Trump aide Stephen Miller reverses course and agrees to cooperate with Capitol riot committee

Former aide is suing to block committee from getting his phone records

Donald Trump’s former speechwriter and top aide on the issue of immigration, Stephen Miller, will appear before the Jan 6 committee on Thursday.

The surprise announcement comes as Mr Miller is separately seeking to block the committee’s efforts to obtain his phone records via a lawsuit. The Associated Press first reported news of his plans.

Mr Miller is one of many White House aides who attended the “Stop the Steal”-themed rally which featured an appearance from Donald Trump in the hours leading up to the Capitol siege. As speechwriter, Mr Miller is thought to have prepared the remarks that the president gave that day encouraging his supporters to fight for a conspiracy theory which his legal team had been unable to prove: that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.

His presence in the White House following the rally itself is also likely of interest to the panel, as is his work to spread Mr Trump’s election-related conspiracies in the weeks leading up to January 6. Lawmakers on the panel are thought to be establishing the existence of a criminal conspiracy involving Mr Trump and his closest aides to overturn the 2020 election.

Other aides to the former president thought to be allies or in the same vein of Trump loyalism as Mr Miller like Steve Bannon have fully resisted the committee’s requests for testimony and are now battling charges of contempt of Congress from the Justice Department. Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is among that list but unlike the others has yet to be charged with contempt, drawing criticism to the DOJ from members of the January 6 committee.

Mr Miller was originally subpoenaed alongside a number of other Trump loyalists by the committee in November. At the time, lawmakers said he “by his own account participated in efforts to spread false information about alleged voter fraud in the November 2020 election, as well as efforts to encourage state legislatures to alter the outcome of the November 2020 election by appointing alternate slates of electors.”

Those false slates of electors were crucial to the efforts of Mr Trump’s DC-based “war room” as they sought to overturn the 2020 election: Members of the former president’s team apparently hoped that on January 6 the vice president would intervene during a session of the Senate to certify the election and demand that some states won by Mr Biden in 2020 toss out their Biden-supporting electors and replace them; GOP-held state legislatures would then take actions leading to the selection of Trump-backing electors who would swing the Electoral College in Mr Trump’s favour.

The far-fetched plan had no basis in the Constitution, as former Vice Presiden Mike Pence has repeatedly insisted, and was based on allegations of massive, country-wide election fraud that was never proven to be true by Mr Trump or his allies while US cybersecurity and law enforcement authorities including some appointed by the president himself were united in the assertion that the 2020 election was secure and the results were valid.

Mr Miller had the distinction of being one of a small number of senior White House officials who survived the entirety of the Trump presidency; other close allies like Steve Bannon saw themselves ousted over four years of Mr Trump’s leadership for various reasons.