White House senior adviser Stephen Miller was booted from the set of CNN’s “State of the Union” when he refused to leave after his fiery interview with Jake Tapper ended.
Miller spent the tense Sunday morning segment bashing former mentor Steve Bannon while defending President Trump as a “political genius” in the heated interview.
Tapper brought the interview to an abrupt stop after the pair got into a heated argument with both cutting each other off and launching personal attacks.
The confrontation continued after the segment when Miller refused to leave the set, despite repeated requests to leave, a CNN source said.
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“The segment was over and Mr. Miller was politely asked to leave the set multiple times — after refusing to leave, he was escorted out by security,” the source said in an email.
The policy aide’s remarks during the show come amid backlash from author Michael Wolff’s book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” in which Bannon trashed fellow members of the President’s inner circle.
Miller and Tapper got into a heated exchange over his responses.
(CNN)
“It’s tragic and unfortunate that Steve would make these grotesque comments so out of touch with reality, and obviously so vindictive,” Miller said Sunday in an oftentimes tense interview that was eventually cut short by host Jake Tapper.
Those statements include calling Donald Trump Jr. “unpatriotic” for taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer, and saying Jared Kushner’s family real estate business would come under federal scrutiny.
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“The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction,” Miller said on “State of the Union.” “And I also will say that the author is a garbage author of a garbage book.”
Wolff described Miller in the book as “a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body,” “knew little about policy,” unread and rubbed people the wrong way.
While he and Bannon worked on a potential travel ban amid the transition, the latter “sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft” the executive order.
Miller (left) said Bannon got too much credit for Trump’s successes.
(NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
But Miller on Sunday doubled down on the White House line that Bannon had little to do with Trump’s presidency, particularly the controversial travel ban.
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During the interview, Miller took several shots at CNN’s credibility when asked policy questions, while Tapper implied Miller wasn’t trying to speak to the American people — only to Trump.
“There is one viewer that you care about right now,” he said, adding: “I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”
The commander-in-chief appeared to be tuned in, too.
“Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!” Trump tweeted roughly an hour after Tapper shut down the discussion.
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Miller insisted Trump was a “political genius” and a “self-made billionaire.”
(Susan Walsh/AP)
Wolff, who made several West Wing visits during Trump’s first year in office, interviewed scores of people close to Trump.
Since his book garnered media attention, Wolff has speculated those close to Trump don’t believe he’s mentally fit to be President.
Trump denied those charges in a string of furious tweets Saturday, calling himself a “stable genius.”
Miller maintained that Trump was the mastermind of the campaign without Bannon’s help.
“The reality is that the President is a political genius who won against a field of 17 incredibly talented people, who took down the Bush dynasty, who took down the Clinton dynasty,” he said.
Trump has slammed the book, whose author has suggested he’s not mentally capable of being President.
(Pool/Getty Images)
He also called Trump a “self-made billionaire,” although the President has admitted he made his first real estate investment with a $1 million loan from his landlord father, but reports indicate the amount could’ve been higher.
The New York Times reported last week that Miller helped craft an early draft of the President’s letter to fire then-FBI Director James Comey in early May.
The letter, which special counsel Robert Mueller’s team now has, noted in the first sentence that his ongoing Russian collusion probe is “fabricated and politically motivated.”
Asked about the draft missive on Sunday, a fiery Miller noted the final version stated up high that Comey’s abrupt firing had nothing to do with the Russia investigation.
“It was a disclaimer,” he said. “It appeared in the final version of the letter that was made public.”
Trump, in a May interview with NBC News after Comey’s firing, signaled he was upset about the Russia probe.
And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.”
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