Man Charged With Threatening Katie Miller, Wife of Top Trump Aide Stephen Miller

Man Charged With Threatening Katie Miller, Wife of Top Trump Aide Stephen Miller
Friday October 2^nd, 2026 at 3:41 AM

The charges against the Massachusetts man were not the first time the Miller family has raised concerns about its security.

Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, with his wife, Katie Miller. Prosecutors say a Massachusetts man sent more than 40 phone and text messages to Ms. Miller.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

A Massachusetts man was indicted on Thursday on charges of cyberstalking after sending dozens of threatening phone and text messages to Katie Miller, the wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s most senior White House aides.

The man, John Anthony Proia III, 41, was also accused of sending threatening messages to Ms. Miller’s parents. The charging document identifies the recipient of the threats only as Victim-1, but an official familiar with the case said the person in question was Ms. Miller.

Over the past two months, according to an indictment filed in Federal District Court in Boston, Mr. Proia sent more than 40 phone and text messages to Ms. Miller, including some calls late at night. Prosecutors said that he often used expletives and “a menacing tone” in his communications, which came from an ever-changing series of numbers. Mr. Proia, they added, employed an internet-based phone system known as voice over internet protocol that allowed him to obfuscate his identity and change his phone number.

According to the indictment, some of the text messages sent to Ms. Miller used obscene and disturbing sexual language. In one message sent to her parents, the indictment said, Mr. Proia referred to Mr. Miller as “a Jewish Nazi/white supremacist” and asked Ms. Miller’s mother if it disturbed her that her daughter was married to him.

The case against Mr. Proia comes at a moment when threats against public figures of all political stripes are on the rise.

“Terrorizing someone isn’t some sick game; it’s a crime, which is why the F.B.I. and our partners take it so seriously,” Ted E. Docks, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Boston division, said in a statement.

Mr. Docks also said that Mr. Proia had been arrested by members of the F.B.I.’s joint terrorism task force, an unusual show of force for a cyberstalking case. Mr. Proia was scheduled to appear in court on Thursday evening.

The charges filed against Mr. Proia were not the first time the Miller family has raised concerns about its security.

In November, state and federal investigators scrutinized a Virginia woman, Barbara Wien, who distributed leaflets disclosing the Millers’ home address. Those inquiries prompted a secret court fight over the balance between personal safety and free speech at a moment of sensitivity over political violence: just weeks after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed by an assassin at an event at a Utah college campus.

Before Mr. Proia was indicted, two senior F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisors in the bureau’s Washington field office were demoted after expressing concern about the case involving the messages to Ms. Miller, according to another person familiar with the case.

Darren Cox, the assistant director in charge of the Washington office, said this week that he had made that decision, not Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director.

“Director Patel did not order this decision,” Mr. Cox wrote in a statement. “This was a personnel decision made at the Washington field office level alone based on our constant evaluation of mission needs. Any suggestion otherwise is false.”

Alan Feuer is a reporter for The Times who covers the effects President Trump has had on the courts, the Justice Department and the broader rule of law.

DOJ charges Boston man with threatening conservative podcaster Katie Miller
Thursday October 1^st, 2026 at 11:38 PM

Federal authorities on Thursday charged a Boston-area man with harassing Katie Miller, the conservative podcaster and wife of senior White House aide Stephen Miller, in a case that sparked a heated debate among prosecutors and within the FBI.

John Anthony Proia III, 41, of Waltham, Massachusetts, was charged with one count of cyberstalking. Prosecutors say he contacted his victim more than 40 times via phone and text over the span of two months earlier this year, leaving menacing messages about her and her husband. He also sent her parents disturbing texts, they said.

Although authorities did not identify Proia’s target by name, describing her in a news release only as a “former political adviser and prominent member of the Republican Party,” two people familiar with the matter confirmed the alleged target was Katie Miller.

Prosecutors said Proia used an ever-changing series of phone numbers to contact Katie Miller at all hours, often using expletives and vulgar language to criticize her and her husband.

