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u.s. state department
'Hope He Smirks in Hell': Biden Spox Matt Miller Panned for Finally Acknowledging Israeli War Crimes
"The most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," said one critic.
Jun 03, 2025
Matthew Miller—the former U.S. State Department spokesperson who smirked and lied his way through the Biden administration's support for Israel's annihilation of Gaza—now acknowledges that Israel has committed war crimes, but for many critics his admission is "too little, too late," as one critic said Tuesday.
Asked Monday by Sky News "Trump 100" podcast host Mark Stone whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza—as alleged by a growing number of experts and in an ongoing International Court of Justice case—Miller said: "I don't think it's a genocide, but I think it is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes."
"'Just following orders' alibi lost its efficacy after 1945."
When Stone said that "you wouldn't have said that at the podium" during his Biden administration tenure, Miller replied: "When you're at the podium, you're not expressing your personal opinion. You're expressing the conclusions of the United States government."
Numerous online critics blasted Miller's " just following orders" reply, with some noting that a number of State Department officials resigned in opposition to the Biden administration's support for Israel.
"Miller is a war criminal," Indian author and scholar Sunny Singh said, pointing to the legal principle established during the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials of Nazi officials stating that "the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
Another academic, Oxford University professor and lawyer Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg, said that "Miller is a despicable person who willingly accepted to be the face of a genocide to provide cover for one of the most horrific mass atrocities of this century and is now trying to escape a sinking ship. He is irredeemable."
The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project said on social media: "For months on end, in his position as State Department spokesperson, Matthew Miller lied through his teeth by denying Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza. Too little, too late, Matt, to finally admit it."
Entrepreneur-turned-commentator Arnaud Bertrand called Miller the "lowest of the low" in a lengthy social media post.
"Miller was quite literally the face of the U.S. covering for Israel, denying their war crimes on the podium day in and day out, all with his characteristic smirk," Bertrand said. "And NOW, after tens of thousands of women and children were massacred, he says he actually knew full well he was lying to the public, but that he was just doing his job and following orders."
"And the most cynical aspect of it all is that he is deluded enough to believe that now admitting what he knew all along makes him look principled," Bertrand added. "We're seeing more and more cases like his as the scale of the horrors that happened—and are still happening—in Gaza is becoming more and more impossible to deny. They're nothing more than opportunists trying to salvage their reputations on the graves of those they helped kill."
Miller's acknowledgment of Israeli war crimes marks a stark departure from what he typically said during many of his press briefings, when he repeatedly said that the Biden administration determined Israel was not breaking international law. Israel's conduct in the war prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged extermination and weaponized starvation—
Even as the Biden administration received hundreds of reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were using U.S.-supplied weapons to kill and maim thousands of Palestinian civilians, Miller kept pushing the false narrative that Israel was not committing war crimes, despite internal department findings and outside expert assessments.
Miller went even further, accusing United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of antisemitism in a bid to discredit her criticism of Israel and its U.S. and Western enablers, whom she called the "axis of genocide."
During one contentious exchange with journalist Sam Husseini, Miller acknowledged what many experts including in the Biden administration had warned: that the actual death toll in Gaza "could very well be more" than the roughly 38,000 Palestinians that the Gaza Health Ministry reported at the time. Asked by Husseini about a peer-reviewed study in the prestigious U.K. medical journal The Lancetestimating up to 186,000 indirect deaths in Gaza, Miller stumbled through his attempt at a response.
"You're smirking as you say that," Husseini said, giving birth to the "Count Smirkula" meme that dogged Miller for the rest of his tenure.
"Count Smirkula, Ma[t]thew Miller, stood on the podium day in and day out, denying Israel's war crimes," Palestinian engineer and researcher Bashar Zapen noted on social media. "The U.S. knew. Biden knew. Miller knew. He smirked every time he lied. Hope he smirks in hell."
During a press meeting on Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the US is aware that the death toll in Gaza “could very well be more” than what has been reported. pic.twitter.com/Gqs4Mim9it
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) July 10, 2024
Miller also said during the Sky News interview that there were "debates" about whether to suspend arms transfers to Israel, "and you saw at times us hold back certain arms while we negotiated the use of those arms."
However, at the time Miller denied that the Biden administration was considering any suspension of the billions of dollars in U.S. armed aid to Israel, which included bombs used in some of the deadliest IDF massacres in Gaza, such as the October 31, 2023 bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp with 2,000-pound bombs in which at least 126 civilians were killed in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander.
The Biden administration knew that the IDF had lifted all curbs on civilian harm following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, explicitly allowing the killing of an unlimited number of civilians in order to eliminate any Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking. Faced with growing congressional opposition to sending arms to Israel, the Biden administration repeatedly bypassed Congress to keep the armaments flowing.
