Stephen Miller’s New Recusals

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