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A pickup truck parked at the United States Capitol and bearing a three percent militia sticker on the day of the January 6 riot belongs to the husband of new U.S. Representative Mary Miller of Illinois, who cited Adolf Hitler as a day earlier.
Researchers on Twitter first noticed the Ford pickup truck with the far-right militia sticker parked on the Capitol grounds in images posted to social media and taken by CBS News.
The presence of a vehicle with a militia decal so close to the Capitol, inaccessible to normal vehicle traffic, raised questions about how it got there – and if it belonged to one of the hundreds of suspects involved in the deadly riot.
But in an email to the Daily Beast, Chris Miller, the husband of Representative Miller and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, admitted the truck was his own even as he pleaded the ignorance of the group of militia.
“A friend in the army gave me a decal. I thought it was a cool decal. I took it off because of a negative ad, ”Miller wrote in an email Thursday night. He says he “was never a member” of the militia and “about 3% knew nothing until fake news started this fake story and read about it.”
A request for comment to U.S. Representative Miller’s office was not returned until publication.
The link between the truck and Rep Miller was first reported on Twitter Thursday by the @capitolhunters account, which is organizing research into the rioters seen in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill by a large community of volunteers examining thousands of hours of footage.
A pickup truck with the same make, model, color, and Illinois plate number as the one on the Capitol on January 6 is also seen in a July 2020 photo carrying Mary Miller banners for Congress during of a July 4th parade in Illinois. That same day, Rep. Miller’s Facebook page posted a photo of what appeared to be the same truck with the same Trump-Pence and Mary Miller banners for Congress attached to the same frame of PVC pipe she campaigned in. the towns of Mattoon, Sullivan, Herrick and Moweaqua.
Previously, the Millers had proudly posted photos of the same model Ford pickup truck, often sporting the same stickers – like “herd leave” and Guns Save Life, a website affiliated with a gun rights group based in the United States. ‘Illinois – which the truck to the Capitol brought on January 6. In at least one instance, prior to Chris Miller’s election to State House in 2018, the truck in question had a different license plate.
The couple have appeared with this truck at campaign events, sometimes with the vehicle pasted to photos of their faces or “taxpayers’ lives matter” posters. The vehicle’s license plate at the Capitol on Jan. 6 – registered in Illinois, but with a design of the State Capitol building – appears to be a design reserved for Illinois politicians, like Chris Miller, who has took office in 2019.
The Three Percenter sticker may have been a relatively new addition to the car, as it was not visible in pictures this summer.
Elected last November, Republican Mary Miller is perhaps best known for speaking at a “Moms for America” rally outside Capitol Hill a day before the riot. “Hitler was right about one thing: he who has youth in the future,” she told the crowd. She later apologized for the remarks and said that “some people intentionally try to twist my words to mean something antithetical to my beliefs.”
Militia groups have drawn new attention from law enforcement given the number of members arrested and charged with riot-related crimes since January 6. Capitol, “appears to be affiliated with the radical militia known as the Three Percent,” according to an FBI affidavit filed in the lawsuit against him.
The group, which first formed in 2008, is part of a loose network of “anti-government extremists” who compare their crusade against the US government to that of Revolutionary War-era patriots. , according to the Anti Defamation League. Their name comes from the false claim that only 3% of American settlers fought in this war.
Ties between the militias and Congress have also come under closer scrutiny after some lawmakers suggested their colleagues may have played a role in the riot. Representative Steve Cohen claimed that US Representative Lauren Boebert led a “grand” tour of the Capitol shortly before the riot. Boebert said she did not visit anyone outside of her family at the time and that there was no evidence to date that any of the rioters had benefited from a internal help.
However, Boebert came under fire for her links to militias after posing for a photo at a gun rights rally in December 2019, where rally attendees displayed placards in the hands of Three Percenters.
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