Jason Miller

---

boosted fake electors w meadows

on 2024 campaign

no merri table

---

many sleazy guys

kolfarge bannon wall build scam

---

rww --> 9 26 benen

It’s been nearly a full month since Karoline Leavitt’s official last day as White House press secretary, and Donald Trump still hasn’t named her successor. In modern American history, no president has ever gone this long without naming an official spokesperson.

That said, the White House press shop has patched together a temporary structure. MS NOW reported:

Danielle Alvarez, a former campaign spokesperson for Trump, has taken on a senior role to help bridge the long transition. Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser, has also moved into a senior messaging role — although he did so before Leavitt left.

But neither Alvarez nor Miller intends to host press briefings, according to one of the people describing internal dynamics.

Whether Miller ever stands behind the podium or not, it’s of interest that he’s working at the White House at all.

The president’s original plan was to add Miller to his team in the first term, when the longtime Republican operative was named as the White House communications director. That didn’t quite work out. As The Washington Post reported:

Inside Trump’s hunt for a new press secretary as clashes with media intensify

Jake Traylor, Akayla Gardner

Stephanie Grisham files for temporary restraining order against Rep. Max Miller

Carla Herreria

Trump had initially appointed Miller as his communications director after winning his 2016 campaign. After allegations broke of an extramarital affair with a Trump campaign staff member, Miller announced he would not accept the White House role. Miller, who was married, later confirmed he was fathering a son born to the staffer and remained with his wife.

Despite the scandal, Miller reportedly remained close with Trump, and the operative was brought on in 2020 to serve as a senior adviser to the president’s ill-fated re-election campaign.

After Trump lost, Miller shifted into a lobbying role, even becoming a registered foreign agent before ultimately taking on White House responsibilities that he was supposed to have a decade ago.

There’s a small group of officials who were considered too scandalous for Team Trump in the president’s first term but who have nevertheless been welcomed to the team in his second term. Miller joins that exclusive, ignominious club.

ref pub cit

July 14, 2026

Registered Corporate Lobbyist and Foreign Agent Jason Miller Must Not Be Appointed to Top WH Comms Job

Documents show Miller receiving $150,000/month from foreign government to influence U.S. policy and thousands more to lobby White House for corporate clients

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A reported plan for President Trump to appoint Jason Miller to a top communications job in the Trump White House would create an unprecedented conflict of interest since records show Miller is also earning millions of dollars lobbying the Trump White House on behalf of a foreign government, two foreign-owned corporations, and two companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military contracts. The reported plan would bring Miller into a White House job by designating him a “Special Government Employee,” a status that could enable him to keep his lobbying contracts.

In a statement, Public Citizen democracy advocate Jon Golinger said: “Taking a lobbyist who’s on the payroll of a foreign government and companies with huge government contracts and putting him inside the White House will create a three-headed beast of divided loyalties. What inside information will this person suddenly have access to and will he withhold it from his paying clients? Congress must block this plan to install a corporate lobbyist and foreign agent inside the White House.”

Federal lobbying filings for Miller’s company SHW Partners show that, starting in July 2025, his firm has reported being paid $261,665 to lobby the Trump White House, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies on behalf of four corporate clients:

Mesabi Metallics Company – a mining company lobbying filings show is 100% owned by a foreign entity based in India.
OKBL USA Holdings Inc. – a cryptocurrency company lobbying filings show is 100% owned by a foreign entity based in the Seychelles.
Divergent Technologies – a metal manufacturing company that last year received Defense Department contracts worth $3.5 million.
Scale AI – a Meta-backed AI company that this spring announced it had received a “five-fold ceiling increase” in its Defense Department contracts from $100 million to $500 million.

Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings for Miller and his firm SHW Partners show Miller signed a $150,000/month contract in April with the government of India to influence “the U.S. Government, the U.S. Congress, state governments, academic institutions, think tanks, and any other relevant stakeholders as required.” The contract continues Miller’s representation of India, which began in April 2025. At the end of the two-year term of his representation of India SHW stands to earn $3.6 million in fees.

A Public Citizen analysis found that, since Miller first registered as a foreign agent in April 2025, he has reported over 100 contacts with Trump Administration officials, Congress, and media figures to influence U.S. policy on behalf of India. This included dozens of phone calls with senior White House officials and Cabinet Secretaries and private dinners with White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair and then DHS Chief Advisor Corey Lewandowski, among others. Miller also disclosed using his social media accounts to distribute information on behalf of the Indian government.

A federal law prohibits public officials from acting as agents of foreign entities that require them to register as foreign agents. Violation of the law is punishable by a fine, imprisonment for up to two years, or both. An exception to the law allows an individual hired as a Special Government Employee only if the head of the agency employing the individual “certifies that such employment is required in the national interest.”

“Putting a corporate lobbyist and foreign agent in a top White House job would harm the national interest, not serve it,” said Golinger. “We urge Congress to tell the White House to abandon this ill-advised idea.”

-=-=

---

lie gaslight

Dozens of FBI confidential sources on the ground at ...}:

Fox News

https://www.foxnews.com › video](https://www.foxnews.com/video/6365915181112)

Dec 12, 2024 — Trump-Vance transition senior adviser Jason Miller reacts to claims there were multiple FBI confidential sources present at the January 6th Capitol riot.

---

===

AN 2 25

Democrats often criticize Fox News and its sister channel Fox Business for conducting softball interviews with President Donald Trump and his allies.

But when Fox News' Howie Kurtz recently interviewed Jason Miller, a Trump senior adviser, he asked some tough questions and grilled him aggressively about Trump's foreign policy. And some MAGA Republicans are furious with Kurtz.

Kurtz asked Miller about Trump's recent attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who he described as a "dictator." Trump blamed Zelensky for the Ukraine-Russia War but didn't criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin.

READ MORE:[Revealed: Emboldened terrorists 'quickly rebuilding' as MAGA takes over the DOJ

Kurtz noted that Trump is being "hammered" by some on the right, including the National Review, for his anti-Zelenskyy comments, asking Miller, "How can you defend that?" And Miller was evasive in his response, carefully avoiding criticism of Trump.

Kurtz told Miller, "Conservative Mark Levin, who is a Fox News host, says this is sick: Ukraine didn't start this war. What were they supposed to do, roll over and play dead? They're just trying to survive. So you very skillfully have not answered the direct question, which is: why is President Trump blaming Zelenskyy for the beginning of the war?"

It didn't take some MAGA Republicans long to start attacking Kurtz, who was accused of "bias." One of them argued that Kurtz belonged on MSNBC, not Fox News.

One X user tweeted, "Your show sucked dude, I had to turn it. I thought I was watching CNN or MSDNC, my god."

READ MORE:[We've reached the moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms

But Kurtz is standing by the interview with Miller, saying he's glad he asked the Trump senior adviser some tough questions.

In a February 23 post on X, formerly Twitter, Kurtz wrote, "The trolls are really out today with nasty insults. Jason Miller was fine with our interview. Trump is under fierce media criticism on a dozen fronts and that’s what we explored with a conservative and liberal panel."

READ MORE:['We are starting to worry': Economist sounds alarm on 'near-term downside' of 1 million DOGE layoffs

*Watch the full video at this Mediaite link.

===

an 12 24

Jason Miller tries to spin Trump on calls to jail Jan. 6 investigators

an 9 24

Donald Trump's senior adviser Jason Miller says that under a second Trump presidency, "it's 'going to be up to the states' whether or not they set up regimes to monitor women’s pregnancies so they can prosecute them for getting out of state abortions."

During a Wednesday Newsmax interview, the conservative interviewer asked, "[Trump] wouldn't support monitoring pregnancies even if a state decided to do that?"

Miller replied, "Well, he's made it very clear that he's not gonna go and weigh in and try to push various states in how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That's gonna be up to the states."

Conservative and Bulwark founder Charlie Sykes replied: "Oh"

Talking Points Memo founder John Marshall commented: "Trump kingpin Jason Miller gives the thumbs up to states that want to set up full menstrual surveillance departments"

Marshall added, "JD Vance is a major Menstrual Surveillance proponent. But the Trump camp has been fairly good and at avoiding the issue. This explicit green light from Miller changes that. Walz shld definitely bring this up at his debate with Johnny Donuts and Harris campaign shld pounce generally."

Watch the video below or at this link.

---

an 7 24

on Thursday, in the midst of the July 4th holiday, a former Donald Trump staffer who worked on his 2016 campaign went public with a series of texts she allegedly made with Trump attorney Jenna Ellis asking about secret lawsuit settlements for accusations of "sexual harassment and gender discrimination" within the campaign.

In replies to those texts from attorney A.J. Delgado, who posted them on-line, Ellis appears to reply, "Yes off record — Boris The campaign settled multiple lawsuits. Have your investigator contact [campaign staffer] Michael Glassner. I will of course tell you the truth."

As the Daily Beast's Josh Fiallo wrote, the "bombshell" texts were included in a filing by Delgado as part of a lawsuit she filed against Trump campaign adviser and he supervisor, Jason Miller, whom she has accused of raping her while they were having an affair.

The video player is currently playing an ad.

According to the report, "As part of that lawsuit, Delgado, a lawyer who’s representing herself, filed a motion Thursday that included a text thread she claims to be between her and Jenna Ellis, another ex-Trump staffer who is a co-defendant in his election subversion case in Georgia."

Ellis pleaded guilty in the Georgia case.

The report adds that the Boris in question appears to be Boris Epshteyn, who has been at Trump's side during his courtroom appearances.

The report states, "The Daily Beast has not independently verified the authenticity of the texts, and neither Ellis, Delgado or a Trump representative responded to questions messaged and emailed on Thursday night. It’s the second time the texts were submitted as evidence by Delgado, after the Trump campaign’s lawyers asked her to re-submit them without names redacted and an offer to mark them as “confidential” appeared to be ignored."

Fiallo added, "The texts did not specify what sort of lawsuits “Boris” may have faced, but Epshteyn was accused of repeatedly groping two sisters at an Arizona bar in 2021 until a bouncer and cops intervened to remove him. "

You can read more here.

---

an august

not long after United States Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump on four counts for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, CNN's Katelyn Polantz confirmed the identities of five of the unnamed co-conspirators that were included in Smith's criminal complaint.

Those people are Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesbro — all of whom were attorneys advising Defendant Trump at the time.

Then, on Tuesday's edition of Out Front with Erin Burnett, Polantz reported that "we are now learning that the senior campaign adviser who is signified in this indictment as one of the people who was giving Trump the harshest assessment that there was no fraud after the election that would overturn the vote, that person is Jason Miller."

Polantz continued, "I have been able to confirm that I've reached out to a representative of his and received no comment back, but I have been able to confirm that that is indeed Jason Miller. And this episode is just one of the highlights of how the special council's office was using information that the close advisors to Donald Trump on the campaign, people who even stuck with him after the 2020 election, may Miller continued to work with Donald Trump, continues to work with him. These are people who were telling him that there wasn't fraud and that Donald Trump and the alleged co-conspirators or the co-conspirators in this indictment who are not charged at this time that those people were doing something anomalous with what the campaign knew that there wasn't fraud and this."

According to the federal filing, Miller warned Trump that "when our research and campaign legal team can't back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we are 0-32 on our cases. I'll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it's tough to own any of this when it's all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership."

Watch below or at this link.

roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms

---

an 8 23

Those people are Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesbro — all of whom were attorneys advising Defendant Trump at the time.

Then, on Tuesday's edition of Out Front with Erin Burnett, Polantz reported that "we are now learning that the senior campaign adviser who is signified in this indictment as one of the people who was giving Trump the harshest assessment that there was no fraud after the election that would overturn the vote, that person is Jason Miller."

