On Sunday night, New York magazine reported that in the summer of 2015 Steve Bannon orchestrated the writing of an immigration-policy “white paper” for a nascent Donald Trump campaign, incorporating contributions from fired Trump aide Sam Nunberg and right-wing pundit Ann Coulter. (At the time, Bannon was not officially part of the Trump campaign—which was then managed by Corey Lewandowski—but stayed in close contact as a chief media ally and as The Daily Beast reported late last year privately joked in emails that he was “Trump’s campaign manager.”) The policy paper made big headlines in 2015 as the first signs of an actual, hardline-nationalist immigration plan from Trump. When Team Trump released it, Coulter—who did not publicly acknowledge a role—tweeted it was the “greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”

Two Trump advisers with direct knowledge of the subject told The Daily Beast on Monday that Stephen Miller, now President Trump’s senior advisor for policy, also contributed notes that Bannon then incorporated that summer into a finished product. Miller ended up being the principal author behind the paper. Lewandowski, then Trump's campaign manager, also served as an editor to what became the policy paper. (This was also before Miller was officially aboard the campaign.) One source said that "Steve [Bannon] took upon himself because he didn't want the campaign to fall apart" to also help “edit together” the project because the “campaign was still a skeleton” at the time and it “didn't really have people to do policy stuff.”

—Asawin Suebsaeng