Stephen Miller Calls the Whistleblower a “Deep State” Agent

Membership Ticker

THE FIRST $500,000

This is a big one: the first time we’re asking for the donations Mother Jones relies on since joining forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting. So in “Less Dreading, More Doing,” we lay it all out for you—why we merged, how we’re stronger together, and why we’re more optimistic than normal about the work ahead. It still won’t be easy. Please help us raise the First $500,000 we need by June 22.

This is big. Mother Jones just merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting, and this is the first time we’re asking for the donations we rely on. So we lay it all out for you in “Less Dreading, More Doing,” and we need to raise the First $500,000 in online donations by June 22. It won’t be easy. Please help if you can.

Ron Sachs/CNP via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller went on Fox News Sunday morning to parrot the official White House line that the whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is nothing more than an attempt to hurt the president.

Miller called the whistleblower a “saboteur trying to undermine a democratically elected government” and invoked a far-right conspiracy line, saying that “this is a deep state operative, pure and simple.”

“A partisan hit job does not make you a whistleblower just because you go through the Whistleblower Protection Act,” Miller to host Chris Wallace said during a heated TV interview on Fox News Sunday.

Miller’s comments follow Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire’s testimony regarding the whistleblower complaint before the House Intelligence Committee last week.

In his testimony, Maguire defended his handling of the complaint. “I believe that the whistleblower and the inspector general have acted in good faith throughout. I have every reason to believe that they have done everything by the book and follow the law,” he told lawmakers.

Miller’s accusations that the whistleblower is a member of the “deep state” echo popular conspiracy rhetoric on the internet that claims the entrenched careerist bureaucrats of America’s intelligence community are working to take down Trump.

The claim that there’s a cabal of so-called deep state actors across the federal government working to undermine the president has cropped repeatedly across the right-wing universe. Trump allies have casually used it as an excuse for difficulties Trump has had in advancing his agenda, and online conspiracy theorists have accused the deep state of helping to enable a supposed pedophile ring being run by liberal elites. There is no evidence to suggest any such group exists.

In the original complaint, the unnamed whistleblower said that in a July 25 call Trump tried to push Zelensky to launch an investigation into former Vice President and 2020 Presidential Candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.