---

j6 ch 3

3.2 President Trump and the Campaign Adopt the Fake Elector Scheme

In early December, the highest levels of the Trump Campaign took note of Chesebro’s fake elector plan and began to operationalize it. On December 6th, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded a copy of Chesebro’s November 18, 2020, memo to Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller writing, “Let’s have a discussion about this tomorrow.” 25 Miller replied that he just engaged with reporters on the subject, to which Meadows wrote: “If you are on it then never mind the meeting. We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.” 26 Miller clarified that he had only been “working the PR angle” and they should still meet, to which Meadows answered: “Got it.” 27

Later that week, Miller sent Meadows a spreadsheet that the Trump Campaign had compiled.28 It listed contact information for nearly all of the 79 GOP nominees to the electoral college on the November ballot for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.29 And on December 8th, Meadows received a text message from a former State legislator in Louisiana recommending that the proposed “Trump electors from AR [sic] MI GA PA WI NV all meet next Monday at their state capitols[,] [c]all themselves to order, elect officers, and cast their votes for the President. . . . Then they certify their votes and transmit that certificate to Washington.” 30 Meadows replied: “We are.” 31

---

ballot 1 23

jason Miller is a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump's (R) re-election campaign in 2020. He was also a senior communications adviser and chief spokesman for Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.^[1]^

Miller became the chief executive officer of a tech startup company in June 2021. Politico reported the company was developing a social media platform, potentially for use by Trump, who was suspended from Facebook and Twitter.^[1]^

The platform, GETTR, was launched on July 1, 2021. Its mission statement included “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”^[2]^

Career

Early career

Miller, a Seattle native, initially served as campaign manager for former U.S. Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.) in 2000. After Keller was elected, Miller became his chief of staff. He also worked on Keller's successful 2002 re-election campaign.^[3]^

In 2004, Miller worked on several campaigns, including Mel Martinez's (R-Fla.) winning campaign for U.S. Senate.^[4] Miller also worked as Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Okla.) campaign manager in his successful run for the U.S. Senate.^[5]^

In 2006, Miller worked on Sen. George Allen's (R-Va.) campaign for Senate as campaign manager.^[6]^

2008 presidential election

Miller worked on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's (R) 2008 presidential campaign as the national deputy communications director.^[7][8] Following Miller's tenure on Giuliani's campaign team, he was hired by the Washington, D.C.-based communications firm Dezenhall Resources as the organization's senior vice president.^[9][10]^

Consulting work

In 2010, Miller became a partner and vice president for Jamestown Associates, a campaign consulting firm. He produced ads for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the American Medical Association in 2012.^[10] Miller was an ad consultant for Richard Mourdock's (R-Ind.) 2012 Senate campaign.^[11]^

In 2013, Miller worked on ads and general strategy for Rep. Mark Sanford's (R) successful campaign in the special election for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District.^[12] Miller also consulted on Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) 2014 re-election.^[13]^

2016 presidential election

More on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign staff
Staff overview
• Trump staff overview
Management and strategy
•Steve Bannon, Executive chairman •Kellyanne Conway, Campaign manager •David Bossie, Deputy campaign manager •Michael Glassner, Deputy campaign manager •Jim Murphy, National political director •John Mashburn, Policy director
Communications
•Hope Hicks, Communications director •Jason Miller, Senior communications advisor •Katrina Pierson, Campaign spokesperson
Advisors
•Roger Stone, Informal advisor •Sam Clovis, Co-chair and policy advisor •Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Senior advisor •Michael Biundo, Senior advisor

Ted Cruz

Miller became Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign senior communications advisor shortly after Cruz announced his candidacy on March 23, 2015.^[13] National Review described him as part of Cruz's "brain trust," alongside campaign manager Jeff Roe and strategist Jason Johnson.^[14]

Throughout the campaign, Miller worked as a national spokesperson. At the time of his hiring, Miller told Politico that he was brought in "to put together a more robust communications operation."^[15] Miller's early communications were mostly positive reports on the campaign's ability to raise money from large donors. He told Politico, "The excitement created by Sen. Cruz’s announcement has motivated conservative grass-roots donors and big donors alike. We’re energized by the early rush of donor activity and are very confident we can achieve our goals."^[16]

In the days before the Iowa caucuses, as Donald Trump's (R) campaign began attacking Cruz, Miller's communications team shifted away from counter-attacks to a more positive note. Miller told The Wall Street Journal, "He is making his closing argument, why he should be the next president of the United States. Every campaign, by definition, has different phases."^[17]

Cruz suspended his presidential campaign on May 3, 2016, after losing the Indiana Republican primary to Donald Trump.^[18]

Donald Trump

On June 27, 2016, Donald Trump's presidential campaign announced that Miller would join the team as a senior communications advisor. Bloomberg reported that Miller would "take the lead role over the Trump campaign’s message and interactions with the news media," duties that were formerly performed solely by Hope Hicks.^[19]

In December 2016, Trump offered Miller the position of White House communications director. Miller initially accepted but turned the job down two days later, citing his desire to spend more time with family.^[20]

Teneo Strategy and CNN

Miller left Jamestown Associates in early 2017 and joined Teneo Strategy as the group's managing director.^[21] In March 2017, he also signed on as a commentator for CNN.^[22] He left the network in September 2018 due to legal issues.^[23]

2020 presidential election

Miller joined Trump's re-election campaign in June 2020 to support campaign manager Brad Parscale on strategy and coordinate between the campaign and the White House.^[24] He remained an advisor to Trump following the election, working as his post-presidency spokesman. In March 2021, Newsmax hired Miller as a contributor.^[25]

2021 tech startup

Miller became the chief executive officer of a tech startup company in June 2021. Politico reported the company was developing a social media platform potentially for use by Trump, who was suspended from Facebook and Twitter.^[1]

Miller was also "expected to remain with Trump’s team, but not in a full-time, day-to-day role," Politico reported.^[1]

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Jason Miller Politics. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Jason Miller (political advisor) - Google News

an 12 22

no lnx docs

'They will ruin my life': January 6th panel publishes additional testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson

Brandi Buchman and Daily KosStaff December 22, 2022

On Thursday, the Jan. 6 committee published two transcripts from its extensive interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who offered some of the most damning and explosive testimony to emerge from the 18-month probe of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

When she appeared publicly before the committee this summer, Hutchinson recounted how former President Donald Trump waved off warnings from his security detail about armed people in the crowd and urged that they be allowed to pass through metal detectors unmolested. She revealed learning about how Trump had lunged at the neck of his own Secret Service agent when his request to be ferried to the Capitol after the speech at the Ellipse was denied. She recalled the secrecy of her boss, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, who allegedly burned paperwork after a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry, an outspoken advocate of Trump’s Big Lie.

Hutchinson’s testimony was an embarrassment of riches for the committee, filling in blank spots left open by less-than-cooperative Trump White House officials. But the transcripts released Thursday also illuminate the huge pressure she came under by testifying.

Hutchinson told the committee that she recalled telling her mother plainly: “I’m f*cked.”

Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 14 by Daily Kos

She was “f*cked,” she said, because she was effectively trapped.

She didn’t have the ability to shell out huge sums of cash to attorneys who could represent her when she went before the committee so was stuck with Stefan Passantino, a Trump White House lawyer whose fees were being paid by the former president’s Save America political action committee.

“I am completely indebted to these people,” she told her mother, the transcript shows. “And they will ruin my life Mom, if I do anything they don’t want me to do.”

[Cassidy Hutchinson Sept 15 by Daily Kos

She went to her estranged father, a Trump supporter, and asked him for help.

“I drove up to New Jersey, and I went to his house one night and begged him. It’s probably the one thing I regret in all of this, I wish I didn’t stoop to that level because it was a no— but I begged him to help me. I said I would pay him back, like, ‘name your interest rate,’” she said. “Like I just need help. And I remember saying to him, ‘you have no idea what they’re going to do to me if I have to get an attorney with Trump world,’ because he’s a very big Trump supporter, as is his own right, and I don’t—it’s not being critical, it’s just a fact. And he just didn’t get it. And I didn’t expect him to. But I just left there feeling defeated.”

Passantino, she told the committee, urged her to skimp on details when answering the investigator’s questions. He advised her to mislead the committee, she said, though she stressed that he did not instruct her to lie explicitly.

“I want to make this clear to you,” Hutchinson said. “Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me, ‘I don’t want you to perjure yourself but ‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury.”

She remembered him adding: “They don’t know what you can and can’t recall.”

He also suggested that she avoid meeting with the committee altogether when she had an appointment in June. She should consider drawing a contempt of Congress charge instead of testifying, he allegedly advised. It would be an unpleasant risk but a smaller one.

Hutchinson said Passantino told her, “running to the right is better for you.”

Passantino represented Hutchinson during three of her depositions before she hired a different attorney. The transcripts published on Thursday are dated Sept. 14 and Sept. 15, both dates when Passantino was not representing her. For these meetings, Hutchinson was represented by attorney Jody Hunt.

The committee has not yet published its final report in full or the complete record of its witness transcripts. Her earlier interviews under Passantino’s representation are expected to be included in that group.

When news first broke Wednesday about Passantino’s alleged advice to Hutchinson, he denied any wrongdoing in statements to reporters. Hutchinson, he said, was truthful and cooperative and he never instructed her to mislead the committee. His biography, meanwhile, has been pulled off the webpage of the law firm where he serves as partner.

During her initial interviews with the committee prior to September, Hutchinson said Trump aides would reach out to her. Jason Miller and Justin Clark extended potential job offers to her after she met with the select committee for the first time. The next time she was scheduled to testify, she said Ben Williamson, an aide to her former boss Mark Meadows called her on the eve of her appearance.

‘Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal,” Williamson said in a voicemail, Hutchinson recalled. “He knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss.”

The “boss” was watching, Passantino would later hint to her.

https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/jason-millers-public-statements-2020-election-contradict-his-deposition

trump coup:

In addition, many of the documents requested by the committee have nothing to do with Bannon’s interactions with Trump. They concern rather Bannon’s interactions with forces that assisted, organized and participated in the coup.

These include the “Women for America First” political group, which organized the fascist rally outside the White House on January 6; Republican strategist, attorney and frequent guest on Bannon’s podcast Boris Epshteyn; members of the group who attended the January 5 planning meeting at the Willard Hotel (including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Roger Stone and Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller); and other Trump officials, such as Kash Patel, former chief-of-staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, another Trump loyalist who was appointed to a high-level position in the Department of Defense following the firing of Defense Secretary Mark Esper after Trump’s electoral defeat.

wiki 1 23

jason Miller (born c. 1975) is an American communications strategist, political adviser and CEO, best known as the chief spokesman for the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign and transition of Donald Trump. He was a Senior Adviser to the Trump 2020 re-election campaign.^[2] From 2010 through 2016, Miller was a partner and executive vice-president at Jamestown Associates.^[3][4] He was initially announced as the incoming White House Communications Director during the presidential transition, though he withdrew shortly after amidst news of an extramarital relationship with a staffer who joined the 2016 campaign two months before the election.^[5]^

In 2017, he became a contributor on CNN,^[6] but left the position in 2018 amidst an unsubstantiated third-party allegation about a separate affair, which was denied by both alleged participants under oath in federal court.^[7] In March 2021, Miller became a contributor for Newsmax.^[8] Miller left his position as Trump's spokesman in June 2021 to become the CEO of Gettr, a micro-blogging social network with a conservative user base.^[9][10][11]

Early life

Miller was born and raised in Seattle. His father was a welder, and his mother worked as a bookkeeper and receptionist.^[12] Miller graduated from George Washington University, where he majored in political science, in 1997.^[13]

Career

Politics

His first job in politics, from 1994 through 1997, was as a staff assistant to U.S. Senator Slade Gorton of Washington.^[14]

After graduating from college, Miller moved to San Diego, California, where he spent most of the next year as coalitions director for businessman Darrell Issa who unsuccessfully sought the U.S. Senate nomination in the 1998 primary. Miller returned to the state in late-1999 to serve as Issa's political director in his successful 2000 campaign for California's 48th congressional district.^[15]

In late 2000, Miller became campaign manager for Ric Keller, who won an open seat in the House of Representatives representing Florida with 50.8% of the vote. Miller went on to serve as Keller's chief of staff and to lead his successful re-election effort in 2002.^[16] Keller won with 65% of the vote.

From July 2003 to July 2004, Miller managed Jack Ryan's campaign for U.S. Senate in Illinois. Under Miller's leadership, Ryan's campaign succeeded in winning a sharply contested race for the GOP nomination. Ryan's Democratic opponent was Barack Obama, then a state senator.^[17] However, Ryan chose to end his candidacy abruptly after a judge in California ordered the unsealing of the Republican candidate's custody file, over the objections of both parents, creating a public furor.^[18] Ryan was replaced as nominee by Maryland resident Alan Keyes, and Obama coasted to an easy election that November.^[19]

Miller then moved to Florida, where he served as political and communications consultant for the successful primary campaign of Mel Martínez for U.S. Senate, against several well-known contenders.^[20] He closed out 2004 doing press and voter-contact consulting in Tom Coburn's winning effort for the Senate from Oklahoma.^[15]

In January 2005, Miller was hired to manage the re-election campaign of Virginia Senator George F. Allen, widely tapped as a leading contender for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.^[20] In an amicable parting designed to help Allen's long-term national ambitions, Miller left Allen's re-election in November 2005 to helm the re-election effort of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.^[21] Allen's presidential hopes were dashed afterwards, losing a close contest after several major gaffes, while Sanford cruised to a 55% re-election.^[22] After the campaign, Miller took a job with the State of South Carolina, doing strategic planning for the governor,^[23] also serving as Deputy Chief of Staff.^[24]

National politics beckoned in April 2007, when Miller moved to New York and joined the Rudy Giuliani 2008 presidential campaign as Deputy Communications Director.^[25] Giuliani ended his campaign prior to Super Tuesday, after finishing third behind eventual nominee John McCain in the Florida primary.

In 2008, Miller joined Denzenhall Associates, a D.C.-based public relations firm specializing in crisis communications, advising major corporations, trade associations, and prominent individuals.^[24]

Jamestown Associates

Miller joined the New Jersey-based Jamestown Associates consulting firm in January 2010 as Partner and Executive Vice President, working closely on campaigns with Jamestown CEO Larry Weitzner.^[26]

Beginning in 2012 and continuing through 2016, Miller and Jamestown took on several insurgent candidates challenging Republican incumbents. These included Mourdock, in Indiana (who defeated longtime Sen. Richard Lugar in the 2012 primary, losing to Democrat Joe Donnelly in the fall;^[27]) and radiologist Milton R. Wolf, who nearly upset Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts in the August 2014 primary. They did work for the Club for Growth PAC, which used Jamestown to help challenge a GOP incumbent in Mississippi and nominate a Tea Party conservative in Nebraska.^[27] And in early 2015, they also worked on Ted Cruz's presidential campaign.

