail": Has Stephen
Miller Become a Shadow Master at the State Department?
There is an important point in this rather lengthy article.
While Donald Trump mugs and cavorts and twitters before the Public, Multiple
clones of Stephen Miller are quietly destroying democracy.
It's the old "Allyshazam Presto Chango!" "The hand is quicker than the eye".
While Donald Trump distracts us, the likes of Stephen Miller are busy hacking
down years of democracy.
Why, you might ask. Because the Millers of the American Corporate Empire hold
the Working Class(most Americans) in abject contempt.
Hear the words of Steve Bannon, "Bannon suggested the chaos was part of the
fun. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot,” he replied."
Huh! What say! Degrading the opposition has always been part of our civilized
behavior, but usually our adversaries are given names like, snakes, rats,
dodos, and vermin. But Snow Flakes? What the Hell is that all about?
It must be some secret code originating at FOX News.
Anyway while Donald Trump hogs the airwaves, the Pied Pipers of Trumpville are
leading us down a Prim Rose Path to our own demise.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/12/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"There Won't Even Be a Paper Trail": Has Stephen Miller Become a
Shadow Master at the State Department?
By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair
12 August 18
For the past year, Miller has been quietly gutting the U.S. refugee
program, slashing the number of people allowed into the country to the
lowest level in decades. “His name hasn’t been on anything,” says a
former U.S. official who worked on refugee issues. “He is working
behind the scenes, he has planted all of his people in all of these
positions, he is on the phone with them all of the time, and he is
creating a side operation that will circumvent the normal, transparent
policy process.” And he is succeeding.
In his first month in the White House, Stephen Miller learned a
valuable lesson from a mentor. As one of his first acts as president,
Donald Trump had signed an executive order banning travel to the
United States from several majority-Muslim countries, and mass
protests were breaking out across the country. Law-enforcement
officials, who had received little guidance on how to carry out the
order, were flummoxed, and the administration was swiftly taken to
court. Chief strategist Steve Bannon, who helped craft the order
alongside Miller, was nevertheless delighted by the self-created
maelstrom. When journalist Michael Wolff later asked Bannon why the
ban had been implemented so recklessly, Bannon suggested the chaos was
part of the fun. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and
riot,” he replied.
Whereas Bannon made controversy his calling card, Miller has operated
in a more shadowy—and effective—manner, gradually applying leverage
and using shrewd personnel decisions to implement his draconian vision
on immigration policy throughout the West Wing and government
agencies. Some measures, like his role in the travel ban or the Trump
administration’s callous family-separation policy, have been obvious.
“It was really a shock to a bureau whose mission is to help refugees,”
Anne Richard, a former assistant secretary of state for Population,
Refugees and Migration, said of the travel ban. “I knew the Trump
administration from the campaign was hostile to refugees. I did not
anticipate that they would move so quickly, even before there was a
Secretary of State.” As one senior Senate staffer explained, in the
early months of the Trump administration “it was very dramatic and
people knew what was happening and you could just see it visibly.”
Other maneuvers to restrict legal immigration have been slightly more
subtle. Last September, Miller played a leading role in slashing the
refugee admissions cap to 45,000—less than one-half the 110,000
ceiling set under President Barack Obama, and the lowest level since
1980. Now, he has reportedly revived his push for another cut, to a
cap as low as 15,000 refugees. Earlier this week, the 32-year-old
senior adviser was reported to be focused on an even more ambitious
project: imposing strict limits on legal immigration, as well as on
individuals seeking asylum from war, famine, and prosecution. “The
administration seems to delight in picking on the most vulnerable
people,” David Robinson, the former assistant secretary for the Bureau
of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department, told
me, enumerating the ways in which the resettlement process had been
logjammed. “Pretty soon you are going to have a trickle and not a
stream.” Currently, the U.S. is on pace to admit around 22,000
refugees this fiscal year. Defenders of the policies argue that the
cuts offset a surge in asylum seekers, while critics dismiss the
notion as a manufactured crisis.
“By 2020, I would not be surprised if we just don't have this program
anymore,” said Jennifer Quigley, an advocacy strategist for refugee
protection at Human Rights First. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s
5,000 next year and then zero.” (When asked about the negotiations for
next year’s refugee cap, an administration official said in a
statement, “We are not going to get ahead of the president’s policy.”)
Nearly a dozen current and former administration officials I have
spoken with in recent weeks describe the latest negotiations over the
refugee-admissions cap as one of the more insidious examples of
Miller’s efforts to curtail immigration to the United States. (Miller,
a lifelong culture warrior, first made his name in conservative
circles with an impassioned op-ed raging against the preponderance of
Latino students who “lacked basic English skills” in his high school.)
“It’s part of a very coherent, effective, and successful plan. It’s
not easy to do hard things in our government,” a former official at
the Department of Homeland Security explained. “Our government is huge
. . . it’s kind of constructed to slow things down and to make sure
that individuals don’t wield excessive power.
