A van parked at the U.S. Capitol carrying a three percent militia sticker on the day of the Jan. 6 riot belongs to the husband of U.S. freshman Mary Miller of Illinois, who cited approved Adolf Hitler a day earlier.
Twitter investigators first noticed the Ford van with the sticker of the far-right militia parked on the Capitol precinct in images posted on social media and taken by CBS News.
The presence of a vehicle with a militia tag so close to the Capitol, inaccessible to normal vehicle traffic, raised questions about how it got there and whether it belonged to any of the hundreds of suspects involved in the deadly riot.
But in an email to The Daily Beast, Chris Miller, Miller’s husband and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, admitted that the truck belonged to him, even when he declared ignorance of the militia group.
“An army friend gave me a tag. I thought it was a great label. I took it out because of a negative pub, “Miller wrote in an email Thursday at the end. He says he” never was a member “of the militia and” knew nothing of the 3% until the fake news they started this fake story and read about it. ”
A request for comment in the office of U.S. Representative Miller was not returned prior to publication.
The link between the truck and Rep. Miller was first reported on Twitter Thursday by the @capitolhunters account, which is organizing investigations into riots seen during the January 6 Capitol riot of a large community of volunteers reviewing thousands of hours of material.
A van with the same Illinois make, model, color, and license plate number as the Capitol on Jan. 6 is also visible in a July 2020 photo carrying Mary Miller for Congress banners during a quarter-final parade. July in Illinois. That same day, Rep. Miller’s Facebook page posted a picture of what appeared to be the same truck with the same Trump-Pence and Mary Miller banners for Congress pasted on the same PVC pipe frame that campaigned in the cities of Mattoon, Sullivan, Herrick and Moweaqua.
Earlier, Millers proudly posted images of the same Ford pickup model, often emblazoned with the same stickers, such as “herd quitter” and Guns Save Life, a website affiliated with an Illinois-based gun rights group. , which the Capitol truck gave birth on January 6th. In at least one case, before Chris Miller’s election to the State House in 2018, the truck in question had a different license plate.
The couple has appeared with this truck at campaign events, sometimes with the vehicle plastered in images of their face or “Taxpayers’ lives matter ”posters. The vehicle’s license plate at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — registered in Illinois but with a drawing of the state Capitol building — appears to be a design reserved for Illinois politicians, such as Chris Miller, who took possession of the charge in 2019.
It is possible that the three-percent sticker is a relatively new addition to the car, as it was not seen in the images this summer.
Elected last November, Mary Miller, a Republican, is perhaps best known for speaking at a “Moms for America” rally in front of the Capitol a day before the riot. “Hitler was right about one thing: whoever has the youth has the future,” he told the crowd. He later apologized for the remarks and said that “some try to twist my words intentionally to mean something antithetical to my beliefs.”
Militia groups have drawn the attention of law enforcement given the number of members arrested and charged with riot-related crimes since Jan. 6. Capitol, “appears to be affiliated with the radical militia group known as the Three Percentages,” according to an FBI affidavit filed in the lawsuit against him.
The group, which was formed in 2008, is part of a loose network of “anti-government extremists” who liken their crusade against the U.S. government to that of the patriots of the Revolutionary War era, according to the League. Anti Defamation. Its name comes from the false claim that only 3 percent of American settlers fought in this war.
Links between militia groups and Congress have also come under greater scrutiny after some lawmakers suggested their colleagues may have played a role in the riot. Rep. Steve Cohen claimed that U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert led a “big” tour of the Capitol shortly before the riot. Boebert said he was not giving visits to anyone outside his family at the time and there is still no evidence that any of the riot police benefited from domestic help.
However, Boebert has been criticized for his links to militia groups after he was posed for a photo at a December 2019 gun rights rally, where those attending the rallies threw three-percent posters.