“The defendant repeatedly and relentlessly targeted the victim, her husband and her family with deeply disturbing communications that profoundly disrupted their lives,” said Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.

Proia was arrested Thursday by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and was released after an initial appearance in federal court. His attorney did not immediately return requests for comment.

Katie Miller thanked Foley, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and the FBI’s Washington field office in a post to social media about the arrest.

Proia’s indictment follows days of internal Justice Department debate over the case. Last week, the FBI transferred the top two agents running the counterterrorism division of its Washington field office over dissatisfaction with what higher-ups deemed to be the slow pace of their investigation into the threats against Katie Miller, The Washington Post has reported.

As President Donald Trump’s policies — including an immigration enforcement crackdown in which Stephen Miller has played a prominent role — have provoked fierce opposition across the country, the administration has prioritized prosecuting people who threaten public officials, federal agents and judges. Administration officials have pointed to recent high-profile incidents of political violence, like the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last year, to justify their heightened vigilance.

In some cases, those threats have prompted indisputably serious concerns from federal investigators that the perpetrator intends to commit an violent acts.

But in many others, defense attorneys have objected to the Justice Department’s decision to label threatening messages “domestic terrorism” and questioned its expanding definition of what constitutes a threat worthy of federal prosecution instead of one better left to local authorities.

Several defendants who have been charged in recent months are accused of little more than making vaguely menacing posts online, with little evidence to suggest they had any intent or ability to act on those alleged threats.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department charged former FBI director James B. Comey with threatening the president’s life after he posted a photo to social media depicting seashells spelling out “86 47.” Trump is the 47th president and “86” can mean to get rid of someone. Prosecutors say it is also mob slang for killing someone.

Comey maintains he did not create the shell arrangement and had no idea it could be read as a threat.

But unlike Comey and others who have been charged under a statute that prohibits communicating interstate threats — which requires prosecutors to prove the message contained a threat of injury or violence — Proia was indicted under a cyberstalking statute that requires only proof that the defendant intended to harass their victim and attempted to cause substantial emotional distress.

Prosecutors said Thursday that the relentless nature of Proia’s alleged communications instilled “real fear and harm.” In one message, cited by authorities, he purportedly contacted Katie Miller’s parents referring to Stephen Miller as a “Jewish Nazi/white supremacist.”

“Did you raise her to be trash or did that just happen naturally?” Proia allegedly texted them.

The Millers have emerged as frequent targets. Last year, the couple and their children moved to housing at a secure military facility, citing concern for their personal safety following protests in the Arlington neighborhood where they were previously residing.

Local activists posted fliers disclosing their home address and scrawled messages on sidewalks in chalk accusing Stephen Miller — the architect of controversial White House policies on immigration enforcement and domestic terrorism — of “destroying democracy.”

“If we don’t step up and start putting people in cuffs for these actions, what comes next?” Katie Miller asked in a Fox News interview shortly afterward.

In May, Virginia prosecutors declined to bring a case against Barbara Wien, a retired peace studies professor, who was involved in those protests, saying she was “not likely to be found guilty and her speech [was] likely to be found constitutionally protected.”

The FBI’s Washington field office was also involved in that investigation, but to date no federal charges have been filed.

Perry Stein contributed to this report.

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FBI hunting the hackers who stole its employees' sensitive data
Thursday October 1^st, 2026 at 10:50 AM

NPR Topics: National Security

The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is seen on Sept. 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Samuel Corum/Getty Images hide caption

Samuel Corum/Getty Images

In a video posted on social media, the assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, Brett Leatherman, vowed Tuesday to hunt down the members of a cybercriminal group going by the name of ShinyHunters, the same group that last week claimed to steal reams of sensitive data from the FBI itself.

"You know how to find us, and we know how to find you," Leatherman said in the video, encouraging the prolific group of loosely connected data extortionists to come forward and share information or face the consequences. "I suggest you reach out first while the choice is still yours."

The FBI says it is "aggressively" investigating the breach and how hackers got ahold of sensitive FBI employment information, including whether the hackers got into third-party software or the FBI's own internal systems. In a statement emailed to NPR, a FBI spokesperson said the bureau is working "around the clock to investigate the cyber incident involving FBIJobs.gov and is in regular communication with anyone who may be impacted."