The staggering Gaza death toll eventually prompted the Biden administration to temporarily suspend shipment of some arms including 2,000-pound bombs. But the shipments soon resumed and the death toll in Gaza—which now reportedly stands at more than 54,500 after nearly 20 months of Israel's onslaught and starvation-inducing siege—continued to rise.
Journalists—hundreds of whom have been killed or maimed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 2023—were particularly dismissive of Miller's acknowledgment.
"Zero respect for Matthew Miller,"
Washington Post opinion columnist Rana Ayyub wrote on the social media site X. "Day after day, he defended war crimes, gaslit the suffering of Gazans, and helped shape public opinion to justify atrocities—including the killing of journalists."
Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed
said on the same site that "we will also never forgive and forget you, and you will always be remembered as the smirker of the Gaza Genocide."
"You also must be held accountable," he added.
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Critics Warn 'Office of Remigration' Is Just Right-Wing Code for Trump's Office of Ethnic Cleansing
Despite the acceleration in raids, "public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends."
May 30, 2025
Eight months after U.S. President Donald Trump publicly called for a policy of "remigration"—a term that's become a rallying cry among far-right groups in Europe and sparked comparisons to ethnic cleansing—the U.S. State Department said Thursday that it plans to create an office devoted to the project, with refugee aid resources diverted to Trump's rapidly accelerating mass deportation campaign.
A State Department official toldAxios that the proposed creation of the Office of Remigration would be part of a broad reorganization of the agency, with a division that resettled Afghan people who supported the U.S. during the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan eliminated.
A proposal sent to Congress detailed how the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration's immigration work would be consolidated into three offices, including the Office of Remigration, to shift the bureau's focus "towards supporting the administration's efforts to return illegal aliens to their country of origin or legal status."
The office would be a "hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking," according to the proposal.
Trump first called for a "remigration" program in September 2024 ahead of the presidential election, saying he would "return Kamala [Harris]'s illegal migrants to their home countries" in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
The comment came amid his attacks on Haitian legal residents in Springfield, Ohio and Venezuelan migrants, claiming the U.S. was under an "invasion" and saying he would "ship them back to their country."
His use of the term remigration went largely unremarked on by the corporate media, said the news analysis group Media Matters at the time, but Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan noted that Trump was "calling for the ethnic cleansing of legal immigrants in the United States."
"Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends."
The term has been embraced by far-right groups in Europe including Alternative for Germany and Austria's Freedom Party, which called for the European Union to appoint a remigration commissioner last year.
Remigration policy has long been promoted by Austrian far-right activist Martin Sellner, who had communications with the white supremacist who killed 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Sellner has denied involvement in the attacks.
On his website, Wired reported on Thursday, Sellner "lays out a three-phase plan to implement remigration" that includes "striking similarities to Trump's current immigration policies":
The primary aim of this phase is "stopping the invasion." The Trump administration, invoking the Alien Enemies Act in March, cited an alleged "invasion" by a Venezuelan gang as a source of authority to take unprecedented steps to remove migrants from the U.S.
Sellner's website also lists a number of "tools" that can be used to achieve remigration, which includes "stop family reunification"—something Trump was doing even in his first term in office. In the first phase, Sellner also encourages governments to "create an ultimatum and economic incentives to self-deport." The Trump administration is already purportedly offering undocumented immigrants a stipend of $1,000 if they use the CBP Home App to self deport.
Sellner adds that governments should "cut humanitarian aid" to force immigrants to stop entering the country. Last month, the Trump administration attempted to cut legal aid to unaccompanied migrant children, only for a court to temporarily block its efforts.
Julia Ebner, a researcher with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the University of Oxford, toldThe Guardian last year that the term "sounds a lot more benign than what it actually stands for. Because, particularly in the context of Germany and Austria, there is still a very strong association of the term mass deportation with the Holocaust."
Far-right lawmakers and activists from the U.S., Germany, Ireland, and France were among more than 400 attendees at the first-ever Remigration Summit near Milan earlier this month. Jacky Eubanks, who was endorsed by Trump during her 2022 run for the Michigan House of Representatives, claimed in a speech at the summit that Europeans were the "founding stock" of the U.S., disregarding the existence of indigenous people across the continent.
The State Department is planning to open the Office of Remigration as the administration ramps up its mass deportation operations, with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller informing immigration officials last week that federal agents should begin arresting 3,000 immigrants per day—tripling numbers from earlier this year.
The push has coincided with mandates for federal law enforcement agents to assist in raids and arrests and the targeting of people at formerly protected locations like courthouses.
"We're seeing the Trump administration take the unprecedented step of arresting non-citizens who are following the government's rules and procedures, and showing up for their court hearings," Nayna Gupta, the policy director for the American Immigration Council, toldThe Guardian on Thursday. "They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where [immigrants] are doing exactly what they're supposed to do."
