Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco got a little overexcited over the weekend following the arrest of a Nevada man in the Coachella Valley outside of a rally for former president Donald Trump. “If you’re asking me right now, I probably did have deputies that prevented the third assassination attempt,”
Bianco told the press. Big if true.
Bianco also reportedly told The Epoch Times via text message, “We arrested a man trying to get in the perimeter with two firearms who ended up saying he was going to kill the president.”
Again, big if true.
One, it would indeed be significant if this was, in fact, the third attempted assassination on Trump in just a few months.
Second, it would also be a major attention-grabbing moment for Bianco, who has been considering a run for governor for quite some time now.
But, right out of the gate, there were problems with Bianco’s — shall we say — bold assertions.
For one, the man arrested, Vem Miller was quickly released on $5,000 bail, not exactly what one would expect would happen to a presidential assassin. Attempted presidential assassins tend to be handled with a little more seriousness.
Then, figures from MAGA world quickly came out of the woodwork to say that Miller was in fact one of them, a major supporter of president Trump and that there was no way he was a potential assassin.
Declared longtime Trump ally Roger Stone on X, “HOAX – Vem Miller the man falsely accused of planning to assassinate President Trump made no threats against the president.” He continued, “He’s a strong Trump supporter. The Riverside County Sheriff making accusations against him will face a multi million dollar lawsuit.”
“Everything they said about me is untrue, provably so,” Miller told the Los Angeles Times. “Unfortunately, [Bianco] appears to have committed career suicide.”
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And then on top of it all, Bianco reportedly walked back his claim that Miller said “he was going to kill the president.” Bianco told the Epoch Times, “He never said it. It was bad info … given to me. He never told a deputy that.”
If this all turns out how it looks like it will, then Bianco’s reckless and sloppy approach to his office has once again put Riverside County in a really bad position. Already, due to a massive spike in jail deaths on his watch, the county is facing a wave of costly lawsuits.
In this situation, and under the most favorable light, perhaps it’s true that he had bad information and said more than he should have. Maybe he didn’t mean any harm and just got ahead of himself.
But any competent person in his position would know better than to rush to the media with a big claim, as he did, without making sure that the facts were there.
Alas, this is Chad Bianco we’re talking about, so we got what we got.
Time will tell what comes of Miller, or his threat to slap the county with a lawsuit of his own.
But for now, Bianco is in a mess of his own making.