It's still unclear how much information was stolen, though media organizations and threat intelligence researchers have already verified the authenticity of some of the stolen materials. Meanwhile, a defacement message was posted on the FBI's jobs website late last week where ShinyHunters took credit for the attack, and the site was temporarily taken down.

Current and former FBI employees familiar with the matter, who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisal for speaking about an ongoing investigation, said many employees first found out about the breach from media reports. They suggested there could be as many as several terabytes of text files in the data tranche, including FBI job applications, details on promotions, information on sensitive job postings, family details, medical data and more. Those same employees, particularly those who have retired, say there's growing frustration with FBI leadership, including FBI Director Kash Patel, about the lack of communication about the breach, exactly who is impacted, and how the FBI plans to protect its current and former employees. Some retired employees who worked undercover might need protection services like relocation assistance or even name changes if their data is exposed publicly.

The FBI told NPR it sent multiple "bureau wide communications within 24 hours of public reporting" of the breach" and that "the FBI treats the security of its own information and the safety of its workforce as top priorities."

One former senior FBI official told NPR the breach could be on par with the 2015 compromise of tens of millions of sensitive government employee records from the Office of Personnel Management. The U.S. government attributed that breach to the Chinese government and described it as a widespread espionage operation designed to identify potential targets for intelligence gathering.

However, unlike the OPM breach, there is more concern in this instance that the stolen materials will fall into the wrong hands or be otherwise weaponized, either by ShinyHunters or any number of criminal, terrorist, or nation-state organizations seeking to pilfer the stolen files. ShinyHunters has come out and said it never intended to leak the files, despite giving a deadline of Sept. 30 for the FBI to amend previously published press releases about the group that it argued were inaccurate, but that doesn't necessarily prevent further theft or exploitation of the data.

The bureau and its former employees are "bracing for impact" and assume that the stolen materials may be irretrievably compromised, according to the former senior FBI official.

But experts argue that the ShinyHunters members, which many threat intelligence researchers have previously identified as a loose collective of young hackers around the world, should also brace themselves for the FBI's response.

Cynthia Kaiser, the former FBI deputy director of the cyber division who currently leads ransomware research at cybersecurity company Halcyon, described the hackers as "reckless" for targeting the FBI, particularly knowing the FBI has a clear policy of not paying a ransom or negotiating with criminal actors. "When any threat actor targets the FBI directly, they should expect that the FBI is going to marshall additional resources to bring them quickly to justice," she wrote in a social media post.

While the FBI has promised to seek the information to make arrests against ShinyHunters hackers in the wake of this breach, it's unclear how imminent those actions might be.

The FBI's video posted on social media also featured a recently announced arrest of one alleged member of ShinyHunters in Amsterdam by the Dutch National Police, an operation the FBI thanked its Dutch partners for leading. However, that arrest preceded the ShinyHunters theft of FBI personnel data, according to the former senior FBI official familiar with the matter. It's unclear if that arrest served as motivation for the breach of FBI data and whether there was concern about potential retaliation following that arrest.

While the FBI has not shared any technical details about how the hackers got into its systems, Google's Mandiant published new research revealing that ShinyHunters is currently targeting a vulnerability in a human resources software tool called PeopleSoft, which is owned by tech giant Oracle. PeopleSoft is a tool used by the FBI, among other major clients in IT services, corporations, government, academia and beyond.

Google originally disclosed information about the vulnerability and its exploitation in June and revealed that while the company released a patch, some customers instead implemented protections like a firewall to attempt to prevent bad actors from exploiting it. Ultimately, ShinyHunters has managed to easily bypass those controls.

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Blue-State Governors Are Rolling Over for Trump’s FBI
Thursday October 1^st, 2026 at 10:48 AM

The New Republic

In a survey of every Democratic governor in America, not a single state leader told The New Republic that they would move to dismantle state and local police participation in the FBI task forces carrying out investigations into political speech and organizing. Of 24 governors contacted, only two gave The New Republic extensive answers about Trump’s executive order criminalizing speech and protest, and the FBI entities carrying out these orders.