In 2013, Miller returned to South Carolina as ad producer and strategist^[28] for Mark Sanford's comeback campaign for U.S. House, following the former Governor's scandalous affair with an Argentinian journalist and subsequent divorce.^[29] Despite being actively shunned by national party committees and major donors, Sanford won the GOP nomination with 56.5%,^[30] and then captured the coastal 1st District seat with 54% in the May special election.^[31] Of Miller, Sanford chief of staff Scott English said, "He's disciplined in the middle of a firefight. He's good at thinking about, 'What are we talking about? What are we trying to accomplish?' and then going back on message again... A lot of people come into a safe environment, where they already know the outcome. He takes on challenges."^[23]

In 2015, Miller and Jamestown Associates were the principal consultants for media and communications for Matt Bevin in Kentucky.^[32] Bevin, who had lost his challenge to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a year earlier, was the surprise winner of a three-way race for the gubernatorial nomination in May—a victory attributed in part to a closing ad by Miller and Jamestown, "Food Fight."^[33] After a difficult campaign he was behind in most polls; Bevin then won a 53% to 44% victory against attorney general Jack Conway that November.^[34]

2016 presidential campaign and transition

During the Bevin campaign and thereafter into early 2016, Miller was Texas Senator Ted Cruz's "digital and communications adviser" in his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.^[35] The Washington Post's Katie Zezima wrote that Miller's challenge was "crafting Cruz's message of unyielding conservatism and spreading it among grassroots groups, where the senator hopes to gain the most support”.^[15] Cruz suspended his campaign on May 5, following his defeat in the Indiana primary.

Miller’s relationship with Donald Trump dated from before the 2016 campaign. In 2011, when Trump was mulling a 2012 campaign, Miller was slated to serve as campaign manager.^[36] On June 29, 2016, the Trump campaign announced hiring Miller as senior communications adviser. BloombergPolitics described it as an attempt to "professionalize" the Trump communications operation.^[37] After the announcement, some reporters noted the many anti-Trump Tweets Miller had sent prior to the end of Cruz's campaign.^[37][38]

After the election, Miller was part of the Trump transition team, serving as its chief spokesman from November 2016 to January 2017. On December 22, he was announced as the President's choice for White House Communications Director.^[39] However, two days later, Miller declined the offer, stating: "After spending this past week with my family, the most amount of time I have been able to spend with them since March 2015, it is clear they need to be my top priority right now and this is not the right time to start a new job as demanding as White House communications director. My wife and I are also excited about the arrival of our second daughter in January, and I need to put them in front of my career... I look forward to continuing to support the President-elect from the outside after my work on the transition concludes."^[5]

His decision came after allegations of an extramarital affair with Trump campaign staffer Arlene J. Delgado.^[40] As a result of the affair with Delgado, Miller became the father to a baby boy in July 2017.^[41]

After 2016 campaign

In January 2017, Miller sold his interest in Jamestown Associates, and joined Teneo Strategy.^[42] Teneo advises "Fortune 500 CEOs on crisis communications, corporate communications and media relations," according to the Axios blog. In the role of Trump adviser, Miller had criticized Teneo as a "corporate consultancy" created by Doug Band "to trade off the influence and power gained through the affiliation with [Hillary Clinton]."^[43] Miller continued at Teneo through 2019.

In 2017, he became a CNN political contributor. He was subsequently quit the network due to legal difficulties.^[44][45]

In October 2019, Miller began co-hosting, with Steve Bannon, War Room: Impeachment, a daily radio show and podcast intended to advise the Trump White House and its allies into how to fight the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.^[46] The podcast was removed from YouTube in January 2021, following the :{2021 storming of the United States Capito:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:l.^[47][48]

The Trump 2020 campaign hired Miller as a senior adviser in June 2020.^[49] The Trump campaign routed his $35,000 monthly salary through his former firm, making it harder for the mother of Miller's son to prove his income in court, and aiding him in dodging approximately $3,000 per month in child support.^[50][51]

In October 2020, shortly after the FBI announced that it had thwarted an attempt by a right-wing militia group to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Miller said it was "shameful" for Whitmer to call out President Trump's divisive rhetoric. Trump had tweeted, "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" in April 2020, which was seen as a rallying cry for opponents of Whitmer. Miller said, "If we want to talk about hatred, then Gov. Whitmer, go look in the mirror."^[52]

In the days before the 2020 election, Miller claimed in an ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulos that he believed that Trump would secure a sure win with at least 290 electoral votes on election night.^[53] Spencer Cox, then-Lieutenant Governor of Utah, stated on Twitter that people should "ignore this type of garbage," referring to Miller's remarks.^[54] Cox's additional remarks in response to Miller, in which he stated, "elections are never decided on election night," did not acknowledge the predictions Miller had cited in the ABC News interview that Trump would secure "280" or "over 290" electoral votes (i.e., over the necessary 270 votes to be declared winner) on election night. In his exchange with Stephanopoulos, Miller did not dispute or even address the use of mail-in ballots, and he did not claim that vote counts were typically finalized or certified on election night.^[54][53]

Newsmax

On March 18, 2021, it was announced that Miller had joined Newsmax as a contributor.^[8]

Gettr

Main article: Gettr

In June 2021, it was reported that Miller had left the Trump team to become CEO of a tech company.^[55][11] Miller was replaced by Liz Harrington. On July 1, 2021, he launched a beta version of the social network Gettr, which is targeted at conservatives and which Miller has described as a "place people won't be canceled".^[9][56] In the first week, Gettr attracted more than 1.4 million users.

Miller stated in a Fox Business Interview, he said "prominent Republicans like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and more have joined the platform, along with other popular conservative voices like Charlie Kirk, Monica Crowley, Rogan O’Handley and more."^[57]

Personal life

Miller met his wife, Kelly, while working for a congressional campaign in California.^[58] They live in suburban Washington, D.C. and have two daughters.^[59]

He also fathered a child with A. J. Delgado during a two-month extra-marital affair, born six months after his second child.^[60]

Controversies and scandals

Delgado suits, 2018–2019

On September 14, 2018, A. J. Delgado, the mother of Miller's son, filed a suit in a Miami-Dade, Florida, Circuit Court.

Ultimately, the court ordered Miller to pay Delgado thousands of dollars for child support. Miller had said he was working hard to become a "better husband and father" and took his parental obligations "very seriously", and that Ms. Delgado had "turned a simple paternity proceeding into all-out war".^[61]

Miller and an unnamed Doe denied all parts of an accusation made by Delgado in her 2018 suit in which Delgado claimed that Miller had drugged Doe with an abortifacient drug, by blending a pill into a fruit smoothie.^[62] The ensuing controversy caused him to leave his position as a political commentator on CNN.^[63] In the suit, Delgado requested that Miller undergo a psychological evaluation, because she alleged that she was told the story by a Republican lobbyist, and she further alleged that journalist Yashar Ali confirmed the story.^[64] Miller questioned the propriety of publishing that unverified claim (from what was then a sealed Florida court filing and was denied by the alleged mistress), causing damage to his reputation. He sued Gizmodo Media Group and Splinter News reporter Katherine Krueger (author of the article) for $100 million for its reporting of the allegation.^[65] Chapo Trap House co-host Will Menaker was added as a defendant in the lawsuit after Menaker labeled Miller a "baby killer" in a Twitter post.^[66]

The US District Court in New York dismissed Miller's suit, ruling that the "fair report" doctrine (which bars civil actions arising from a "fair and true report of a judicial proceeding") protected Gizmodo from liability for defamation, as the article accurately reported the allegation Delgado had included in the Florida filing. In its ruling, the New York court stated that the Gizmodo article had "essentially summarize[d] or restate[d] the allegations" made by Delgado; by granting summary judgement to Gizmodo (necessarily occurring before the fact-finding stage in U.S. civil litigation), the New York court did not and could not rule on the accuracy of the Florida allegation itself.^[67][68]

Miller later brought another suit in Florida, which ended in August 2019 when the court granted Gizmodo's motion for summary judgment, as had occurred in the New York case.^[69] The Florida court applied similar reasoning as the New York court had applied (i.e., the "fair report" privilege enjoyed by publications citing a judicial proceeding) to the claims brought against the publication and author. In its opinion granting Gizmodo's motion, the Florida court opined that Gizmodo and Krueger (whose article made reference to Delgado's third-party allegations, which were denied by Miller and Doe) had disclosed the "potential biases" involved in those allegations, explaining, "by disclosing this information, Defendants [Gizmodo and Krueger] invite readers to decide for themselves" whether the third-party allegations were credible. The Florida court also found that declarations made by Krueger and her editors at Gizmodo suggested that "neither Krueger nor her editors intended to augment the credibility of the accusations...by attributing them to Jane Doe herself."^[70][71] In May 2021, nearly two years after the case ended, the Florida court approved Gizmodo's request for Miller to pay $42,000 in legal fees incurred by Gizmodo while defending the case.^[72][73]

Neither courts' granting of the defendants' motions for summary judgement, which precluded fact-finding by the courts with respect to the underlying disputed third-party allegations against Miller, addressed whether he had actually done what Delgado alleged. In their answers before the Florida court, both Miller and alleged previous mistress Doe denied under oath that they had ever had a sexual relationship. Both testified that Doe had never become pregnant with his child, that Miller had never been to Doe's apartment, and denied that he had given her a smoothie — the drink that allegedly contained the pill. Doe specifically denied that she had ever "lost a pregnancy" as a result of a beverage given to her by him.^[74][75]

Detention in Brazil

In September 2021, Miller and other American right-wing media personalities in his traveling party were detained and questioned for three hours at the international airport in Brasília, Brazil, before returning to the U.S. following participation in a CPAC Brasil Conference. The investigation was part of an inquiry by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes into misinformation allegedly perpetuated by the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro. Miller noted that Brazil was the second-largest market for Gettr, and praised Bolsonaro's supporters as "proud patriots".^[76] Miller later said that Brazilian officials had not accused him of any wrongdoing.^[77] Miller continued to advise Jair Bolsonaro after his October 2022 election defeat, meeting with the president's son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, in November 2022, as protests and election challenges continued.^[78]

Testimony before January 6 Committee

During the third public hearing on the investigation of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, Miller appeared via a taped deposition. He stated that on January 5, 2021, he helped Donald Trump craft a statement in response to a New York Times story that said Pence disagreed with Trump’s claims that Pence had the authority to change the results of the election. In the statement, Trump claimed that he and Vice President Mike Pence were in agreement, while in fact Pence had made clear multiple times that he disagreed strongly with Trump on this issue.

Marc Short, Pence’s Chief of Staff, expressed his displeasure that Miller had allowed such a statement to be released without consulting Pence.^[79]

References

old artl recycled?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/top-trump-supreme-court-pick-involved-in-100-million-controversial-lawsuit-involving-top-trump-campaign-strategist/

roger salon

Florida judge rumored to be on short list of nominees to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death is currently hearing a $100 million lawsuit from one of President Donald Trump's top campaign strategists.

Judge Barbara Lagoa was appointed to Florida's 11th Circuit Court of Appeals less than one year ago by Trump. She is one of two Trump appointees on a three-judge panel which will decide whether the effort by the president's senior campaign strategist Jason Miller to revive a $100 million defamation suit against Gizmodo may advance.

Miller has sued the media conglomerate over a 2018 article in its now-defunct subsidiary website Splinter reporting that he drugged a woman with an abortion pill without her knowledge after learning she was pregnant.

Splinter reported that the allegation came in a court filing from A.J. Delgado, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide. Delgado has been engaged in a bitter custody dispute since 2017 with Miller, a married man who fathered her child while they worked on the campaign. Delgado claimed in a court filing that the alleged smoothie incident involved another woman, whose identity she did not publicly reveal.

Miller filed a $100 million defamation suit against Gizmodo Media and Katherine Krueger, the reporter for Splinter. He denies the allegations.

A Miami-based federal district court judge tossed out the case a year ago, ruling that the report was a fair and accurate summary of a judicial proceeding — and therefore shielded from libel charges. Miller appealed that ruling, and the court heard opening arguments last month.

The appeal hangs on Miller's argument that the "fair report privilege" should not apply, because the filing cited by Splinter was been under seal at the time of publication. However, Gizmodo claims that the document was available for at least a three-day window before Miller's lawyers filed to seal it. Because the court did not automatically seal the document, Gizmodo says it had a fair claim for publication under New York law.

The two Trump-appointed judges on the panel — Lagoa and Andrew Brasher — "seemed friendlier to Miller's case," according to a Politico report on the initial hearing last month.

For a Supreme Court nominee, Lagoa's judicial experience would be thin by historical standards. Lagoa has about nine months of experience on the federal bench, and she previously served for less than one year on Florida's Supreme Court.

In addition to the Miller case, Lagoa is also currently ruling on a challenge to a Florida law requiring anyone with a serious criminal conviction to pay all fines and legal obligations before they can vote. Florida is a key swing state in the 2020 elections.

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee recently wrote to Lagoa and Brasher, along with Trump appointee Robert Luck, asking them to recuse themselves from the case. The senators cited judicial ethics rules barring judges from ruling on cases if their impartiality can be "reasonably" questioned. Though Brasher recused himself, Lagoa and Luck have not.

Lagoa's potential conflicts of interest in that case may go beyond her connection to Trump. During her short stint on Florida's Supreme Court, the judge ruled to reverse a decision invalidating the felon voting law. She argues that the federal case is different from the state-level case, which some see as a gray area when it comes to recusal.

