Stephen Miller
Role at the time: Deputy White House chief of staff
Statement summary
On Hannity, Stephen Miller tied Abdul El-Sayed to Hasan Piker over Piker's "America deserved 9/11" remark, and said a party that makes common cause with him should receive no votes.
“The Democrat Party has embraced the platform of individuals who fundamentally hate America and hate Americans. ... Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan campaigned and promoted with Bernie Sanders a man named Hasan Piker. ... Hasan Piker said that America and Americans deserve 9/11.”
Internet Archive TV News recording of Hannity on Fox News, aired September 11, 2026, 6:00-7:00pm PDT, with deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller as guest. The text available from this item is Internet Archive closed-caption data, not a verified verbatim transcription. The captions contain visible artifacts elsewhere in the hour ("country of conscious" for conscience, "fine phone calls" for final phone calls, "a ceasation" for association), so the wording here should be treated as caption-derived. The quoted lines are independently corroborated by contemporaneous write-ups at The Gateway Pundit and LifeZette, which render them the same way. Capitalisation has been normalised from the all-lowercase caption feed. This broadcast pre-dates the September 17 Axios interview by six days; Miller is responding to Piker's earlier "America deserved 9/11" remark, not to the al-Qaeda comparison.
Why we used this label
Miller supports the substance of that line of attack, naming El-Sayed directly and treating his promotion of Piker as grounds to reject the party. He attributes the "deserved 9/11" sentiment to Piker rather than to El-Sayed himself, which is how the accusation has generally been constructed.