It’s got lots and lots of checks and balances, so it’s really
difficult to pull off something like what they’ve pulled off, and they’ve
done it.”
There
are, after all, hundreds of career civil servants who have dedicated
their lives to helping the estimated 69 million refugees in the world,
only a minuscule portion of whom ever gain sanctuary in the United
States. But Miller has found ways to hijack the machinery of the
government to undermine these agencies’ core mission. “Now, it’s sort
of like the termite approach, which is you place people inside and you
have them basically eat away in a more quiet way, subtly inside,” the
senior Senate staffer continued. “It’s not as transparent to the
outside world, and they just sort of destroy programs they don’t care
about.” (The White House declined multiple requests for comment.)
Miller, perhaps in the wake of Fire and Fury flameout, has also
satisfied his boss’s distaste for negative headlines with the sort of
apparatchik gamesmanship that Bannon never bothered playing. His
critics describe his influence as being like Gríma—the fictional
character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings, better known as
Wormtongue—a silent power behind the throne. For instance, multiple
sources described how Miller has worked to make the refugee cap
irrelevant by bureaucratically kneecapping the refugee program—slowing
down the interviews D.H.S. officials conduct with refugees overseas,
undercutting the staffing at the agencies that handle resettlement in
the United States, and complicating the vetting process. A current
administration official told me that Miller is “having D.H.S.
intentionally make sure that we don’t get anywhere close to the
numbers that we agreed to.”
Miller has, at times, acted ruthlessly to cement his power and control
the information flow to the president. According to two sources
familiar with the situation, last month Miller helped orchestrate the
ouster of Jennifer Arangio, a senior director in the National Security
Council division that deals with international organizations, who
Miller viewed as an opponent to his efforts to decimate the refugee
program. Arangio, a Republican who had served Trump since the
transition, fought to provide more accurate information to the
president about the issue, the two sources said, eventually sealing
her fate. “She is a real Trump loyalist, like through and through from
the campaign days,” the current official told me. “For her to be
pushed out by Stephen Miller is more of an accomplishment I guess for
him than for some random career person to leave.” “He’s got the ear of
the president, and I think that’s what it all comes down to,” the
former D.H.S.
official told me. (An administration official said they do not comment
on personnel matters.)
Perhaps as significantly, sources say, Miller has been able to help
frame the issue for Trump, both by communicating the administration’s
policies to the media and by quietly suppressing information that
doesn’t comport with his narrative. “He claims to be speaking for the
president all while manipulating the information the president
receives, so the president never hears alternative views or
arguments—whether it is evangelical support for refugees or veterans’
strong commitment to providing protection to Iraqis that fought
alongside them,” the former official who worked on refugee issues told
me. When the Department of Health and Human Services completed a
report that found refugees had boosted government revenues by $63
billion over the past decade, for instance, Miller reportedly had the
study suppressed. “The president believes refugees cost more, and the
results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the president,” he
reportedly instructed officials at the agency. (At the time, White
House spokesperson Raj Shah dismissed the report as a leak “delivered
by someone with an ideological agenda” and insisted refugees are “not
a net benefit to the U.S. economy.”)
***
As Miller has shored up his influence in the West Wing, he has
simultaneously broadened his leverage as his ideological allies secure
critical positions across the government. At first, sources say,
Miller focused his efforts on installing immigration hardliners at the
White House, D.H.S., and D.O.J. “[He would place] a political
[appointee] that was high up enough that they would know everything
but not high up enough that they would be in the public spotlight or
needing Senate confirmation,” the current administration official told
me.
Among Miller’s confederates is Gene Hamilton, who like Miller is a
veteran of Jeff Sessions’s Senate office and was tapped early in the
administration to serve in the somewhat nebulous role of counselor to
John Kelly, then the Secretary of Homeland Security. (Hamilton took a
role at D.O.J. after Kirstjen Nielsen was named as Kelly’s successor
at D.H.S. ) During the refugee admissions debate last September,
Hamilton was allied with Miller against then Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and Vice President Mike Pence, among others, including Elaine Duke, the No. 2
official at D.H.S. at the time.
“Stephen and Hamilton and their compadres tried to drive that number
way, way, way down,” the former D.H.S. official explained, recalling
that Miller and Hamilton sought to set the cap well below 45,000
refugees, “But cooler heads prevailed.” Other Miller allies reportedly
include John Walk, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office and
the son-in-law of Sessions; L.
Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services at D.H.S.; Dimple Shah, the deputy general counsel at D.H.S.;
Chad Mizelle, the counsel to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at
Justice; and Thomas Homan, the former acting director of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, who retired earlier this year.
Miller has been particularly attentive to the refugee program at the
State Department, which flows through the bureau of Population,
Refugees, and Migration, cultivating attachés to assist his agenda.
(Miller’s defenders say he is working to execute the president’s
agenda, not his own.) “He is definitely in empire-building mode and
succeeding at it,” a former administration official who worked on
refugee policy told me. “He’s plugged every hole across the U.S.
government and replaced every weak link with one of his staunch allies
so that there is virtually no path forward for anyone who cares about
refugee protection. You just run up against a wall at every path.”