The Trump campaign views Florida as a must-win on its path to electoral victory Nov. 3.

Lagoa, a Cuban-American from Florida, was also featured on Trump's Sept. 10 list of potential nominees.

Financial affidavits from Miller's child support case, reviewed and first reported by Salon, showed the Trump adviser has consistently argued for years that he is broke despite simultaneously reporting incomes anywhere between $20,000 and $67,000 a month. His August affidavit showed a $35,000 monthly income starting in June, when he joined the Trump campaign. However, the campaign has not disclosed any payments to Miller or other top staff members.

Delgado has publicly claimed that Miller may be financially "desperate" to overturn the initial ruling on his $100 million lawsuit.

"It's Lagoa who decides it," she tweeted. "So she was placed on this list and now has to rule in Miller's favor."

Federal judge Amy Coney Barrett has been reported to be the front-runner to replace Ginsburg. Trump said Monday that he intends to announce a decision by "either Friday or Saturday."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

an 1120

no lnx

Arizona officials vow to 'continue our job' as armed Trump backers gather at local election building

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams November 05, 2020

Undeterred by a crowd of Trump supporters—some of whom were armed—that gathered outside of the Maricopa County, Arizona election office late Wednesday to protest alleged "fraud" in the vote-counting process, county officials vowed to "continue our job" of tallying ballots in the battleground state that both Fox News and the Associated Press have called for Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

"Staff at the Maricopa County Elections Department will continue our job, which is to administer elections in the second largest voting jurisdiction in the county," the department tweeted early Thursday morning amid reports that officials in the county building were forming an "exit plan" due to safety concerns caused by assault rifle-wielding Trump supporters baselessly alleging election theft by the Democratic Party.

"We will release results again tonight as planned," the department added. "We thank the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office for doing their job, so we can do ours."

Early Thursday, the county released a newly counted batch of more than 70,000 votes that favored Trump by a margin of 59% to 41%, leaving Biden with a lead of more than 68,000 votes in a state Trump won in 2016.

The fresh results came as Trump supporters, emboldened by the president's constant attacks on the legitimacy of the vote-counting process in states nationwide, rallied outside the Maricopa County election office chanting, "Stop the Steal!"—a slogan that has been embraced and amplified by Trump backers on social media.

Angry over the network's decision to call Arizona for Biden on Election Night, the Trump supporters also chanted, "Fox News sucks!"

The New York Times reported Wednesday that "Trump and his advisers erupted" after Fox News called Arizona for Biden, fearing the move would further undermine the president's false narrative that he won the election outright.

"Jason Miller, Mr. Trump's political adviser, disputed the accuracy of the call on Twitter and frantically called Fox News, asking the network to retract it. He was unsuccessful," the Times reported."Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, was also in touch with Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News owner, as the night wore on. And on Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, insisted the president would win Arizona by 30,000 votes."

In a statement released late Wednesday, a pair of Maricopa County election officials—one Democrat and one Republican—raised concern over "the misinformation spreading about the integrity of our elections" and said that "everyone should want all the votes to be counted, whether they were mailed or cast in person."

"An accurate vote takes time. It's possible the results you see now may change after all the votes are counted. This is evidence of democracy, not fraud," the statement continued. "We would like to thank the hundreds of volunteers, poll workers, and staff for being a part of an incredible elections team. All of us are committed to a fair and efficient count of all votes."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/trumps-top-campaign-strategist-is-hiding-payments-from-steve-bannon/

no lnx

Trump's top campaign strategist is hiding payments from Steve Bannon

Roger Sollenberger and Salon November 03, 2020

President Trump's top campaign strategist, Jason Miller, has been paid tens of thousands of dollars a month through a third-party campaign vendor rather than taking a salary from the campaign, obscuring the flow of money and apparently concealing how much he makes — an arrangement campaign finance experts say is illegal.

Miller, a 2016 senior adviser who joined the re-election campaign in early June, appears to have been paid as recently as July by Citizens of the American Republic (COAR), a nonprofit founded by Steve Bannon which is currently part of a federal fraud and money laundering investigation into the former Trump campaign chief, as a vehicle used to fabricate invoices in furtherance of that scheme. (Salon first reported that COAR had paid Miller $20,000 a month.)

Miller also appears to have taken monthly payments of several thousand dollars from a firm co-founded by two Trump officials — one of them being Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien. Salon was first to report that the campaign does not report any salary payments to Stepien, either.

The question of the campaign payments, and Miller's mysterious and varying monthly income, is important not only for reasons of public transparency, but for determining how much Miller, who is married, should pay for child support in a contentious custody case with a 2016 Trump campaign adviser which has dragged out for years in Florida family court.

Prior to re-enlisting on the Trump campaign, Miller worked over the last two years as a consultant and, for about six weeks this spring, a lobbyist, reporting monthly incomes ranging between $27,000 and $99,000, including side payments from his old firm, Teneo, where he had collected a $500,000 salary.

During this time Miller paid the mother of his child as little as $500 a month, one-sixth of what a courts had demanded. That sum of $500 would also the minimum monthly amount required by the state for a parent who makes $2,300 a month. Miller spends $2,300 a month just on expenses related to his cars, according to a financial affidavit filed in August, which states that he made more than $600,000 last year.

After Trump's 2016 victory, Miller expected a White House post, but had to withdraw when news broke that he had fathered a child with fellow 2016 campaign adviser AJ Delgado, who is not his wife.

Delgado, who joined the transition team and expected a job in the administration or cable news before news broke of the affair, alleges that Miller, a staunch conservative who once worked for Sen. Ted Cruz, told her at the time that he was separated from his wife, and twice asked her to have an abortion. Delgado also alleged in a court filing which later leaked to the press that Miller had slipped an abortion pill into the smoothie of another woman he had gotten pregnant.

Miller denies that accusation and has sued the outlet, Gizmodo, for $100 million. In a 2019 sworn deposition for that suit he admitted to hiring prostitutes and receiving sexual favors at multiple "Asian themed" massage parlors, an industry known to have connections to sex trafficking rings.

Throughout his professional political life, Miller has been known as an attack dog, someone "not beyond throwing binders," a former colleague of his told Salon.

In recent months he has become the Trump campaign's preferred media presence, the 2020 answer to Kellyanne Conway. On television, comes across as a deft but maddening dissembler, sailing through the Sunday shows on currents of lies and backtalk — the exact personality that Trump wants to put out front.

"He sort of failed his way up," Rick Wilson, longtime Republican strategist and co-founder of the Lincoln Project, told Salon. "He's got a certain shamelessness about him that media bookers can't get enough of."

Miller has built those skills over the last 20-odd years, working for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — who officiated what a longtime friend of the Miller family described as the Millers' "shotgun" wedding — as well as Cruz and former Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican whose extramarital affair scuttled his political ascent.

Like many Cruz-backing conservatives, Miller was initially anti-Trump. The Millers' longtime friend recalled Miller's wife, Kelly, going out of her way to compliment his social media posts blasting Trump during the 2016 primary, going so far as to put their conversation on speakerphone and calling Jason in to the room to take part. A few months later, the Millers cut that social tie.

In 2003 and 2004, Miller joined Jack Ryan's ill-fated Senate campaign in Illinois against then-state senator Barack Obama. He was brought on as a PR specialist, a known dirty player who in his first weeks onboard allegedly fought not to fire an Obama tracker who had been so aggressive he followed the then-candidate with a camera to a bathroom, and waited outside the door.

When Miller arrived on the Ryan campaign, Chicago media outlets were trying to unseal custody documents which later revealed that Ryan pressured his wife to perform sexual acts with him at strip clubs, a scandal that ended his campaign. According to a person who worked on the campaign, Miller himself enjoyed strip clubs and was frequently seen in "obvious embraces with women who were not his fiancée."

"Women in particular got a lot of his wrath," the person said, adding that Miller was "uneven towards women."

Ryan, who now runs a real estate business, briefly hired Miller as a lobbyist this spring, Salon previously reported.

Other people who knew Miller characterized him as "untrustworthy," and that his behavior around women had made them nervous.

"I can handle being around assholes at work. All my life. But not this guy," said one person, who described Miller as pugnacious, especially when he'd been drinking: "Get a little liquor in him, and you get the sense he's not somebody totally in control."

Miller has invoked substance abuse and mental illness multiple times in his custody case, including multiple stints in rehab. Delgado, herself a graduate of Harvard Law, has expressed suspicion about the timing and forthrightness of these check-ins, which have coincided with court dates.

A few years before he joined the Ryan campaign, Miller had a central role in a Washington Post article about the party scene at George Washington University, where he was a fraternity member:

The frat brothers show off for the girls and the cameras, ripping off shirts and chugging beers. ... Jason Miller surveys the crowd like a proud father. "It's my senior year so I'm going to party," he says. Miller says he's got a 3.0 average, a major in political science and a job as a staff assistant in Sen. Slade Gorton's (R-Wash.) office on Capitol Hill. He will become a lawyer and probably a politician some day. Life is good.

"He wants you to know he's there, that he's the guy with the rolodex," the Ryan campaign colleague said. "He kicked the campaign director out of his office and just took it. Demanded a personal driver. Now, this is Chicago. We don't put on airs. But he had a tailor come into the campaign office once, to work on his suits."

"The attitude he brought into every room — the attitude fit him, but it didn't fit the room," the person added.

"You'd think he would have burned his bridges," the person said. "But Jason knows how to play nice."

Salon reviewed communications that illustrate those two sides today.

In an email last January, Miller's attorney wrote that Delgado, who often drags Miller on Twitter, acted out as a jilted and jealous ex who couldn't process that Miller's interest in her did not range beyond the sexual:

She cannot accept that the relationship was simply just sexual encounters and Mr. Miller's decision not to have any emotional commitment or future involvement with Ms. Delgado made your client launch a venomous campaign designed to publicly harm and humiliate Mr. Miller.

(A Page Six piece that ran shortly after their son's birth in 2017, and which Delgado alleges Miller planted, describes their relationship in similar terms, as "a wild night in Vegas.")

Miller later admitted in court, however, that the relationship was not just a one-night stand, an implication echoed by multiple voicemails reviewed by Salon, which Miller left on Delgado's phone early in their relationship.

"Hey beautiful, it's me. I just wanted to call, say I miss you," Miller says in one, his voice smooth. "Hope you're having a nice Thanksgiving with Nancy. I miss you so much. Just want you to know I'm thinking about you. I'll try you again tomorrow. Bye."

In two other voicemails Miller expresses the same concern, endearment and attention to detail. Delgado says that he later had a D.C. gossip website remove the only existing picture of the two of them together, taken at a media party during the campaign. ("That is actually, to make it even weirder, the night things 'started,'" Delgado told Salon.)

Miller's mother-in-law has repeatedly and publicly weighed in on the custody case, which the judge has told Miller is not helpful. At one point, for instance, she accused Delgado in a since-deleted tweet of being "ALL about the Benjamin's. ... No doubt about it!!"

In a 2018 Daily Mail article Miller accused Delgado broadly of a "pattern of harassment," which later was more narrowly defined in court as Delgado's filings and critical tweets.

"First, he falsely portrays me as a drunken one-night encounter in Vegas, only to then privately admit in a deposition the involvement was months-long," Delgado told Salon. "His false narrative will harm [their son] in the future. It was completely unnecessary and done for his wife's benefit. Then, as if it that isn't bad enough, he goes to the Daily Mail in 2018 and ... heavily indicates I'd been harassing him only to then admit in the family-law matter that that wasn't true, either."

Delgado was fired from her position at America First Policies after that article ran. She claims no specific reason was given.

"Jason doesn't understand how all of this is playing out in the public square," said a former Miller colleague. "He doesn't seem to have that fatherly instinct."

Miller's parenting plan, which he submitted to Florida family court in May 2019, when his son with Delgado was not yet two years old, did not express any desire to see his son: "This parenting plan does not contain any time sharing between the child and the father."

Delgado, a former journalist and political analyst — she shared with Salon a 2016 email from a top Fox News executive saying that one day she would "have her own show" on the network — says she believes Miller and his allies have tried to block her professional opportunities.

"My career? There is none of which to speak," she told Salon, claiming that her former media go-tos dropped her after the affair. "As an example, after my tweets disclosing I was pregnant and, essentially, complaining about Miller still being promoted — I don't know if Jared [Kushner] called up Fox News, but I was suddenly never invited on again."

"I don't think people realize how degrading it is to have to beg for money from strangers doing a GoFundMe just to be able to keep up on costs of the litigation, and not even then," she said.

"There is a reason she is sitting home, unemployed and blackballed from the political arena," reads one recent email that Miller's attorney sent Delgado's attorney in the custody case. "She has nobody to blame besides herself."

It is unclear who "blackballed" Delgado.

"Jason is a problem child," said Wilson, whose never-Trump group of former Republicans raked in nearly $40 million last quarter. "If you're a real campaign, you cannot justify giving this guy fiduciary responsibilities of any kind, or putting him out there any sort of public-facing role. He is leaving the mother of his child out in the cold."

But even Miller couldn't successfully ride out the smoothie allegations, after which his CNN contributor gig vanished. He had ducked into the private sector and landed the Teneo job. Last June, Teneo severed public ties with Miller, reportedly as a result of crass insults he tweeted at Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., over what Miller saw as Nadler's rude treatment of Hope Hicks, another 2016 Trump campaign aide who has now returned to the White House.