In 2025, Donald Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, a sweeping directive instructing the departments of State, Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security to pursue a dramatic effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The memorandum also instructs the attorney general to submit a list of groups and entities deemed to be domestic terrorists to the president.

Among the many indicators of the new violent domestic threat in NSPM-7 are “anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The mechanism for investigating and prosecuting these new thought crimes is a post-9/11 invention that fuses the FBI with state police, local police, the National Guard, DHS, military intelligence components, and sometimes even the CIA into a Joint Terrorism Task Force, or JTTF. A national network of over 200 JTTFs was expanded through the justification of preventing the intelligence-sharing gaps that allowed hijackers to attack the twin towers on 9/11.

In the intervening years, JTTFs have been used to deputize state and local police into federal agents, injecting federal directives like NSPM-7 directly into local communities. A study of 14 JTTFs conducted by the Brennan Center described their functioning as “organized chaos,” writing that the network functions as “a sprawling, federally subsidized, and loosely coordinated system designed to share information that is collected according to varying local standards.”

The Brennan Center report also found that JTTFs’ headlong rush into intelligence work has “created risks that hurt counterterrorism efforts and undermine police work” and that the “lack of oversight, accountability, and quality control over how police collect and share personal information about law-abiding Americans not only violates the civil liberties of Americans, but creates a mountain of data with little to no counterterrorism value.”

That sprawling chaos is now being weaponized by the Justice Department to pursue investigations and intimidation of activists across the country. The FBI has even stood up a NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center composed of 10 federal agencies to organize the JTTFs’ NSPM-7 investigations. According to internal FBI documents first obtained by the nonprofit Property of the People, NSPM-7 investigations began in dozens of blue states, including New York, California, and Illinois.

But the governors from all three of those states equivocated in response to The New Republic’s inquiry about whether they were taking any action to stop the implementation of NSPM-7.

Gavin Newsom of California shirked the question, telling The New Republic in a written statement only that “California’s security efforts operate wholly under state law and appropriate safeguards.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office attempted a more acrobatic maneuver, claiming that “New York State Police assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force focus only on genuine criminal or terrorism investigations, follow New York’s laws, and do not participate in civil immigration enforcement or the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center.” That answer is misleading. The FBI Joint Mission Center is the central hub for administering NSPM-7, but its participants are only a few dozen federal employees based in Washington, D.C.

As the map of NSPM-7 investigations makes clear, the New York JTTF—which is chock-full of NYPD intelligence officers—is actively pursuing NSPM-7 investigations. The governor’s office also acknowledged that New York State Police members and command staff are assigned to the New York JTTF and that those members work in partnership with the FBI and the other agencies represented on the JTTF under the supervision and oversight of state police command staff.

This map was obtained independently by TNR via the Freedom of Information Act, after it was obtained by the nonprofit Property of the People.

“Governor Hochul’s top priority is public safety, and she expects all law enforcement agencies to utilize resources responsibly to fight crime and keep communities safe, while respecting New Yorkers’ right to exercise their First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly,” her office said in a statement.

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also demurred on the question of how exactly local and state police are participating in the FBI’s ongoing Illinois NSPM-7 investigations, telling The New Republic, “Regardless of any actions taken by federal officials under the direction of the Trump administration, Illinois remains committed to maintaining the integrity of its own processes and will continue to ensure law enforcement information is handled appropriately and focused on legitimate public safety purposes, not political agendas.”

The Illinois State Police, or ISP, who also provided a statement, wrote that the JTTF information process is a critical state asset but that the current gubernatorial administration does not tolerate abuse of the process. “The State of Illinois is committed to protecting free speech and ISP officers do not participate in the potential targeting of First Amendment rights. ISP personnel assigned to JTTFs remain under the authority of ISP, are subject to Illinois law, and are bound by the U.S. and Illinois constitutions. Any violation of the ISP rules of conduct is subject to discipline, up to and including termination, under the independent ISP Merit Board process.”

