A Virginia woman who distributed leaflets disclosing the home address of top White House aide Stephen Miller will not face state criminal charges, according to court documents filed Tuesday by Arlington County’s top prosecutor. Proceeding would violate the activist’s constitutionally protected free speech rights and “risk having a chilling effect on others wishing to engage in peaceful political protest.”
There was “insufficient evidence” to conclude the activist last year distributed the fliers with intent to harass Miller, wrote Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, a second-term Democrat who serves as Arlington’s lead prosecutor, in court filings. The activist included Miller’s photograph with a red line through it and urged people to scan a QR code to “demand a congressional investigation.”
“Petitioning government is a clear and quintessentially protected activity,” Dehghani-Tafti wrote. She requested the Virginia State Police destroy all materials collected from the activist’s phone under a search warrant previously issued by the court.
Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s wife, faulted the lack of prosecution in a text message to The Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon. She used an expletive and pointed out that Dehghani-Tafti had been backed by liberal donor George Soros in her campaigns. “This is a consistent theme across the country of prosecutor[s] and judges funded by Soros,” she wrote.
The leaflet incident and ensuing fallout, chronicled by The Post earlier this year, stirred debate over the tension between free speech and public safety, placing the Miller family’s concerns for their security against the First Amendment claims of an activist criticizing the Trump administration.
“We never intended to threaten his children, threaten his family or have him flee Arlington,” the activist, retired peace studies professor Barbara Wien, said previously of her and her husband’s intentions.
In September, Wien and her husband, Robert Herman, drove to Miller’s Arlington neighborhood and dropped manila envelopes stuffed with printouts near people’s front doors. Among the news articles and pamphlets was the flier with the Millers’ address at the time. Wien has said she doesn’t know who made the flier and didn’t realize it included the address.
“Wanted for crimes against humanity,” the flier stated, listing the address. “No Nazis in NOVA,” meaning Northern Virginia.
Walking through one cul-de-sac that morning, Wien spotted Katie Miller standing on her porch.
Wien pointed her fingers at her own eyes, then at Miller, as if to say, “I’m watching you.”
The day before, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was fatally shot in Utah and, as she later described in social media posts and television interviews, Katie Miller perceived the risk of violence now rising outside her own door.
By that point, she had found other fliers in her neighborhood that included her home address and reported the issue to local police, according to court records.
“I love obscure statutes. That’s my thing,” Miller said, proceeding to read a state law that makes it a misdemeanor to publish a person’s name or photograph along with identifying information, “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, or harass.”
According to court records, she told police: “Isn’t that great? I love a good obscure statute.”
In September, as the Secret Service gathered potential evidence after Wien’s visit — including manila envelopes she distributed and security footage from the neighborhood — Stephen Miller warned of a left-wing “domestic terror movement,” bringing a national megaphone to the tensions at his doorstep. In early October, members of the FBI, Secret Service and Virginia State Police arrived at Wien’s home with a search warrant to seize her phone, signed by a judge after police accused her of a “coordinated plan to intimidate and harass Stephen Miller.”
The matter ricocheted through Wien’s community, through the White House and the halls of Congress, spurring concerns of federal overreach and where to draw the line between free speech and public safety, between legitimate protest and personal harassment, in a nation beset by political violence. After the leafleting incidents, the Millers listed their home for sale and moved to military housing. Katie Miller recounted on a podcast telling one of her children she needed to return to the Arlington house to retrieve some clothes. Her 4-year-old replied: “Mommy, you can’t go back there. It’s not safe.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, last year opened an inquiry into Dehghani-Tafti, accusing her of ignoring the Millers’ safety out of “political bias.”
Dehghani-Tafti and Wien’s attorney raised questions over the conduct of the investigation, including the involvement of federal law enforcement in executing the search warrant even though it was based on evidence that she might have committed a local misdemeanor.
In Tuesday’s court filing, Dehghani-Tafti detailed how after she reviewed evidence against Wien, she determined Wien did not commit a crime. “Were the case to proceed, she wrote, “Ms. Wien is not likely to be found guilty and her speech is likely to be found constitutionally protected.”
Wien’s attorney, Bradley R. Haywood, welcomed the development as “the right thing to do” but said he remains concerned about the weaponization of federal law enforcement against critics of the administration. “I’m cynical about the impact of this. Decisions aren’t being made on whether a law is broken — at least on Stephen Miller and Jim Jordan’s side of things. They have an agenda and they’ll just do whatever they can to get there.”
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