Donald Trump's Refugee Ban Has Attorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions' Fingerprints All Over It
For years, Senator Jeff Sessions and his top communications guru have been screaming and hollering about refugees. Looks like their new boss granted their wish.
BETSY WOODRUFF
01.28.17 7:15 PM ET
To longtime Jeff Sessions observers, the chaos that unfolded in American airports on Saturday morning wasn’t a surprise. At all.
Rather, the refugee ban was the predictable culmination of years of advocacy from two of President Donald Trump’s most trusted advisors: White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller and attorney general designate Jeff Sessions. For years, Sessions and Miller––who was the Alabama senator’s communications director before leaving to join the Trump campaign––pushed research and talking points designed to make Americans afraid of refugees.
Press releases, email forwards, speeches on the Senate floor––Miller and Sessions used it all to make the case against Obama’s refugee program was a huge terror threat. The executive order Trump signed late in the day on Friday is just the logical conclusion of their work.
I started getting press releases that Miller sent on behalf of Jeff Sessions in March of 2013, shortly after I moved to D.C. to cover Congress. The emails went to my Gmail, and kept coming over the years––hundreds and hundreds of them. By the time he left Sessions’ office to join the Trump campaign, Miller’s press releases were legendary among Hill reporters: There were just so many of them, at all hours of the day, and they never stopped. Some were lengthy diatribes; some were detailed, homemade charts; some were one-liners; one was just a link to Facebook’s stock page on Google Finance with the subject line, “Does this mean Facebook has enough money now to hire Americans?”
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/28/donald-trump-s-refugee-ban-has-attorney-general-nominee-jeff-session-s-fingerprints-all-over-it.html
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