Gun-Nut Reporter Did Not Actually Fight Off One Million Crack Fiends Singlehandedly

A few years ago, wingnutty bobblehead Emily Miller published a series of articles about the Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare she encountered when buying and registering a handgun in Washington after she survived a home invasion. She eventually expanded the articles into the book “Emily Gets Her Gun...But Obama Wants to Take Yours,” for which she has been feted by gun-humpers everywhere. The NRA even made a video of her story. A dark night, a vulnerable young blonde white woman, a bunch of street thugs probably hopped up on the Mary Jane … Scary!

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Unless Miller made most of it up and has changed her bullshit tale multiple times over the years, as Erik Wemple has been documenting at the Washington Post. 

The basic story goes like this: On New Year’s Day in 2010, Miller was house-sitting for some friends in D.C. She took their dog for a quick walk, leaving the house unlocked. When she returned 10 minutes later, she found a nervous-looking man coming out of the house. He claimed he was there to clean the pool and then left. Hours later, her credit card company called about strange charges on her card, and she realized the “pool cleaner” had actually gotten far enough into the house to lift her credit card and fifty bucks in cash from her wallet.

Being the victim of a burglary is creepy enough, especially when you come face-to-face with the actual burglar. But this story isn’t exactly Desperate Hours. So Miller, perhaps wondering how she could get in on some sweet wingnut grift while becoming known for something other than her role as a footnote in the Jack Abramoff scandal, apparently started embellishing her tale. And embellishing. And embellishing. Like Bill O'Reilly did NOT do with every story he ever told.

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For example, bumping into the guy in the yard turned into walking into the house “and [finding] basically a thug, drug addict in my house stealing my wallet. It’s all he got away with. And thank God, you know, he did not hurt me.” Yeah, you know what those drug-crazed thugs are like. You can imagine her readers at the Washington Times reading this and nodding while stroking their shotguns.

Then at some point Miller added more details, saying she had grabbed her Blackberry and chased after the burglar, only to encounter about 15 of his friends hanging around a couple of trucks. The burglar then confronted her, and she barely escaped, likely with her virtue intact. Give her a few more iterations and all 15 of those dangerous criminals she encountered will have been waving Glocks, smoking blunts, and blasting that Negro music out of their souped-up stereos.

This all sounds scary, so you would think Miller would have told the cops all of it at the time. But no. According to the case files Wemple dug out of the D.C. police archives, she told the cops the mysterious burglar claimed he was there delivering firewood, not cleaning the pool. (Would someone in D.C. need a pool cleaned in the dead of winter, anyway?) Not only that -- and this is the best part -- the report says that the guy gave Miller a business card for “a tree service” and then drove off in a truck with landscaping on the side of it. Nothing about chasing the guy, nothing about coming across a couple of trucks full of MS-13 members, or whatever. Oh, and Miller's only evidence that the burglar was a drug addict appears to be that the burglar used her credit card to get a "tattoo of a Skull with a blunt in its mouth and the word Stoned under it."

She didn't even realize she had been robbed until six hours later, when her credit card company called her about the charge at the tattoo parlor. But since this wasn’t quite a frightening enough encounter with the seamy criminal underbelly of the city to even be much of an anecdote to tell her friends over martinis at the Capitol Club, she turned it into a tale of a drug-addicted burglary ring prowling the neighborhood, from which she barely escaped with her life.

Before Miller was an investigative reporter for Fox’s Washington, D.C. local affiliate and the Opinion editor for the Washington Times, she was a press secretary and communications director for the likes of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Tom DeLay. With a résumé like that, it’s hard to believe she would get the idea that widespread lying in public is a career booster. And yet, here we are.

[ WaPo / WaPo again]