THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

When Paramount CEO David Ellison wanted to throw a Washington dinner party last month “honoring the Trump White House,” he got a helping hand from Katie Miller, the MAGA podcaster and onetime White House strategist. She sent follow-up invites to top Trump aides to encourage attendance for the “intimate gathering” at the U.S. Institute of Peace ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.The party turned a traditional celebration of the CBS News White House team into a high-profile corporate flex. Ellison, who is seeking federal approval for his company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ended up sitting at the same table as President Trump and in the same room as Miller’s husband, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and other senior administration officials, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose department is currently reviewing the deal.Katie Miller’s involvement was not entirely unexpected. For months before, she had been talking informally with Paramount brass about selling her media property, The Katie Miller Podcast, to the news-media giant as it expands its offerings, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the nonpublic information. Those talks, which were first reported by Axios, have yet to result in a finalized sale, the people familiar with the matter said.But the conversations were serious enough that months earlier, Stephen Miller—who has a near-boundless role overseeing policy as deputy chief of staff—told the White House that he would recuse himself from all issues around Paramount’s efforts to win control of Warner, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us.Stephen also recused himself last year from matters involving artificial intelligence because Katie, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, had maintained a part-time consulting contract with xAI, the owner of the Grok chatbot and the social-media company X. When SpaceX purchased xAI in February, Miller also recused himself from space issues, Jackson added.“Katie Miller is an accomplished professional in her own right with over a decade of senior government and media experience—Stephen is incredibly proud of what his wife has achieved through her own hard work,” Jackson told us in a statement. “He fully complies with all ethics recommendations and rules and regularly consults with White House ethics officials to address any potential conflicts of interest.”Stephen Miller has not recused himself from matters related to sponsors of Katie’s podcast, however, because the White House counsel has… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Early one morning behind the airport in La Lima, Honduras, before the first planeload of deportees landed, Sister Idalina Bordignon was meeting with her staff about an unsettling situation. Every day, parents were arriving without their children, and they were asking questions like What do I do if I don’t know where my child is? and Do I lose my rights as a parent if I’m deported? An American aid worker suggested a quick analysis of each case to determine which agencies or nonprofits might help the families. We’ll never have time for all this, Idalina thought. The Trump administration was sending too many people to Honduras too quickly, and soon the reception center that she oversees would be packed with more than 100 people who were exhausted, hungry, and in shock. They would need to be processed into the country as quickly as possible to make room for the next planeload.  Shackled to a seat on one of those planes was a 39-year-old single mother named Claudia. After she emerged from the reception center in a detainee sweatsuit, looking teary and depleted, she told me her story in the parking lot. She’d fled Honduras in 2023 because her ex-partner’s girlfriend was stalking her and had physically attacked her, and she’d settled in Atlanta with her 11-year-old son. In December she was arrested for driving without a license and spent three and a half months in ICE detention, where she pleaded to be reunited with her son, but was ignored. “I really wanted to bring him with me,” Claudia said. “Being with him is my top priority.” A cousin said he would start saving money to get her son a passport and bring him to Honduras, but it was unclear when that would happen.Sofia Valiente for The AtlanticOutside the deportee reception center in La LimaSince retaking office, Donald Trump has sent hundreds of thousands of immigrants like Claudia into the deportation pipeline, where many are transferred from facility to facility—losing access to their families, lawyers, and journalists—before being sent abroad. ICE was holding 60,000 people in custody as of early April; 71 percent have no criminal convictions. The agency is detaining people who are in the middle of applying for legal status, and the Justice Department has directed hard-line immigration judges to deny bail and ICE attorneys to pursue deportations as vigorously as possible. “The only process invaders are due is… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert from Alabama, spent years as a bit player in the world of election denial. He wasn’t a star with his own media platform, like the MyPillow guy. But he still gained a modest following by circulating conspiracy theories about President Trump’s 2020 defeat, including that poll workers gave Trump supporters—but not other voters—felt-tip markers to fill out their ballots, rendering them invalid and unreadable by voting machines. More recently, he’s asserted that a group of federal lawmakers is covering up foreign election interference. “They’re all puppets,” he said on the Rumble-streamed Real AF Patriot show in January. “They’re bought and paid for; it’s just by who.” He claimed that because of “undeniable” evidence of malfeasance, justice was coming.On that last point, Parikh may actually be in a position to know. He is now pushing debunked election claims from within the systems he rails against as a special government employee in the Trump administration. The search-warrant affidavit that allowed the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in January—an extraordinary intervention by federal law enforcement—cited an analysis by Parikh. Last fall, Parikh began a contract with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office that made him a player in the state’s process for certifying election equipment. He boasts of access to the Wyoming secretary of state, who, he said on Rumble, has invited him to participate in an online presentation with residents. And at 1:01 a.m. on Christmas Day, Trump made Parikh internet famous when he reposted a video of the 63-year-old testifying in court that election equipment could be infiltrated remotely.Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. Another is the attorney Kurt Olsen, who was brought on last fall by Trump to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen’s work in the government—following years of pushing debunked or unsubstantiated theories—helped lead to the seizure of the Georgia ballots. In Arizona, federal probes of the 2020 election by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are under way. Olsen and other Trump administration officials have participated in extensive meetings about U.S. elections with senior members of the Justice Department in recent months, four people familiar with the meetings told us. In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson said, “The Justice Department… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Fifteen years after Mitt Romney stood on an Iowa hay bale and proclaimed that “corporations are people, my friend,” his declaration is no longer mockable. The amount of money corporations spend anonymously to sway federal elections has increased from $359 million in 2012 to $1.4 billion in the most recent presidential cycle. All of that spending by “dark money” nonprofits is protected by the same right to free speech enjoyed by “natural persons,” because the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. FEC that U.S. corporations function as citizen associations under the Constitution.But not all of these “people” are created exactly equal. Whereas humans are automatically granted certain rights at birth, corporate personhood comes into existence under state laws that define its powers—a fact that opponents of corporate money in politics hope to use to transform how U.S. elections are funded. Hawaii is the first state to try. Earlier this month, a nearly unanimous and bipartisan majority—well, as bipartisan as it gets in a state with so few Republicans—of Hawaii’s state legislature voted to change the powers of corporations doing business in the state and no longer grant them the ability to spend on most political causes.“Corporations are not people. They are granted powers and privileges by the state,” State Senator Jarrett Keohokalole told me this week, explaining the rationale of the bill he sponsored. “How can a creation of the state have inalienable rights? It doesn’t make any sense.”The legislation—which Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a Democrat, has not yet signed—is expected to apply to for-profit companies, so-called dark-money nonprofits, unions, and chambers of commerce, potentially cutting off a major revenue stream for the super PACs that dominate politics. The legislation makes exceptions for journalistic work—as in, newspaper editorials explicitly advocating for certain candidates—and company-organized political-action committees that pool individual donations.Under the proposal, Hawaiian corporations would still enjoy personhood of a kind, but they would lack a single ability guaranteed to their living and breathing peers. Supporters point to Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 opinion in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a landmark case that set the course of corporate law that followed. “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” Marshall wrote. “Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.”Tom Moore, a senior fellow at the Center for American… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Douglas Wilson has a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system, “we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”Wilson is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170 affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member, and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of America, people listen.When I asked him about this position, Wilson said it wasn’t his top priority—“We have bigger fish to fry”—but something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years’ time. I found this intellectual footsie maddening. “If I said to you, ‘I think all white men should be put in cages—but not now; it’s not my aspiration for now,’ ” I suggested, “then you wouldn’t be interested in a single other thing that I had to say at that point.”Wilson chuckled. “Oh, I know you’d probably have all my attention.”This is twinkly, avuncular Douglas Wilson, the guy who joined a hippie congregation fresh out of the Navy because he liked to play guitar, and ended up leading services once the regular pastor moved on. The same guy who once went on a multicity debating tour with the New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and bonded with him over their shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. But the 72-year-old shows a different side on his website, Blog & Mablog. For more than two decades, Wilson has been airing piquant opinions on unruly women—or, as he calls them, “small-breasted biddies,” “harridans,” “lumberjack dykes,” and “Jezebels.” He once referred to Gloria Steinem and another feminist as “a couple of cunts.” And this is the polite version. Every year he celebrates “No Quarter November,” when he promises to tell readers what he really thinks.Wilson believes that women should “not ordinarily” hold political office, and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives’ weight, spending habits, and choice of… [TheTopNews] Read More.