Miller’s foothold in Foggy Bottom is buttressed by two veterans of his
influential Domestic Policy Council who have recently taken posts at State.
John Zadrozny is expected to oversee refugee policy, at least in part,
in his role as a member of the Policy Planning Staff, an office that
developed outsized influence under Secretary Tillerson. And Andrew
Veprek was named as the deputy assistant secretary of State in the
refugee office. Given his relatively low foreign-service officer rank,
Veprek’s appointment to the high-ranking post drew criticism and
confusion. (A State Department spokesperson disputed this
characterization.) The former administration official who worked on
refugee policy suggested the ascendance of both men had less to do
with their résumés than their ideological alignment with Miller.
“Their sole qualification is their willingness to do anything to
please Miller as members of the Domestic Policy Council and their only
major interest is their anti-immigration agenda,” this person told me.
Veprek, who joined the bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
in March, has proved especially vexatious to the other civil servants
who work there. Veprek is “a mini-Stephen Miller, except that he is
not as socially awkward,” the former official who worked on refugee
issues told me. “He knows how to say things the right way but when
push comes to shove, he is willing to show his cards and there is no
mistaking where his heart is.”
Diplomats were provided a taste of this side of Veprek when he
reportedly raised issues with standard-fare United Nations documents
that condemned racism and posited that leaders have an obligation to
denounce hate speech and incitement. “The drafters say ‘populism and
nationalism’ as if these are dirty words,” Veprek wrote, according to
documents obtained by CNN. “There are millions of Americans who likely
would describe themselves as adhering to these concepts. (Maybe even
the President.) So are we looking to here condemn our fellow-citizens,
those who pay our salaries?”
***
Before Trump took office, the Population, Refugee, and Migration
Bureau at the State Department enjoyed sustained bipartisan support on
Capitol Hill.
“This was a fine-tuned machine, it was people that had worked together
for decades,” said Robinson, who also served as the deputy assistant
secretary of state in the refugee bureau. “They are the experts on
refugee issues—not just resettlement.” Under the current
administration, however, refugee issues have become a lightning rod.
Current and former officials described P.R.M. to me as a bureau under
siege, with beleaguered staffers trying their best to stay
professional and keep their heads down—not always with success.
Since January 20, the majority of the bureau’s top talent has been
ousted or left.
It remains an open question whether P.R.M. will survive at all, in its
current form. According to current and former officials, Mark Green,
the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, is pushing
to move overseas humanitarian-assistance programs out of Foggy
Bottom—taking a hunk of the bureau’s roughly $3.4 billion budget with
it. Advocates of the move argue that it would be more cost effective,
while critics posit that it will further marginalize refugee issues
and effectively kill the P.R.M. (The spokesperson for State said the
department and USAID “are working together to develop a proposal to
optimize U.S. diplomacy and assistance to displaced people around the
world,” but no recommendations have been finalized.) “What principally
concerns me is that we’ve gotten to the point where the U.S.
government is so anti-refugee that even a bureau with the word
‘refugee’ in its name has to disappear?” Eric Schwartz, the president
of Refugees International and former assistant secretary of state of
the refugee bureau, told me. “What a sad commentary on where we are
right now.”
Worse, from the perspective of Foggy Bottom, there are few senior
Trump officials willing to defend the program. Secretary Mike Pompeo,
unlike his predecessor, has not said much about P.R.M. “I do think
that he is going to bat for the institution as a whole. But in terms
of standing up to the White House on particular issues, on particular
policy issues, I haven’t seen evidence of that so far,” one current
State Department official told me.
Nikki Haley, who was initially thought of as a potential torchbearer
for refugee issues as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has drawn
criticism from refugee advocates over her support of a measure to put
a hold on U.N.
Relief and Works Agency funding for Palestinian refugees. “Across the
board with this administration there has been no profile in courage on
refugee issues,” the former official who worked on refugee issues told
me. “Why would anyone cross Miller?”
It is now Miller’s government, after all. The president and his senior
adviser for policy are fully aligned in their vision of an America
Dream in which immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers are largely
excluded. It is no surprise that the two men would seek to recalibrate
the bureaucratic systems at their control to grind resettlements to a
halt. Perhaps Miller’s greatest achievement, however, is how he has
managed to project his influence largely from the shadows, deploying
ideological apostles to do his dirty work. “He wants to be able to put
it out there, speak for the president, not have his fingerprints on
it, not risk his own political future, not get out ahead of the boss
but be able to use his anonymity to put forward these extreme views
and cast them as the president’s,” said the former official who worked
on refugee affairs. “He has just been a master operator on that front.
His name hasn’t been on anything. He is working behind the scenes, he
has planted all of his people in all of these positions, he is on the
phone with them all of the time, and he is creating a side operation
that will circumvent the normal, transparent policy process.” Miller
will succeed, the former official continued, “and there won’t really
even be a paper trail.”
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