Delgado alleged in court that Miller's apparent split with Teneo was fraudulent. Citing Miller's financial disclosures, Delgado asserted that in the month after Miller's departure Teneo began paying him through a corporation called SHW Partners tat Miller had set up for that purpose, and which Delgado characterizes as a "ruse" for Teneo to keep working with him.

In the months after leaving Teneo, Miller decreased his child support payments, citing an inability to pay, which, according to Delgado's court filing, appears fraudulent and the fruit of his private arrangement with Teneo (which has not replied to Salon's request for comment).

Indeed, Miller has pulled in a remarkable amount of money for a man who paid $500 in child support — between $27,000 and $60,000 a month over the last year, court documents show. In July, communications reviewed by Salon show, his income hit $99,000.

But none of those payments came from the Trump campaign — or at least none did so officially or directly.

As Salon previously reported, though the campaign does not list payments to Miller, it does pay a firm called Jamestown Associates, a media company founded in New Jersey which specializes in campaign publicity, and which lists Miller as an executive and partner. The campaign attributes all the disbursements to "video production services."

According to Salon's analysis of court documents, FEC filings and other communications, as well as a senior campaign source who confirmed the arrangements, Miller has been paid $35,000 a month throughJamestown Associates. That would be $420,000 annually — a larger salary than the president.

Salon previously reported that FEC filings show that the Trump campaign made a number of payments to Jamestown from January and June, each somewhere between approximately $7,500 and $45,500. In July, however, those expenditures increased significantly, including a $78,394 payment on July 13 and a $133,800 payment on July 28 — at the time the campaign's single largest payment to the firm.

Communications reviewed by Salon show that the next day, Miller received $70,000 in a single payment from Jamestown. In a public court document from the child support case, Miller reported an unattributed $35,000 monthly payment, exactly half the amount Jamestown paid him in late July — which was apparently two months' pay.

Jared Kushner personally signed off on the payment arrangement, according to the senior campaign source, who added that the president was typically aware of such decisions.

Trump campaign chief spokesperson Tim Murtaugh did not respond to Salon's multiple requests for comment.

"If the Trump campaign is paying Jason Miller for consulting services, but disclosing the payments as disbursements to Jamestown Associates for 'video production,' then the campaign would be violating its legal reporting requirements," Brendan Fischer, director of federal reform at Campaign Legal Center (CLC), an organization that advocates for fairness and transparency in elections, told Salon.

In July, CLC filed an FEC complaint that alleged the Trump campaign hid the true recipients of at least $170 million in payments through the scheme Fischer described above, most specifically through American Made Media, a consulting firm co-founded by top campaign officials.

"These campaign finance violations would be in addition to, and separate from, the violations that arise from the Trump campaign routing its spending through LLCs created and managed by senior campaign officials," Fischer said.

Campaign finance experts say that FEC advisory opinions dating back to the 1980s have held that political committees only have to report expenditures to the primary vendor, but do not have to report expenditures to subvendors. The FEC has held, however, in a series of enforcement cases, that the initial vendor cannot simply act as a conduit for payments to subvendors.

In short, experts say, the arrangement is illegal.

In recent weeks, Miller and his attorney have refused to tell Delgado whether he is being paid by either Jamestown Associates or the Trump campaign. In an email and court filing, Miller's attorney no longer refers to Jamestown CEO Larry Weitzner as a "former" associate of Miller, but has refused to clarify the current relationship.

Over the course of the last year, court documents show, Miller has dramatically and inventively reduced his child support payments. While reporting income of between $27,000 and $99,000 a month, he made six monthly support payments of $500, often in immediate proximity to mandatory court dates.

While his creative accounting in court documents somehow reduces the monthly sums to around zero, the court has recently ruled those arguments invalid. In March, for instance, Miller paid $500 to his child's mother, yet spent more than $4,000 on guns. At one point he argued that he did not have enough money for a plane ticket.

And while Miller has paid the full mandated $3,167 the last two months — since taking the campaign job for no official salary — he ignored a July 22 court order to pay more than $11,000 to make up for the payments he ducked earlier this year. Delgado has requested that the court hold him in contempt.

It is unclear why Miller's income structure over the last year has been so opaque, and why in recent months he has fought to keep the details secret. It's also not clear why Miller's most lucrative month of the last calendar year — July, when he earned $99,000 — was the same month he dedicated himself to working for the campaign without taking a paycheck.

However, one source of Miller's income over the last year has recently become the subject of federal scrutiny: Bannon's nonprofit, COAR, which prosecutors alleged in a charging document this August was a vehicle that Bannon and his collaborators used to create fake invoices as part of a money laundering scheme.

In an Aug. 23 interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Miller told host Chuck Todd that although he had worked for COAR, he had not been interviewed by government investigators: "I have not, and from public reports it looks like this investigation was going long before the podcast even started, the podcast and the radio show that I co-hosted with Steve."

The indictment says that a financial institution had alerted Bannon and his collaborators that they were under federal investigation around October 2019, after which group members began communicating via encrypted messaging apps.

Miller co-hosted a podcast with Bannon for COAR, reportedly beginning in October 2019, the month after he left a stint in rehab. Ordinal invoices that Miller references in his custody filings suggest that COAR began to pay him around that time.

Those filings, obtained by Salon, along with additional communications, show that Miller appears to have been paid tens of thousands of dollars a month for his work at COAR, from October 2019 through as late as July — nine months after Bannon's group allegedly took steps to conceal communications after learning they were under investigation.

At the time of that July payment, of $10,000, Miller had been working on the Trump campaign for at least a month, and had recorded his last COAR podcast in May. It is unclear whether the Trump campaign is aware that Miller was being paid by Bannon's nonprofit while working for them.

Communications reviewed by Salon also show that Miller received $7,500 in July from a group called National Public Affairs, a consulting firm cofounded by former White House official Justin Clark and Trump's current campaign manager, Bill Stepien. Miller received at least one other payment from the firm in that amount, communications show.

Stepien joined the campaign in December, but FEC filings do not disclose a salary. Reports have suggested that Stepien took a 33% pay cut through another firm, Revolution Strategies LLC, when he took the campaign manager job. But it is unclear what work Stepien's other firm paid Miller to do while he worked for the campaign for free. FEC filings also show that National Public Affairs had several high-dollar candidate clients who also did spots on Bannon's podcast, featuring Miller, around the time of some of those payments.

"The fact that Jason Miller is being paid by Bannon is completely unsurprising to me," Wilson remarked. "Stepien seems caught in the wheel of history here, kept as one of Jared's pets. But the Bannon connection illustrates exactly the shocking but yet unsurprising nature of the whole thing."

Miller's COAR income for podcasts and radio was effectually an annual salary of around $200,000. By comparison, COAR's 2018 tax returns, the most recent available, show that the highest-paid official made $55,000 a year.

Federal prosecutors say in the Bannon indictment that they are seeking to seize assets belonging to the nonprofit.

"These allegations are very serious and I hope that Steve has some good answers for the things he's been accused of," Miller told Todd. "It's not something I worked on. I don't know anything about the financial dealings of this organization or how it worked, and I hope Steve has an opportunity to tell his side of the story."

"It's TrumpWorld played out in real-life," Delgado said. "Mediocre white men fail upwards and are given every leeway in the book, while women, minorities — and heaven forbid one is both — and children don't matter."

Delgado has passed through a series of events that she experiences as a bitter personal irony. Today a brassy, albeit jobless, Trump critic, Delgado had been one of the Trump campaign's earliest architects, advocating for him since fall 2015 and playing a surrogate role until she came on board as a senior communications adviser the following August. That path tracks the opposite of Miller's, who spent months trying to stop Trump, but has since dug himself into the president's inner circle — and been paid handsomely.

Wilson said the saga is a reflection of the larger culture Trump has conjured over the last five years.

"Jason Miller's terrible personal reputation is appealing to Trump, in a strange kind of way. And that's because Donald likes to be around people who are as broken as he is," Wilson said.

"This is why there is no bottom in TrumpWorld. There is no standard," Wilson added. "And at the end of the day, at the end of the campaign, the end of the presidency, you see it — that people like this are the types who have survived."

Miller directed Salon's questions to his attorney in the custody case, Sandy Fox, who did not reply.

mma1120

No pushback when Trump adviser suggests that counting votes after election night is stealing the election

Trump adviser Jason Miller appeared on ABC's This Week. Talking with George Stephanopoulos, Miller claimed that Donald Trump will be ahead on election night but that Democrats will try to "steal" the election by counting ballots after that. The fact is that ballots are usually counted for many days and that mail-in ballots in many cases will be delayed in the count due to Republican-led state legislatures. Stephanopoulos, however, did not push back on the claim at all.

Over on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace did not push back either when guest Corey Lewandowski said that Trump would be winning by such margins on election night that "there will be no need to continue to count" in the ensuing days.

Trump campaign has been hiding payments to a senior adviser facing bitter child support battle: report

Alex Henderson September 16, 2020

Far-right Republican activist Jason Miller, who became an informal adviser to President Donald Trump in 2017 and is now a senior adviser for his reelection campaign, has been involved in…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/donald-trump-campaign-aide-was-paid-20000-a-month-by-steve-bannon-nonprofit-linked-to-alleged-fraud/

salon

senior Trump campaign official Jason Miller appears to have been paid about $20,000 a month for work done for a nonprofit co-founded by indicted former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, according to public court filings obtained by Salon.

The nonprofit — now reportedly under investigation in connection with the federal charges against Bannon — started paying Miller the same month that Bannon’s associates learned they were under federal investigation, court documents and public reports show.

The Trump campaign has not disclosed any payments to Miller since news of his hiring broke in June — nor has the campaign disclosed any salary payments to campaign manager Bill Stepien, according to mandatory federal filings. Publicly available court documents obtained by Salon together with Federal Election Commission (FEC) records suggest that the campaign is paying Miller $35,000 a month, apparently through non-public indirect transactions.

Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have charged Bannon, along with co-defendants Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, with running a multimillion-dollar fraud and money laundering scheme, in which they secretly siphoned millions of dollars in payments from their We Build the Wall crowdfunding campaign through a shell company as well as an unnamed nonprofit. The group disguised the allegedly unlawful transactions with fake invoices to hide their own personal takes, according to the indictment.

bannon denies the charges.

C.O.A.R.

Though prosecutors do not explicitly name Bannon’s nonprofit in the indictment, the document describes “Non-Profit-1” as predating the crowdfunding campaign and being dedicated to promoting “economic nationalism and American sovereignty.” This would appear to describe the Bannon-founded nonprofit called Citizens of the American Republic (COAR),which first filed a tax return in 2017. Its website says the group “seeks to advance the ideals of Economic Nationalism and American Sovereignty.”

Miller co-hosted a podcast with Bannon for COAR, reportedly beginning in October 2019.

In an Aug. 23 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Miller host Chuck Todd that although he had worked for COAR, he had not been interviewed by government investigators.

“I have not, and from public reports it looks like this investigation was going long before the podcast even started, the podcast and the radio show that I co-hosted with Steve,” Miller said.

While the exact timeline of the federal investigation is not a matter of public record, the Florida Agriculture Commissioner reportedly opened a probe into We Build the Wall in May 2019, but had not been contacted by SDNY investigators despite referring elements of the case to the FBI.

However, the charging document against Bannon and the other three men accused says they were first alerted that they were under federal investigation by a financial institution around October 2019, after which group members began communicating via encrypted messaging apps.

Miller had joined Bannon’s podcast that same month, and ordinal invoices that Miller references in public filings in Florida court suggest COAR began to pay him around that time.

Those filings, obtained by Salon, show that Miller appears to have been paid around $20,000 a month for his work at COAR, from October 2019 until as recently as April 2020 — six months after Bannon’s group allegedly took steps to conceal communications after learning they were under investigation.

It’s not clear what, if anything, Miller’s COAR income, effectually a $240,000 annual salary, covered in addition to podcasts and radio shows, nor is it clear exactly why the business relationship ended when it did, around April 2020. By comparison, COAR’s 2018 tax returns, which predate the investigation timeline but are the most recent available, show that the highest-paid official at that time was making $55,000 a year, and the highest-paid contractor — a Wyoming entity called Fortress FM — received $191,000 for “security, logistics and training.”

Federal prosecutors say in the Bannon indictment that they are seeking to seize assets belonging to “Non-Profit-1” — presumably COAR.

“These allegations are very serious and I hope that Steve has some good answers for the things he’s been accused of,” Miller told Todd. “It’s not something I worked on. I don’t know anything about the financial dealings of this organization or how it worked, and I hope Steve has an opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

However, Delgado alleged in court that Teneo and Miller did not in fact discontinue their relationship, but that Teneo privately began paying SHW Partners immediately after Miller’s public departure.

Miller was ordered by a Florida judge to resume paying Delgado $3,167 a month in child support beginning this July, per court filings, but when he failed to comply at the end of the month Delgado motioned that the court hold him in contempt. The current status of the case is unclear.

However, Miller’s most recent filings in the Delgado case, obtained by Salon, suggest that the Trump campaign is currently paying him $35,000 a month. Miller claims current monthly income of an even $35,000, and had no other known clients when he took the position and has disclosed no new clients since — it would be unusual, but not unthinkable, for a senior campaign official to have other, secret clients while on the campaign.

