Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco shared new details about the man who was arrested over the weekend in California at a rally for former President Donald Trump.
At a press conference on Sunday night, Bianco said that Vem Miller, a 49-year-old, was arrested just outside the event on Saturday night. He cautioned that that may not be the suspect’s real name because the suspect had multiple IDs on him with different names.
Bianco said that Miller claimed to be a journalist and that he made it through the outer perimeter and that once he got to the inner perimeter a sheriff’s deputy became suspicious.
“There were many irregularities that popped up,” he said. “The deputy noticed that the interior of the vehicle was in quite disarray. The vehicle had an obviously fake license plate, and that prompted further investigation from our deputy into why the person was there, and what he was doing.”
“During that investigation, the deputy eventually found multiple passports with multiple names, multiple driver’s licenses with different names, the vehicle was unregistered and the license plate was what we in law enforcement would recognize as one that is homemade and indicative of a group of individuals that claim to be sovereign citizens,” he continued.
He said that a loaded handgun and shotgun were also found in the suspect’s vehicle along with boxes of ammunition.
“I can tell you that from my perspective, from a state law enforcement agency’s perspective, the firearms charges is what we arrested him for and booked him on,” he said. “Anything further will come from the federal government, and quite frankly, I don’t know if we will be a part of that.”
Bianco said he did not remember telling the media that it was an “assassination attempt” but “it certainly would be something I did say, because it’s something that in the last 12 hours, we’ve talked about extensively of what happened.”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to be saying after the fact that I wish we would have done something to prevent that shooting,” he said. “And there is absolutely no way that any of us are going to truly know what was in his head.”
“It’s all going to be speculation about what his intentions were getting there,” he later added. “What we do know is he showed up with multiple passports with different names, an unregistered vehicle with fake license plate and loaded firearms. If you’re asking me right now, I probably did have deputies that prevented the third assassination attempt.”
“If we are that politically lost that we have lost sight of common sense and reality and reason, that we can’t say that holy crap, what did he show up with all of that stuff for and loaded guns?” he continued. “And I’m going to be accused of being dramatic? We have a serious, serious problem in this country, because this is common sense and reason.”
He said that any kind of assassination attempt charge, if it can be proven, would come from the federal government.
“I truly do believe that we prevented another assassination attempt,” he added. “And it was solely by our effort of keeping those type of people out.”
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