The Washington Postreported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement in more than 20 states have been directed to arrest people at courthouses during court proceedings.
"The Trump administration is pressuring judges in immigration courtrooms to function more like cogs in the mass deportation machinery rather than as fair and balanced arbiters of the law," Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Post. "That is not the way Americans want and understand our judicial system to work. Immigration judges should be worried about this."
Gupta said the administration is "doubling down" on its "illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda."
Less than a third of Americans in a March Gallup poll agreed with Trump's stated goal of removing all undocumented immigrants from the United States; those who said "some" undocumented immigrants should be deported said that committing violent crimes should be a prerequisite for removal.
"Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump's immigration agenda," said Gupta, "as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities, and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies."
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Insiders Say Trump Foreign Aid Cuts Causing 'Violence and Chaos' in Fragile Nations
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," said one former senior State Department official. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
May 28, 2025
U.S. State Department officials in at least two countries have recently warned that the Trump administration's sudden foreign aid cutoff is fueling "violence and chaos" in some of the world's most vulnerable nations, according to a report published Wednesday.
Internal State Department communications viewed by
ProPublicarevealed that U.S. Embassy officials in the southeastern African nation of Malawi sounded the alarm on cuts to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), which have "yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking" in the Dzaleka refugee camp.
Meanwhile, dramatically reduced U.S. funding to feed refugees in Kenya has sparked violent protests and other incidents, including the trampling death of a pregnant woman during a stampede for food in which police opened fire on desperately hungry people.
"In Kenya, for example, the WFP will cut its rations in June down to 28% — or less than 600 calories a day per person — a low never seen before...The WFP’s standard minimum for adults is 2,100 calories per day." Just unbelievable suffering as U.S. withdraws foreign aid.
[image or embed]
— Lisa Song (@lisalsong.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 1:15 PM
This, as President Donald Trump's administration—spearheaded by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its de facto leader, Elon Musk—has taken a wrecking ball approach to vital offices and programs including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), where contracts for programs including those that fed and provided healthcare for millions of people and fought diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS have been slashed by up to 90%.
Republicans have attempted to justify the cuts under the guise of tackling the staggering U.S. national debt, even as they push a massive tax cut that would disproportionately benefit the ultrarich and corporations while adding trillions of dollars to the deficit, according to a nonpartisan congressional committee.
Although a federal judge ruled in March that Musk's moves to shutter USAID were likely unconstitutional and ordered a halt to the effort, much damage has already been done.
"It is devastating, but it's not surprising," Eric Schwartz, a former State Department assistant secretary and National Security Council member, told ProPublica. "It's all what people in the national security community have predicted."
"I struggle for adjectives to adequately describe the horror that this administration has visited on the world," Schwartz added. "It keeps me up at night."
It is unclear if any of the cables were sent via the official dissent channel set up during the administration of then-President Richard Nixon in an effort to allow State Department personnel to voice opposition to U.S. policies and practices—especially in regard to the Vietnam War—and stop leaks to the press.
The State Department responded to the ProPublica exposé in a statement saying: "It is grossly misleading to blame unrest and violence around the world on America. No one can reasonably expect the United States to be equipped to feed every person on Earth or be responsible for providing medication for every living human."
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed during a congressional hearing that "no one has died" due to USAID cuts, an assertion refuted by Congressman Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), who displayed photos and harrowing stories of people who have, in fact, died since funding for vital programs was slashed or eliminated.
"It's clear that people are dying because U.S. aid was suspended and then reduced. But it's difficult to come up with a precise death toll that can be tied directly to Trump administration policies," according to a Washington Post analysis by Glenn Kessler published on Tuesday. "The death certificates, after all, aren't marked, 'Due to lack of funding by U.S. government.'"
Last month, the international medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that there will be "more preventable deaths and untold suffering around the world" due to the Trump administration.
"These sudden cuts by the Trump administration are a human-made disaster for the millions of people struggling to survive amid wars, disease outbreaks, and other emergencies," Avril Benoît, who heads the U.S. branch of MSF, said last month.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025."
On the ground in Kenya, WFP country director Lauren Landis told ProPublica that her organization is cutting daily aid rations to less than 600 calories per person—far less than the standard minimum 2,100 calories per day under agency guidelines.
"We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025," Landis said, describing children who look like "walking skeletons" due to severe malnutrition.
Meanwhile, enough food to feed more than 1 million people in some of the world's most fragile places through most of the summer is moldering in storage as USAID funds run dry and workers are laid off.
This,
warned WFP last month, "could amount to a death sentence for millions of people facing extreme hunger and starvation."
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