A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to Salon’s questions.

(Miller also claims in those filings liabilities of $250,000 to the IRS and $65,000 to the Commonwealth of Virginia, but because he does not itemize debt amortization, both might be projections for taxes owed for the current fiscal year — Miller is self-employed. He also says he’s in possession of a baseball card collection worth $10,000.)

FEC filings show that the Trump campaign has made a number of payments to Jamestown this year of between approximately $7,500 and $45,500, through June. In July, the campaign’s expenditures to Jamestown increased significantly, including a $78,394 payment on July 13 and a $133,800 payment on July 28. Miller joined the campaign in June, and Stepien was promoted July 15. The campaign reports that the disbursements were for “video production services.”

When asked if the missing receipts for Stepien and Miller seemed unusual, Brendan Fischer, director of the Federal Reform Program at the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), told Salon, “It doesn’t surprise me at all. The Trump campaign has disguised millions of dollars in payments to personnel and vendors by routing the money through LLCs created or managed by senior Trump campaign officials.”

The CLC recently filed an FEC complaint alleging that the Trump campaign has unlawfully hidden at least $170 million in payments through shell companies, thereby keeping its spending a secret form the public, law enforcement and its own donors. Some of those hidden payments have allegedly gone towards salaries — such as to Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump — and were made through an entity controlled by Parscale.

Reporting sourced this spring from White House advisers suggests that Parscale paid Guilfoyle and Lara Trump $180,000 a year, the rough equivalent of a top White House salary, but those sums have not been verified. Miller’s recent court filings suggest that his campaign salary might more than double that, and Stepien’s salary is unknown.

A great many of Trump’s donors contribute in small dollar amounts.

A Trump campaign spokesperson, Jamestown Associates and Teneo did not respond to Salon’s questions. COAR and A.J. Delgado did not immediately respond to request for comment.

is it as simple as, dems won on this in 2018 so i'll just co-opt it, tho central to aca which raga and doj actively constantly trying to kill for year? ppl lose healthcare w/ jobs, so helps the, how?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-campaign-thought-their-huge-news-on-pre-existing-conditions-had-democrats-cornered-but-it-backfired-spectacularly

During a bizarre Friday evening press conference at his private golf club in New Jersey, President Donald Trump vowed to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions.

Of course, Trump does not need an executive order to accomplish such a goal, as it is already federal law in the Affordable Care Act, that was passed a decade ago by congressional Democrats and then-President Barack Obama.

Trump campaign advisors soon took to Twitter to praise Trump’s promise as “huge news.”

“Huge news just now – [Trump] announces upcoming EO to cover pre-existing conditions. Big, big, big news,” campaign senior advisor Jason Miller tweeted.

Campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn believed it was such “HUGE NEWS” that he tweeted it between to flashing red sirens.

There was just one problem, which was pointed out by trial lawyer Max Kennerly, who pointed out it conflicted with a brief the administration recently filed with the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here’s what others were saying:...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/pence-secretly-meeting-with-right-wing-media-personalities-on-how-to-spin-trumps-virus-crisis-report/

no lnx

Pence secretly meeting with right-wing media personalities on how to spin Trump’s virus crisis: report

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story March 17, 2020

As part of his duties overseeing the task force in charges of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Vice President Mike Pence has been holding secret meetings with prominent right-wing “influencers” on how to spin Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to contain the growing health crisis.

According to a report from the Daily Beast, the outreach began at the annual CPAC conference long before the administration had any idea what they were dealing with, the report notes.

“The direct outreach occurred on Thursday, Feb. 27—the day after Trump tapped Pence to lead the task force. There, the vice president hosted an informal briefing on COVID-19 and the administration’s latest efforts, with several right-leaning personalities with large followings on Twitter and other social media platforms, according to a source with direct knowledge of the gathering,” the Beast reports, adding, “The following Wednesday, Pence hosted another closed-door meeting with conservative ‘influencers,’ with this one lasting for roughly an hour in the vice president’s office on White House grounds.”

Among those Vice President Pence has been reaching out to are “Fox New fixture and prolific MAGA tweeterDan Bongino; former Trump adviser and current “War Room: 2020” podcast host Jason Miller; Newsmax TV host and Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer; former White House official and Sinclair ‘must-run’ commentator Boris Epshteyn; Sinclair anchorand ex-Fox News host Eric Bolling; and former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), a Trump surrogate.”

The report notes that the outreach illustrates that White House knows it has a public relations problem of epic proportions on its hands and needs all Trump-supporting hands on deck, who are being used to praise the president while at the same time lashing out the media for their coverage of the administration’s failures.

“For weeks the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force has struggled to maintain continuity in messaging, with different departments seemingly operating off of different scripts and with different ideas about how to disseminate information to the public. Part of that tension is internal, with a White House and a president having been desperate to calm the markets at a time when state governments are calling for help amid rising death tolls,” the report continued. “Through it all, the vice president’s office, and communications teams on the task force, have tried to minimize the noise, calm Americans, and relentlessly lauded the president’s response to the outbreak in the U.S. The efforts to loop in conservative influencers has been seen as a way to maneuver beyond the regular briefings to the White House press corps and reach a different and more sympathetic media cohort. “

Defending the meetings, Pence chief of staff Marc Short described their efforts by stating, “The vice president has said that he wants to get as much information out to the American people as possible… There are a lot of different channels of communication. It’s not just press briefings every day, it’s not just TV interviews… There’s a whole lot of different streams of information. And one of those is surrogates.”

You can read more here.

ref

axios

White House and Hill GOP leaders are astonished by the unambiguous, far-reaching power of Steve Bannon and policy guru Stephen Miller over, well, just about everything:

They wrote the Inaugural speech and set in fast motion a series of moves to cement Trump as an America-first Nationalist.
They maneuvered to get more key allies inside the White House and positioned for top agency jobs.
They wrote many of the executive orders, sometimes with little input from others helping with the transition.
They egged on Trump to take a combative approach with the media, China, Mexico and critics.
And Bannon punctuated the week with a full-throated, Trump-pleasing bashing of the media ...

Another satisfied customer ... Bannon, in a phone interview with NYT's Mike Grynbaum, who covers media, TV, and politics (story is on A1): "The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while … I want you to quote this … The media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States."

More Bannon: "The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong … The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign … Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: They were outright activists of the Clinton campaign … That's why you have no power … You were humiliated."

Pre-conventional wisdom: A conservative leader told Axios' Jonathan Swan that Reince Priebus' people were feeling like they "won November and December," having filled the White House with so many loyalists. The spin was that Reince was outmaneuvering Bannon and would be the real power source. But now it's dawning on them, as Trump makes his early moves, that maybe they spoke too soon.

Jason Miller - Global Volatility Summit

www.globalvolatilitysummit.com › speaker › jason-miller-2

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: brings more than two decades of strategic communications, public relations, political and ad-making experience to :{Teneo Strategy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, where he serves ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Jason Miller to Join Clinton-Tied Teneo Strategy

www.thedailybeast.com › jason-miller-to-join-clinton-tied-teneo-strate...

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Donald Trump's former chief campaign spokesman, :{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, announced ... :{Teneo Strategy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: is known for its deep Clinton ties—the ex-president previously ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Report: Jason Miller exits Teneo after profane tweetstorm | PR ...

www.prweek.com › article › report-jason-miller-exits-teneo-profane-t...

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Jun 24, 2019 - WASHINGTON: :{Teneo:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: MD :{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: has exited the firm, according to The Daily Beast. Miller's reported departure comes after his profane ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Missing: strategy ‎| Must include:strategy

Jason Miller (political advisor) - Ballotpedia

ballotpedia.org › Jason_Miller_(political_advisor)

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Jump to :(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:**Teneo Strategy** - Miller left Jamestown Associates in early 2017 and joined Teneo Strategy as the group's managing director. In March 2017, he ...

About Jason Miller (communications strategist) - Biography ...

peoplepill.com › people › jason-miller-communications-strategist

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (born circa 1974) is an American communications strategist and ... Miller is currently employed at :{Teneo Strategy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, and was formerly a partner and ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Jason Miller, Former Trump Aide, Loses Job After Nadler ...

www.nytimes.com › 2019/06/24 › politics › jason-miller-trump-nadler

FoJun 24, 2019 - WASHINGTON — Jason Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump's 2016 campaign, has left his position as a managing director at Teneo, ...

Missing: strategy ‎| Must include: strategy

Jason Miller | CNN Journalist | Muck Rack

muckrack.com › jason-miller-15

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{Find :{Jason Miller's:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: articles, email address, contact information, Twitter and more. ... Managing Director, :{Teneo Strategy:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. As seen in: CNN. Is this you? Contact us ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

:{---:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

:{:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

Jason Miller (communications strategist) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jason_Miller_(communications_strategist)

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{:{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (born c. 1974) is a communications strategist and political manager, best known as the chief spokesman for the fall 2016 campaign and presidential ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

**Political party**‎: ‎Republican

Education‎: ‎George Washington University‎ (‎BA‎)

Career through 2009 · ‎Partner at Jamestown ... · ‎2016 presidential ... · ‎After Trump

Fundraiser by AJ Delgado : AJ Delgado vs. Jason Miller

www.gofundme.com › delgadovsmiller

:{:(style="border-color:#3c4043;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

:{May 11, 2018 - This is a campaign for funds to help me proceed in the ongoing litigation, in Miami-Dade family court, which the father of my son, :{Jason Miller:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, ...:(style="overflow-wrap:break-word"):}:

T rump adviser leaves high-powered consulting firm after calling House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler ‘a f*cking scumbag’

Alex HendersonJune 24, 2019

Former 2016 Trump campaign aide Jason Miller has resigned from a high-powered consulting firm following an insulting profanity-filled rant against Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Miller, a…

rmer 2016 Trump campaign aide Jason Miller has resigned from a high-powered consulting firm following an insulting profanity-filled rant against Rep. Jerry Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Miller, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has left his position as managing director of the firmTeneo,telling the Daily Beast, “I have parted ways with Teneo by mutual consent and look forward to formally announcing my next move in the coming weeks. Teneo is an incredible firm and without a doubt, the premier CEO consultancy on the planet. They have always been great to me, and I’m proud to have called them teammates for the past two and a half years.”

medium .com

https://medium.com/textifire/a-special-relationship-the-birth-of-cambridge-analytica-97633129cb06

no lnx

A Special Relationship & the Birth of Cambridge Analytica

Bridging the Atlantic to bring radical nativists of Trump & Brexit together via military tech & ad money, one donation or dataset at a time.

May 19,2017 · 46 min read

Steve Bannon-owned Cambridge Analytica LLC, a US subsidiary of UK defense contractor SCL Group, has been increasingly faulted for its dual role in both Donald Trump and Brexit’s victories. Its elevated & expensive role in the Trump digital marketing team’s self-proclaimed voter suppression rollout was the culmination of several years of preparation by military and anti-government interests on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as nationless finance & technology kingmakers seeking to enhance their own profit power.

As a direct result of the reporting led by the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, Cambridge Analytica is already under active investigation for violating United Kingdom data protection laws, as related to their involvement with Leave.EU. It’s unclear if anything will come of this, as Leave’s ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ seem quite confident they were able to skate through some loopholes and use some creative accounting to their advantage.

Separate issues have been under the microscope of UK authorities. For example, one is the improper collection & use of voters’ personal data via the internet for political marketing/advertising purposes, and another is the question of foreign (read: non-UK) money being used to fund the Leave campaigns. Cambridge Analytica is at the center of the data inquiry, and US-based stock trader Robert Mercer has been identified as the primary source of the foreign money, but in both cases political media production & dissemination is the underlying issue.

Our previous article looked at the undertold history of the nonprofit organization Citizens United regarding highly influential American political media & advertising from 1988 to 2011, and we’ll continue just prior to where we left off. SCL was in a down period at the beginning of our tale, and its Cambridge Analytica did not yet exist.

Donald Trump would soon begin early-2011 meetings with his new friends Steve Bannon and Citizens United’s David Bossie (fresh off a huge Supreme Court victory) to plot out a Trump 2012 presidential campaign, but they ultimately decided to once again put his formal aspirations on hold.

Still, the fire rises.

Dukakis to Donald: 30 Years of Citizens United - TEXTIFIRE - Medium

1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of…

medium.com

PROFIT BOTS

Bannon & Bossie began releasing their political issue advocacy film collaborations in 2010, months after Bossie’s Citizens United v FEC case received its big Supreme Court victory, but they were among many looking to exploit the new election [de]regulations. One such up-and-coming major player was half-billionaire Robert Mercer.

Mercer had won awards in his first career, working for IBM’s Watson AI project in the field of natural language processing, where he wrote code teaching computers how to understand humans. The avid yachtsman changed tacks slightly in 1993, as he went on to make his sudden fortune with the wildly profitable private hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, also known as RenTec, of which he is now co-CEO. Its stock-in-trade, if you will, is using quantitative analysis and high frequency trading (HFT) to win big on the global financial markets.

Quantitative analysis is a blanket term that covers a range of techniques, but the basic idea is to execute financial transactions based on predictions made by calculating large groups of historical alphanumeric sets; i.e., using existing patterns to predict future outcomes. When you’re anticipating future numbers, you might naturally expect to first inspect past numbers.

