Trump adviser never pushed migrant drone strikes

WASHINGTON — Former Department of Homeland Security appointee Miles Taylor claims in an upcoming book that senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller asked then-Coast Guard commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft if the US could use drones to slaughter migrants at sea.

One problem: Both men purportedly involved in the conversation say it never happened, they exclusively told The Post this week.

The disturbing allegation was reported Monday by Rolling Stone, which reviewed Taylor’s tome “Blowback” ahead of its July 18 release.

“Taylor writes about an April 2018 conversation in which Miller allegedly advocated an attack on a migrant ship headed for the United States,” the magazine wrote. “Miller, Taylor writes, argued for the potential mass killing of civilians by suggesting they were not protected under the US Constitution because they were in international waters.”

The book further claims Miller asked Zukunft, “Why can’t we use a Predator drone to obliterate” a boat full of migrants, to which the admiral allegedly replied, “Because, Stephen, it would be against international law,” according to Rolling Stone.

Other media outlets have picked up the story, with Vanity Fair going so far as to argue the tale “should not come as a surprise” because Miller is “one of the most evil people to have worked for Donald Trump.”

While Miller has been a divisive figure and target of the left for his instrumental role in much of the Trump administration’s hardline border security policies, he vehemently denied the allegation in a statement to The Post.

“Those who uncritically regurgitated this author’s malicious and preposterous lies should now feel deep humiliation,” Miller said. “Their humiliation should be exceeded only by the shame felt by those responsible for publishing this work of vile defamation from an individual desperate for a relevance he will never know or find.”

The reporting was also repulsive to Zukunft, who said he was blindsided by the allegation.

“To Stephen Miller’s defense, at no point did he even intimate that, ‘Hey, maybe we should’ – you know, a flippant remark that we could use drone technology to take out innocent migrants just trying to find a better life,” he said.

Though Miller remains loyal to Trump, endorsing him for the 2024 Republican presidential ticket, Zunkunft, like Taylor, endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 despite working under the Trump administration until his retirement in 2018.

While Rolling Stone reported Zukunft said he had “no recollection” of the conversation, the retired admiral told the Post his theory of where the claim may have arisen, adding that he gave the same explanation to the magazine’s reporters.

When asked by Rolling Stone to respond to Zunkunft’s denial, Taylor replied: “The conversation happened.”

Zukunft, who said Taylor never called him to verify the claim before including it in his book, proffered that it could have been a misconception by someone eavesdropping on a conversation he had with Miller aboard a Coast Guard plane returning from a DHS trip to Florida in the spring of 2018.

“On the flight back, Stephen Miller is in the plane with me and some of his staff and some of mine. We’re having a very deep philosophical discussion that lasted well over an hour for the flight back to DC about border security,” he said. “And my approach was, you know, we need to look beyond the border and look at if can we do more in the source countries in Central America, where people vote with their feet and leave and enter the United States illegally.”

“And so this went back and forth, but at no time did Stephen Miller even suggest that we would use drones to shoot up migrant vessels. And if he had said something like that, I would have put him down on the spot,” he added.

So how, then, did the egregious rumor spread?

“There were other people on the plane and so I’m not sure what was picked up what that may have led to Miles Taylor putting this in a book and attributing that to Steve Miller,” Zukunft said. “There might have been overheard discussions about using armed helicopters – not to use deadly force, but just to disable drug-laden vessels – but at no point was there any discussion about using any type of lethal force against boatloads of migrants.”

Taylor remains best known for billing himself as a “senior Trump administration official” in an anonymous New York Times op-ed from September 2018 in which he claimed to be “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Despite serving a stint of less than one year as chief of staff to then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and then-acting secretary Chad Wolf, Taylor was not widely known in Washington.

When Taylor finally revealed himself as the op-ed’s author, then White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called him a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer” who “was ineffective and incompetent during his time as DHS chief of staff, which is why he was promptly fired after only serving in this role for a matter of weeks.”