US Law enforcement officers have arrested an armed man with fake press passes who attempted to enter a rally held by Republican candidate Donald Trump in Coachella, California, a local sheriff has said.
Vem Miller, a 49-year-old Las Vegas resident, was arrested at a checkpoint outside the rally venue on Saturday with an illegally owned shotgun, a loaded handgun, and a high-capacity magazine, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Sunday.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told local media that Miller had presented fake VIP and press passes at the checkpoint.
“They were different enough to cause the deputies alarm,” Bianco told the Press-Enterprise. “We probably stopped another assassination attempt.”
The incident represents the third foiled attempt on former president Trump's life in months.
Bianco described Miller as a “sovereign citizen,” referring to a loose collective of extreme libertarians who believe that the government cannot legally exercise authority over them. Miller is a registered Republican who holds a master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and ran for state assembly in Nevada in 2022, Bianco added.
Miller has not confirmed or denied that he intended to assassinate Trump, Bianco stated.
The 49-year-old suspect was released on $5,000 bail and will appear before a court in January charged with illegal firearms possession.
Trump has survived two assassination attempts over the last three months. The former president and Republican presidential candidate narrowly avoided death at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania in July, when a bullet fired from around 150m away grazed his ear. The gunman fired from a rooftop that had inexplicably been left unprotected by the Secret Service, and managed to kill one rally goer and injure two others before he was shot dead by a sniper.
The second attempt took place at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September. A gunman aiming at Trump from behind bushes was spooked by Secret Service agents and arrested after he fled the scene. The suspect, identified as Ryan Wesley Routh, had unsuccessfully attempted to join the Ukrainian military in 2022, and afterwards embarked on a scheme to recruit former Afghan commandos to fight for Kiev.
American intelligence agents have claimed that Iran is seeking to assassinate Trump, and President Joe Biden has warned Tehran that he would treat an attack on his former political rival as an act of war.
Republican Representative Matt Gaetz claimed last month that there are currently five “assassination teams” in the US trying to kill Trump, three of them connected with Iran, Pakistan, and Ukraine. Another theory popular with some Republicans is that “a mole inside the Secret Service” is leaking information to these teams of hitmen, Gaetz told Breitbart News.
Biden said on Friday that he had ordered the Secret Service to protect Trump “as if he were a sitting president,” and to grant him whatever security assistance his campaign requests.