However, the standard human brain can only do so much these days, so the vast majority of work involved in this field is performed by computers. Even experts in the field — unsurprisingly called ‘quants’, though RenTec is known for exclusively employing mathematicians, physicists, and cryptographers — are still only able to quickly & accurately calculate a small grouping of historical variables. As a result, giant datasets — consisting of any number of different variables tracked over time — are fed into computers which calculate them using complex math equations, following repeatable series of preprogrammed steps that are known as algorithms.

Not only do quants employ algorithms to spit out robotically identified market trends, but they frequently direct the algorithms to buy and sell stocks all on their own. This outsourcing of labor is known as algorithmic trading, and since the computers involved are usually employing algorithms on both sides of these transactions, the trades can happen incredibly quickly (nanoseconds) and in high volumes (around half of all US equity trades). Now we’re describing the quant subgenre of high frequency trading.

HFT is very controversial within the financial industry, with supporters saying it helps keep the markets liquid & transparent and detractors saying it increases volatility, but it’s probably safe to say most outside observers think it’s very dangerous. It’s been responsible for “flash crashes”; allowed for massive accumulations of private wealth for no reason other than automated exploitation of loopholes, timezones, and bandwidth;played a sizable (or at least very profitable) role in the 2008 global financial meltdown; and put the planet’s resources under the control of larval artificial intelligence.

For these reasons, it should be no surprise HFT came under the scrutiny of regulators, but only after a decade of algorithmic trading that was enabled by the 2000 changeover to stock decimalization (pricing shares by pennies instead of quarter-dollars). The EU had been fairly vigilant in that regard, but the US government hadn’t pricked up its ears until after the July 2009 arrest of Sergey Aleynikov, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, for allegedly stealing ‘proprietary’ algorithms from his employer Goldman Sachs.

Aleynikov was accused of sticking his digital avatar hand into the “black box” — the batches of algorithms that are kept secret by HFT firms — of Goldman Sachs, but his still-active case has been in & out of courts for these past 8 years, partially because some of the laws he broke had not yet been fully written. That genre of legislative inefficiency sparked the interest ofPeter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, which in turn caught the eyes of quants and black box houses like RenTec.

4 minutes of HFT

DeFazio spearheaded the idea of a financial transactions tax — to impose a micropercent tax on trades that would only affect the high-volume HFT in any tangible way— and teamed up with a couple colleagues to bring bills to the floor of Congress. He got nowhere in 2009, two years after the “Quant Quake”, nor in 2010, even after the May 6th “Flash Crash” again alerted the public to the dangers of HFT. Despite the failure to ignite substantial interest, his dedication to reform did not go unnoticed.

TEST DRIVING CITIZENS UNITED

DeFazio’s 2010 reelection campaign was nearly derailed by the appearance of highly-funded ads which attacked him and supported his ‘Tea Party’ Republican opponent, Art Robinson. Created by a PAC calling itself Concerned Taxpayers of America (CTA), it had been an ongoing mystery at the time as to who put up the big money for that organization. Only a few weeks before the election, as per the then-newly lax criteria set forth by the Citizens United decision earlier that year, was it revealed that one of the only two funders was Mr Robert Mercer, who contributed $643,750.

Investigation by the Washington Post prior to the reveal turned up even more curiosities, including a denial of the existence of CTA by a PR rep standing in the doorway of its registered address and directly to DeFazio’s face. Also, we should not be surprised to learn CTA’s treasurer was Jason Miller, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign communications director starting 30 June 2016. Miller was briefly named White House communications director in December 2016, before recusing himself a few days later after a fellow campaign worker accused the otherwise married Miller of fathering her unborn child.

Mercer’s attacks on DeFazio are easily attributable to HFT tax proposals, but his support of political then-novice Art Robinson is also notable. Robinson is a crackpot pseudoscientist whose mentor was Nobel Prize Winner Linus Pauling, before they acrimoniously parted ways in a divorce which ultimately ended in Robinson’s $25.5m lawsuit against the Pauling Institute (which he settled for $575k).

Robinson then became a supporter of homeopathic disease cures via exposure to raw radioactive elements, as well as a well-known climate change denier, an obsessive hoarder of 14,000+ human urine samples, and a forest-dwelling widower who homeschooled his 6 children using his own Bible-based, available-for-sale “Robinson Curriculum” (all of which basically makes him the Anti-Captain Fantastic).He lost to DeFazio in 2010 and lost again & again & again in 3 subsequent elections, but managed to become the chairman of the Oregon Republican Party from 2013–15, and has recently been considered for the role of Trump’s chief Science Adviser.

Robert Mercer and his politically powerful daughter Rebekah are said to have become fans of Robinson’s after reading his newsletter “Access to Energy”, which argues such things as Chernobyl radiation and carbon pollution are ultimately beneficial to planetary life. However, Mercer has privately “downplay[ed] the dangers posed by nuclear war” when excitedly expressing his belief that Hiroshima & Nagasaki radiation made the greater population of Japan healthier, and Robinson has published a book & multi-DVD set on Nuclear War Survival Skills, so they have that hobby in common.

After bringing someone like Robinson close to victory in 2010, the Mercers’ fresh taste for political power brought them the privileges and lifestyles of the rich & famous. They soon found themselves at a2011 conference of the Club For Growth, a pro-business activist group for the conservative elite, which spent $6m of its own in support of 2010 GOP/Tea Party contenders. The Club is perhaps best known for being sued and fined by the FEC in 2005 for violating fair election laws. Its Executive Director David Keating then formed SpeechNow, a group which sued the FEC and did even more damage to campaign finance regulations via their Ninth Circuit Court victory in the immediate wake of Citizens United v FEC, but right now we’re focused on the Club as the place where Mercer first met Andrew Breitbart.

BREITBART OUT, BANNON & MERCER IN

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/cnn-hired-a-habitual-liar-as-the-republicans-strategy-to-work-the-refs-pays-off/

no lnx

CNN hired a habitual liar as the Republicans’ strategy to ‘work the refs’ pays off

Written by Eric Boehlert / Daily Kos October 23, 2019

Former Republican Rep. Sean Duffy, recently hired by CNN to be a paid political commentator, can’t stop fabricating facts when he goes on the air. Since making his CNN debut on Sunday, Duffy has lied about the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords. He’s lied about Joe Biden trying to fire a Ukraine prosecutor in order to protect his son. And Duffy’s helped spread the preposterous lie about the Democratic National Committee’s email servers from 2016 somehow ending up in a foreign country.

Sean Duffy, who staked his congressional reputation in recent years on being an undying Trump loyalist, is not a serious person. And Sean Duffy appears to be a habitual liar. (He once claimed George Soros was rigging voting machines, and that Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.) You would think those unfortunate traits would represent two large check marks against someone who wanted to be in the business of commenting on the news.

And yet, here we are.

CNN executives, having surveyed the political landscape in search of new voices to add to its discussions, decided to hire Duffy, which says a lot more about CNN than it does Duffy. What’s newsworthy about Duffy’s hiring is the timing. It just seems odd since much of the press, including CNN, has moved to toughen up Trump coverage in recent weeks and temporarily abandon the hallmark timidity that has defined so much of the reporting and commentary over the last two-plus years.

“The mainstream media seems to have quietly removed its Trump-normalizing gloves in the past few weeks,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

CNN anchors and commentators have often been part of that change. They have been out front since the Ukraine collusion scandal broke last month, emphasizing that Trump’s pronouncements and denials are almost always wrapped in lies and deceptions. That’s a good thing.

So why now, of all times, would CNN decide to shift into reverse and hire another Trump loyalist who cannot be trusted to be honest or state anything factual each time he appears on air? Why would CNN want to go back to playing the silly and time-consuming game of blocking off lots of airtime so conservative contributors can make stuff up, which CNN anchors then have to point out is, y’know, made up? What does CNN hope to accomplish with this?

It’s all just a colossal waste of time, and CNN already tried to pull off that losing strategy for two years. Looking to capture the cable news “middle” between Fox News and MSNBC, CNN often obsesses over its Both Sides presentation. And on paper, there’s nothing wrong with that. (Think: Crossfire format.) The problem is trying to find honest conservatives these days and, specifically, the nearly impossible task of finding honest conservatives who are also Trump loyalists, since that’s the Both Sides debate CNN often wants to present.

CNN has hired many such Trump loyalists who have chewed up the cable news scenery, spreading lie after preposterous lie. That includes people like Jason Miller, Jack Kingston, Ed Martin, Jeffrey Lord, and Corey Lewandowski, among others. None of them, to be generous, covered the network in glory. Following the 2018 school massacre at Parkland High School in Florida, Kingston claimed on the air that students who rallied against gun violence were being taken advantage of by “left-wing gun control activists” led by billionaire George Soros.

It all badly muddies the waters, because by allowing—and paying—people like Duffy to disseminate nonsense like he’s already spewed about DNC servers, CNN is legitimizing that lie, even when it’s fact-checked. “First of all, what you are stating is completely inaccurate and factually wrong,” CNN contributor Jen Psaki told Duffy when he started in with the server conspiracy. “It’s a conspiracy theory on the right-wing blogs.” And frankly, that’s where that garbage should stay.

By hiring someone like Duffy at this juncture, it appears CNN has learned very little since 2017, and specifically very little about how to cover a liar like Trump. It’s not up to CNN and other media players to hire bad actors simply because the conservative movement is filled with bad actors. All news outlets ought to have easily identifiable standards, and if would-be paid contributors can’t meet those standards, they should not be hired.

Keep in mind that CNN remains under constant bullying attacks from Trump and the entire conservative movement. Last year, the White House lashed out at CNN by pulling reporter Jim Acosta’s press pass. Trump routinely defames the network on Twitter. And just last week, Trump’s personal attorney sent a ridiculous threat to CNN, threatening to sue the network for its “biased” coverage of Trump. (“Never in the history of this country has a President been the subject of such a sustained barrage of unfair, unfounded, unethical and unlawful attacks by so-called ‘mainstream’ news, as the current situation,” etc.) Lawyers everywhere mocked the move as deeply unserious, but the cumulative effect adds up.

And that makes Duffy’s hiring even more distressing. It certainly seems to send a signal that “working the refs” is an effective strategy, and that if Republicans complain loudly and long enough, the cable news channel will bend, in small ways, to the GOP’s will.

Recall that back in January, CNN seemed to make a similar and equally misguided concession to Trump when it hired a hyper-partisan Republican flack with no experience in journalism to oversee the network’s campaign news coverage. After a public outcry, CNN changed the Republican’s job duties.

Note to CNN: It’s not too late to do the same with Duffy.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

Trump adviser leaves high-powered consulting firm after calling House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler ‘a f*cking scumbag’

Alex HendersonJune 24, 2019

220

Jason Miller

Principal, SHW Partners LLC

Washington D.C. Metro Area235 connections

Join to Connect

SHW Partners LLC

About

Principal, SHW Partners LLC. @realDonaldTrump 2016 Sr. Comms Advisor, Transition Team Comms Director. Co-Host, “War Room: 2020” @WarRoom2020. Mark 12:30-31.

Activity

Protecting intellectual property forms the 'most significant part' of the phase one deal: Analyst

Liked by Jason Miller

Congratulations Brad!

Liked by Jason Miller

My heart is so sad to learn #RushLimbaugh has lung cancer. He's set to start treatment and says…

My heart is so sad to learn #RushLimbaugh has lung cancer. He's set to start treatment and says he'll continue to work while taking some time off...

