Vem Miller was ‘lunatic’ for thinking he could come to a Donald Trump rally with a loaded gun and several other ‘major red flags,’ said the local sheriff who is insisting he helped squash a third assassination attempt.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco doubled-down in an interview with DailyMail.com about what led him to think Miller could have been plotting something nefarious for Trump’s Saturday rally.
Miller, 49, was arrested by Bianco’s department outside Trump’s Coachella event when a shotgun, loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine were discovered in his vehicle during a checkpoint stop.
After posting $10,000 bail, the Las Vegas resident was released from custody.
Other items of concern found on Miller included a ‘fake license plate,’ multiple IDs with variations of his name and two firearms said the sheriff.
Bianco immediately said that his officers helped ‘probably’ prevent a third assassination attempt on the former president by catching Miller.
But the sheriff caught a slew of backlash online for this comment with many claiming it was too serious a claim to be throwing around.
‘I don’t know how – maybe I’m not explaining it right or something,’ Sheriff Bianco told DailyMail.com. ‘But those are major, major, major red flags.’
‘That’s not normal,’ he insisted. ‘A normal person doesn’t show up at a Trump event knowing the security, the heightened security that’s going to be there with all of those different issues and loaded weapons. It makes no sense.’
After reports emerged that Bianco called Miller a lunatic, he doubled-down.
‘Anyone that thinks that that’s okay has got to be a lunatic,’ he said. ‘There is no one with any common sense or reason that can believe that it’s okay to show up with a fake license plate on an unregistered vehicle, with multiple forms of identification and loaded weapons. This is bizarre to me, that that could even be, that anyone in the right mind could say, Oh, that’s okay.
Miller has defended himself in a video posted to Rumble and when speaking with right-wing media personalities and outlets.
‘My position is that a normal person doing nothing wrong doesn’t show up with all of the red flags that he did and try to get into that event,’ Bianco said. ‘So could we have probably saved a third assassination attempt? I do believe so, because we all have absolutely no way of getting in the head of what is in his head, of what his intentions were.’
‘And now he’s out of custody – and of course, he’s going to say whatever it is he feels he needs to say, especially to deny it,’ he added. ‘I mean, I don’t hold that against him. I mean that that would be normal to me, also.’
‘So I’m, I certainly am going to stand by what I said,’ the Sheriff insisted.
Miller was charged with two illegal possession of firearms offenses and posted $5,000 bail for each charge.
He has a court date set for early January.