A California sheriff said Sunday that deputies thwarted a third would-be assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump a day earlier, when they prevented an armed man from entering the Republican candidate’s rally.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said authorities stopped Vem Miller, 49, of Las Vegas, at a checkpoint outside the rally after police noticed he had fake media and VIP passes on him and was also carrying illegal guns.
Jail records show Mr. Miller posted a $5,000 bond Saturday and has since been released.
Sheriff Bianco said deputies found a pistol and a shotgun — both of which were unregistered — and multiple boxes of ammunition for the two guns inside Mr. Miller’s messy black SUV when they searched it.
The SUV also had a fake license plate number.
“I truly do believe we prevented another assassination attempt,” Sheriff Bianco said during a Sunday press conference after being pressed by reporters about similar comments he had made the previous day.
Officials said Mr. Miller had multiple passports and multiple driver’s licenses in the car as well. The suspect tried to portray himself as a journalist at the security perimeter before Sheriff Bianco said deputies sussed him out.
Mr. Miller was taken into custody at the scene on illegal-weapons charges, police said.
The sheriff said the former president, who survived two assassination attempts during this campaign season, one of which came an inch from killing him, hadn’t arrived yet when the arrest was made.
Sheriff Bianco added that he didn’t want to speculate about the suspect’s intentions.
But he noted the earlier assassination attempts and security failures in both Pennsylvania and Florida, along with the numerous alarm bells Mr. Miller allegedly raised.
He said that combination made him confident that Mr. Miller likely arrived to the rally to commit harm.
“If we are that politically lost, that we have lost sight of common sense and reality and reason, that we can't say ‘Holy crap, what did he show up with all of that stuff for and loaded guns,’... and I'm going to be accused of being dramatic, we have a serious problem in this country because this is common sense and reason,” Sheriff Bianco said.
Any charges related to an assassination attempt would have to come from federal authorities, the sheriff said.
For his part, Mr. Miller said Sunday that the accusations of wanting to harm Mr. Trump "shocked" him and said he supports the former president.
“These accusations are complete b-------," he said in an interview with Southern California News Group.
Mr. Miller said he was wearing a Trump shirt and hat, had been a Trump caucus captain, and had a "special entry pass" for the rally from the head of Clark County’s Republican Party.
He is a registered Republican and ran in 2022 for Nevada State Assembly, District 13, though he lost the Republican primary.
Secret Service said in a statement that Mr. Trump was not in any danger when local law enforcement intercepted the suspect.
“While no federal arrest has been made at this time, the investigation is ongoing,” the agency said.
If the sheriff is correct, Saturday's incident would be the third assassination attempt in as many months against Mr. Trump, with assailants criss-crossing the country to take aim at the former president.
Mr. Trump narrowly survived a gunman’s bullet in July when Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired off eight rounds during a campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania.
The Republican candidate suffered a grazing wound in the shooting that killed one rallygoer and seriously injured two others.
Secret Service snipers shot and killed Crooks moments after shots first rang out.
In September, Secret Service agents shot at an armed man hiding along the edge of a Florida golf course at which Mr. Trump was playing.
Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was arrested after a short pursuit. Investigators found a scoped Ak-47-style rifle and a camera in the brush lining the West Palm Beach golf course.
Authorities later charged Routh, who is a convicted felon, in the assassination plot. Routh pleaded not guilty to the charges and is being held at a federal prison in Miami.
Security lapses during the first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania — such as Secret Service snipers not detaining Crooks despite repeatedly observing suspicious behavior well before he positioned himself on an unmanned roof overlooking the rally stage — led to the ouster of then-director Kimberly Cheatle.
The beleaguered agency extended "its gratitude to the deputies and local partners" for nabbing Mr. Miller in its statement Sunday.
Sheriff Bianco said the suspect made it past a preliminary check on the outer perimeter of the rally, but a more thorough check closer to the rally site caught deputies’ attention.
That’s when law enforcement found the various passports and driver’s licenses in the man’s possession, all of which had different names on them, and eventually learned he had a fake license plate on his unregistered car.
Sheriff Bianco said Mr. Miller is a “sovereign citizen,” which he described as a far-right anti-government group.
“In my own personal belief, I wouldn't say it's a militant group. It's just that they don’t believe in government control,” Sheriff Bianco said. “They don't believe that the government and laws don’t apply to them. So I think it's fringe, one way or the other.
He concluded: "I couldn't care less — it's people trying to do harm, and thank God we prevented it.”
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