Liked by Jason Miller

Join now to see all activity

Experience

SHW Partners LLC

Principal

SHW Partners LLC

Jul 2019 – Present8 months

View Jason Miller’s full profile to

Check markSee who you know in common

Check markGet introduced

Check markContact Jason Miller directly

Join to view full profile

Career

Early career

Jason Miller, a Seattle native, initially served as campaign manager for former Florida Rep. Ric Keller in 2000. After Keller's election, Miller became chief of staff for the congressman. He worked on Keller's 2002 re-election campaign, which the Orlando Business Journal noted was unusual in that Miller and others received dual paychecks while working on staff and on the campaign.^[3]

In 2004, Miller worked on several campaigns, including Mel Martinez's (R-Fla.) successful campaign for U.S. Senate.^[4] Miller also worked as Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Okla.) campaign manager in his successful run for the U.S. Senate. He was hired after Coburn's initial campaign manager, Michael Schwartz, left.^[5]

In 2006, Miller worked on Sen. George Allen's (R-Va.) campaign for Senate as campaign manager.^[6]

Rudy Giuliani 2008 presidential campaign

Miller worked on Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. He was Giuliani's national deputy communications director and worked alongside Mark Campbell, Ted Cruz's 2016 political director.^[7].^[8]

Following Miller's tenure on Giuliani's campaign team, he was hired by the Washington, D.C.-based communications firm Dezenhall Resources.^[9]According to his bio on the Jamestown Associates website, Miller was the senior vice president.^[10]^

Consulting work

Following Dezenhall Resources, Miller became a partner and vice president for Jamestown Associates, a campaign consulting firm. In 2012, Miller produced ads for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican State Leadership Committee and the American Medical Association according to the Jamestown Associates website.^[10]^

Miller was an ad consultant for Richard Mourdock's (R-Ind.) 2012 Senate campaign. During the campaign, Miller worked with Cruz's 2016 campaign manager Jeff Roe.^[11]

In 2013, Miller was part of Rep. Mark Sanford's campaign in a special election for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District. Miller worked on ads and general strategy for Sanford's 54 to 45 percent win over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch.^[12] Miller also consulted on Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Cal.) 2014 re-election.^[13]

Presidential election, 2016

More on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign staff
Staff overview
• Trump staff overview
Management and strategy
•Steve Bannon, Executive chairman •Kellyanne Conway, Campaign manager •David Bossie, Deputy campaign manager •Michael Glassner, Deputy campaign manager •Jim Murphy, National political director •John Mashburn, Policy director
Communications
•Hope Hicks, Communications director •Jason Miller, Senior communications advisor •Katrina Pierson, Campaign spokesperson
Advisors
•Roger Stone, Informal advisor •Sam Clovis, Co-chair and policy advisor •Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Senior advisor •Michael Biundo, Senior advisor

Ted Cruz

Jason Miller was chosen as Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign senior communications advisor shortly after Cruz announced his candidacy on March 23, 2015.^[13] National Review described him as part of Cruz's "brain trust," alongside campaign manager Jeff Roe and strategist Jason Johnson.^[14]

Throughout the campaign, Miller worked as a national spokesperson. At the time of his hire, Miller told Politico that he was brought in "to put together a more robust communications operation."^[15]Miller's early communications were mostly positive reports on the campaign's ability to raise money from large donors. He told Politico, "The excitement created by Sen. Cruz’s announcement has motivated conservative grass-roots donors and big donors alike. We’re energized by the early rush of donor activity and are very confident we can achieve our goals."^[16]

In the days before the Iowa caucuses, as Donald Trump's campaign began attacking Cruz, Miller's communications team shifted away from counter-attacks to a more positive note. Miller told The Wall Street Journal, "He is making his closing argument, why he should be the next president of the United States. Every campaign, by definition, has different phases."^[17]

Cruz suspended his presidential campaign on May 3, 2016, after losing the Indiana Republican primary to Donald Trump.^[18]

Donald Trump

On June 27, 2016, Donald Trump's presidential campaign announced that Jason Miller would join as a senior communications advisor. Bloomberg reported that Miller would "take the lead role over the Trump campaign’s message and interactions with the news media," duties that were formerly performed solely by Hope Hicks.^[19]

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms JasonMillerTedCruz. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles; they are included to provide readers with the most recent news articles on the subject. Click here to learn more about this section.

Jason Miller - Google News Feed

Loading...

External Links

Jamestown Associates

Footnotes

[show]

v•:{e:(style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;border:none"):}:

Influencers

[show]

2016 Presidential Candidate Key Staffers and Advisors

Categories:

Delgado is an attorney and conservative commentator who frequently defended Trump on cable networks during the campaign. Miller joined Trump’s operation after advising Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) failed presidential campaign.

NEWS & POLITICS

Trump Communications Director Leaves to 'Spend Time with Family' After Staffer Hints at Sex Scandal

Expect a lot more stories like these in the years ahead.

By Tom Boggioni / Raw Story

December 26, 2016 a surprising Christmas Eve announcement, newly appointed White House communications director Jason Miller has stepped down from his position after a Trump transition member hinted on Twitter that a sex scandal may be brewing.

According to the New York Daily News, Miller announced that he is walking away only two days after being appointed, saying his wife is expecting their second child and, “It’s clear they need to be my top priority right now, and this is not the time to start a new job as demanding as White House communications director.”

In a series of tweets, now hidden from view, Trump advocate and transition staffer A.J. Delgado cast a shadow over Miller’s announcement, writing, “Congratulations to the baby-daddy on being named WH Comms Director!” before adding, “The 2016 version of John Edwards.” The Edwards mention no doubt referring to the ex-Democratic presidential nominee whose career was derailed by an affair and a child out of wedlock.

In a series of tweets captured by Mediaite, Delgado leveled more accusations at Miller, writing, “When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it’s a bit… spooky,” hinting that Miller’s troubles may have begun earlier. Delgado added, “Jason Miller. Who needed to resign… yesterday.”

Delgado has since taken her Twitter account off-line.

This is not the first time Delgado, a Trump advocate and cable TV regular, has removed her Twitter account from view. Previously, she dropped it after insisting that Charleston shooter Dylann Roof didn’t appear to be white — leading to much Twitter ridicule

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/jason-miller-affair-trump-232966

odd?

Trump pick backs out of White House job after affair allegations

By MARC CAPUTO, JOSH DAWSEY and ALEX ISENSTADT 12/25/16 01:24 PM EST Updated 12/25/16 03:20 PM EST

Donald Trump’s newly tapped White House communications director, Jason Miller, backed out of the job following claims that he had an affair with another transition official, according to three sources close to the Trump transition.

Two days after his appointment as communications director was announced, Miller told POLITICO on Christmas Eve that he was stepping down because the White House job would be too demanding at a time when he needed to devote attention to his family. He and his wife are expecting their second child next month.

“After spending this past week with my family, the most amount of time I have been able to spend with them since March 2015, it is clear they need to be my top priority right now,” Miller, a senior campaign official, said in a prepared statement. “I need to put them in front of my career.”

But around the same time, campaign surrogate and transition aide A.J. Delgado began directing comments at Miller on Twitter. On Thursday, Delgado congratulated “the baby-daddy” on his promotion, and cryptically wrote: “The 2016 version of John Edwards.”

Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and Democratic presidential candidate, had an affair with Rielle Hunter, a campaign worker who became pregnant.

By Saturday, Delgado used Twitter to call for Miller to resign and then deactivated her account once he had announced he wouldn’t join Trump’s White House.

“When you try to put a brave face and tweet about nonsense to distract, your feed looks like @JasonMillerDC’s,” she wrote Saturday before his announcement to step down.

“When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it's a bit ... spooky,” Delgado then wrote. When an old law school friend asked on Twitter to whom she was referring, Delgado replied: “Jason Miller. Who needed to resign ... yesterday.”

Delgado and Miller declined to comment on Sunday.

The matter has caused turmoil within the Trump operation over the past week. After POLITICO reporters received an anonymous email about the alleged affair, Delgado disclosed details of the relationship to senior officials in emails Thursday, the people close to the transition said. The nature of their relationship had been known to people involved in the Trump campaign and transition for “a number of months,” one source said.

In October, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that Delgado and Miller, along with members of the media, had been spotted at a Las Vegas strip club the night before the campaign’s final debate. The New York Times reported last month that Miller offered to resign after that incident, but the offer was rejected.

Miller, 41, informed top Trump officials of his decision to step down on Friday night.

The reversal followed a period of indecision for Miller. He had been encouraged to take the job of communications director, which oversees messaging strategy in the White House, by a number of top officials, including incoming chief of staffReince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to sources. Miller had also weighed taking a more lucrative post in the private sector.

Sean Spicer, who was named to be White House press secretary last week, will take over Miller’s responsibilities as communications director, Miller said in the Saturday statement.

“I look forward to continuing to support the President-elect from the outside after my work on the transition concludes,” Miller said.

often defends bannon

Trump Aide Jason Miller Says Steve Bannon’s ‘Embraced Diversity’

Nov 16, 2016 10:28 AM PST

Jason Miller, an aide to Donald Trump, stood by the president-elect’s controversial appointment of Steve Bannon to a top White House role. Speaking at Trump Tower on Wednesday, he said the former executive chairman of Breitbart News is “someone who’s embraced diversity at every step.” Miller also refuted reports of turmoil inside the transition team.

On December 14, there was a meeting to discuss the outside group in a glass-walled conference room on the 14th floor of Trump Tower. Brad Parscale sat at the head of the table. Around him were roughly 12 people, including Rebekah; Kellyanne Conway; David Bossie; Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer; Jason Miller, then Trump’s senior communications adviser; and Marc Short, Mike Pence’s senior adviser.

ref

XXXguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage

no lnx

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing US computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Sunday 26 February 2017 04.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 5 April 2017 05.53 EDT

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.

It’s money he’s made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called “revolutionary” breakthroughs in language processing – a science that went on to be key in developing today’s AI – and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees’ money, is the most successful in the world – generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns – all Republican – and another $50m to non-profits – all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer.

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich man’s plaything – the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting “liberal bias” is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. It’s bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. It’s the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had “to take back the culture”. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UK’s forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”. France and Germany are next.

A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercer’s name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in “election management strategies” and “messaging and information operations”, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as “psyops” – psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on people’s emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so I’d read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercer’s money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Google’s search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites “strangling” the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters – its USP is to use this data to understand people’s deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a “propaganda machine”.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica “is a US company based in the US. It hasn’t worked in British politics.”

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farage’s trip to Trump Tower – the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. “That’s the one I took,” he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the “bad boys of Brexit” – a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EU’s co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from people’s Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

“It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.”

They hadn’t “employed” Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. “They were happy to help.”

Why?

“Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you.’ What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldn’t you?” Behind Trump’s campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were “the same people. It’s the same family.”

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than £7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? It’s certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters’ data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioner’s Office said: “Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.”

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles – especially people’s “likes” – could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centre’s lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. “Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves,” says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the university’s model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centre’s director? “Certainly not from us,” he says. “We have very strict rules around this.”

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesn’t know where Kogan’s data came from. “The evidence was contrary. I reported it.” An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. “But then Kogan said he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldn’t continue [answering questions].”

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the university’s inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

“The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.

“It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People don’t know it’s happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.”

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, “driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities”. But in many ways, it’s what Cambridge Analytica’s parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but it’s SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level – for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others – in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatcher’s image,says Briant, and the company had been “making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but it’s all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.”

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration. “It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if it’s the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear,” says Briant.

It’s the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. “How is it going to be used?” he says. “Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just don’t understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.”

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we can’t see, and that is working on us in ways we can’t understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? “Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. It’s totally covert. And people don’t realise what is going on.”

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You don’t have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the military’s or SCL’s playbook.

But then there’s increasing evidence that our public arenas – the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news – are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. It’s a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: “information warfare troops”.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institute’s computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated “bots” – accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump – many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection – Russian bots, organised by who? – attacking Paul Nuttall.

You can take a trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it, turn it against the media that uncovered it

“Politics is war,” said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

There’s nothing accidental about Trump’s behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. “That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. There’s feedback going on constantly. That’s what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words.We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, it’s all about how can you use these trending words.”

Wigmore met with Trump’s team right at the start of the Leave campaign. “And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.”

Who did?

“Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.”

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. “It’s all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call itbio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.”

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called “cognitive warfare”. Though there are many others: “recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism,” explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. “Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives,” says one US state department white paper. “Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.”

Yet another details the power of a “cognitive casualty” – a “moral shock” that “has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking”. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or “fake news”. Or as it has now become: “FAKE news!!!!”

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like “liberal media bias”, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the “failing New York Times!” what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannon’s media empire is theGovernment Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercer’s money. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” Bannon told Forbes magazine. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how theGAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google can’t find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer and later turned intoa film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you “weaponise” the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clinton’s cash did. Like Hillary’s emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. “Strategic drowning” of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldn’t take Bill Clinton down because “they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber”.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, there’s a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether it’s Mercer’s millions or other factors, Jonathan Albright’s map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? “There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. It’s clearly being led by money and politics.”

There’s been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but it’s Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. Nick Patterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. “There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.”

Play VideoPlay

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as “very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that he’s a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.”

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. “We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.”

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how it’s been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the “blackest box in finance”.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: he’s done research that shows you canpredict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. “Society is driven by emotions, which it’s always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.”

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. “We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes we’ve had – sudden huge drops in stock prices – indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.”

The other people interested in Bollen’s work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollen’s research shows how it’s possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

“It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.”

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institute’s Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? “There’s not a smoking gun,” says Howard. “There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.”

“Look at this,” he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. “This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like he’s a consensus.”

And that requires money?

“That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are what’s legitimate. You are creating truth.”

You can take an existing trending topic, AMP FDBK such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us – the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of “sleeper” bots they’ve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

“Like zombies.”

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. “You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.”

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought – using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

We’re not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become “FAKE news!!!” But we’re almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote byMarshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. “World War III will be a guerrilla information war,” it says. “With no divisions between military and civilian participation.”

By that definition we’re already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Jason Miller

More articles

Registered Corporate Lobbyist and Foreign Agent Jason Miller Must Not Be Appointed to Top WH Comms Job

Career

Early career

2008 presidential election

Consulting work

2016 presidential election

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Teneo Strategy and CNN

2020 presidential election

2021 tech startup

Recent news

Early life

Career

Politics

Jamestown Associates

2016 presidential campaign and transition

After 2016 campaign

Newsmax

Gettr

Personal life

Controversies and scandals

Delgado suits, 2018–2019

Detention in Brazil

Testimony before January 6 Committee

See also

References

C.O.A.R.

Trump adviser leaves high-powered consulting firm after calling House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler ‘a f*cking scumbag’

Career

Early career

Rudy Giuliani 2008 presidential campaign

Consulting work

Presidential election, 2016

Ted Cruz

Donald Trump

Recent news

See also

External Links

Footnotes

Trump Communications Director Leaves to 'Spend Time with Family' After Staffer Hints at Sex Scandal

Trump Aide Jason Miller Says Steve Bannon’s ‘Embraced Diversity’