A California sheriff stood by earlier assertions Monday that deputies who arrested a man with multiple firearms at the site of a Trump rally prevented a third assassination attempt on the former president in the last year.
Deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department arrested 49-year-old Vem Miller on gun charges Saturday at a checkpoint near the site where former President Donald Trump was holding a rally at Coachella, California. Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade that his deputies did their job.
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“In our minds, we did,” Bianco said after Kilmeade asked if they thwarted an attempt on the former president’s life. “That’s what we were set up there for. We were set up to stop and prevent anyone from coming on the grounds, like happened the last time, and it worked. You know, there’s a lot of speculation that, you know, he’s just an innocent person, and he very well could be with his intentions to not — he had no intention to harm the president.”
“But out of the, you know, between the 25 and the 50, depending on the numbers that you are hearing, thousand people that came to the rally, only one brought guns, and so we were thankful that our deputy found him and he was removed before the president even got there,” Bianco continued.
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Trump has survived two other assassination attempts in recent months. A Secret Service agent thwarted an apparent assassination attempt on Trump in September by firing shots at Ryan Wesley Routh, who was allegedly lurking near Trump International Golf Club while the former president was on the course. Trump was shot in the right ear while giving a speech at a July 13 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
Bianco then explained why Miller had already been released despite his arrest at the rally due to the charges only being misdemeanors.
“For the rest of the country, it’s hard to believe that when we arrest people, they don’t stay in jail, but that’s a fact of life here in California, and those crimes that we arrested him for were misdemeanors, and we do not hold misdemeanors in custody,” Bianco told Kilmeade. “So, he was given a citation to appear at a later date, and I have been told, I don’t know the date, but I think it’s after January, it’s after the new year. So, we have been dealing with bad law enforcement policy for decades in California, and unfortunately, the whole world sees it now.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.