The California sheriff who reported that his deputies had “probably stopped another assassination attempt” on Saturday evening on Presidential candidate Donald Trump, last night seemed to try to walk back that particular claim. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s explanation of the circumstances of their arrest of 49-year-old Las Vegas resident Vem Miller at a checkpoint outside of Trump’s rally in Coachella, CA, however made clear that their actions were warranted.
In last night’s press conference, Bianco explained that Miller made it through the outer perimeter in his SUV, but at the inner perimeter, a sheriff’s deputy became suspicious: “There were many irregularities that popped up. 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.” They then found a loaded handgun and shotgun along with boxes of ammunition in the vehicle. Miller also claimed to be a journalist.
Bianco added: “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. Anything further will come from the federal government, and quite frankly, I don’t know if we will be a part of that.” While he said that he didn’t remember his earlier assertion that it was an “assassination attempt,” he said that “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.”