How this firewall squares with the FBI’s ongoing Illinois investigation remains unclear.

The office of Hawaii’s Governor Josh Green simply responded to questions about NSPM-7 with: “This is not relevant to Hawai’i state law enforcement or National Guard personnel.” The office of New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill told The New Republic, “I’d refer you to the NJ Office of the Attorney General on this.” The office of Delaware Governor Matt Meyer said they’d respond, then never did.

The universal support for FBI JTTFs makes sense given the fear most elected officials have around the scaling down of the national security establishment. Should an attack take place under their watch after a downsizing or reduction in budget and scope, they could end up catching the blame.

But earlier this year, there was one democratic gubernatorial candidate who broke with the ranks of the Democratic herd to proffer that the FBI’s JTTFs scouring the country for dissidents should and could be kicked out of Wisconsin—the home state of the progenitor of the Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

“Because of the seriousness of the Trump threat, I would use my authority over state police forces to cease any cooperation with a federal joint operation task force that is designed to target American citizens exercising their civil liberties,” Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong told KLIP News in July. She also said that the memorandums of understanding that authorize state and local police to work with the FBI “are a loophole to essentially federalize local police forces. I do not wish to see Wisconsin become a patchwork of communities where people are unsure if they are safe depending on which side of the county line they may find themselves.”

Wisconsin’s current governor, Tony Evers, did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment.

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Garry Kasparov and Ilya Ponomaryov Targeted in Alleged Assassination Plot in U.S., Report Says - The Moscow Times
Wednesday September 30^th, 2026 at 3:35 PM

A Russian intelligence network planned to assassinate exiled opposition figures Garry Kasparov and Ilya Ponomaryov in the United States this summer, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported Tuesday.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging five men over alleged plots involving surveillance, recruitment and targeted killings against two opposition figures, who were not identified by name.

El Mundo said it had obtained information that the alleged plot organizers were in contact with people assigned to track and kill Kasparov and Ponomaryov around the time when both were alerted to the assassination threat.

Ponomaryov declined to confirm or deny whether he had been tipped off, but told The Moscow Times that the allegations mark “a new level of escalation” by Russia.

“America was previously considered safe, especially compared to the EU, Turkey and Ukraine. The Kremlin is now destroying that framework as well, which had been in place since World War II,” he said.

Kasparov did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to El Mundo, a recruited operative had allegedly taken photos and videos of the Washington house and office linked to Ponomaryov, whom the U.S. Justice Department indictment identifies only as “Victim-1.” The operative refused to carry out the assassination, according to the indictment.

Kasparov, a chess grandmaster, was reportedly provided special protection for the first time since he moved to New York in 2013. El Mundo did not indicate whether Ponomaryov, who lives between Kyiv and Washington, was offered the same protection.

The Spanish newspaper reported that Vladimir Kara-Murza, another exiled anti-Kremlin figure who was released from Russian prison in 2024 in a landmark East-West prisoner swap, is also viewed as a potential target of assassination.

Two of the indicted Russian nationals also reportedly targeted Ivan Tyutrin, who founded the Free Russia Forum conference in Lithuania with Kasparov, as well as Bashkir independence activist Ruslan Gabbasov, who previously discovered a tracking device inside his car in Lithuania.

The Kremlin and the Russian Embassy in Washington have not commented on the U.S. allegations, though Moscow has previously denied carrying out targeted killings abroad.

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Putin Humiliated as Irreplaceable Nuclear Bomber Crashes
Wednesday September 30^th, 2026 at 3:31 PM

The Daily Beast Latest Articles

A large number of Putin’s losses have been self-inflicted.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an annual meeting

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A nuclear-capable Russian bomber has crashed during a training flight, handing Vladimir Putin another stinging loss from his irreplaceable strategic fleet.

The Tu-95 “Bear” went down in the Far Eastern Amur region while flying without ammunition during a training flight on Tuesday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. Only one of the seven crew members survived the crash.

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