A pickup truck parked at the United States Capitol and with a sticker of the Three Percenter militia on the day of the January 6 riot, belongs to the husband of freshman U.S. Representative Mary Miller from Illinois, who named Adolf Hitler a day before approvingly quoted.
Investigators on Twitter first saw the Ford pickup truck with the emblem of the far-right militia parked in the Capitol grounds in images posted on social media and captured by CBS News.
The presence of a vehicle with a militia emblem so close to the Capitol, inaccessible to normal car traffic, raised questions about how it got there – and whether it belonged to one of the hundreds of suspects involved in the deadly riot.
But in an email to The Daily Beast, Chris Miller, Rep. Millers and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives admitted that the truck belonged to him even as he pleaded for ignorance of the militia.
Army friend gave me a sticker. I thought it was a cool emblem. Past because of a negative pub, ‘Miller wrote in an email late Thursday. He says he had “never been a member” of the militia and “didn’t know about 3% 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 prior to publication.
The link between the truck and Rep. Miller was first reported on Twitter on Thursday by the @Royal house account, which conducts an investigation into rioters spotted during the January 6 riot at the Capitol by a large community of volunteers who viewed thousands of hours of footage.
A pickup truck with the same make, model, color, and Illinois license plate as the one in the Capitol on Jan. 6 is also visible in a July 2020 photo with Mary Miller for Congress banners at a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. That same day, Rep. Miller a photo of what appeared to be the same truck with the same Trump-Pence and Mary Miller for Congress banners attached to the same PVC tube frame she was campaigning with in the cities of Mattoon, Sullivan, Herrick and Moweaqua.
Previously, the Millers have proudly posted photos of the same model Ford pickup truck, often adorned with the same decals, such as ‘herd quitter’ and Guns Save Life, a website affiliated with an Illinois-based gun rights group – as the truck at the Capitol building on January 6. In at least one instance, before Chris Miller’s election to the State House in 2018, the truck in question had a different license plate number.
The couple has appeared with that truck at campaign events, sometimes with the vehicle plastered with pictures of their faces or posters depicting ‘the life of the taxpayer’. The vehicle’s license plate at the Capitol on Jan. 6 – registered in Illinois, but with a drawing of the state’s Capitol – appears to be a design reserved for Illinois politicians like Chris Miller, who took office in 2019.
The Three Percenter emblem may have been a relatively new addition to the car as it was not visible on images from this summer.
Mary Miller, a Republican, was elected last November and is perhaps best known as a speaker at a “Moms for America” meeting outside the Capitol the day before the riot. “Hitler was right about one thing: he who has the youth has the future,” she told the crowd. She later apologized for the comments, saying, “Some are deliberately trying to twist my words to mean something that is contrary to my beliefs.”
Militia groups have received new attention from police, given the number of members arrested and charged with riot-related crimes since January 6. Robert Gieswein, an alleged rioters identified by The Daily Beast who is visible in footage of the first rioters breaking into the Capitol, “appears to be affiliated with the radical militia known as the Three Percenters,” said an FBI affidavit that has been filed in the lawsuit against him.
First formed in 2008, the group 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 percent of the American settlers fought in that war.
Links between militia groups and Congress have also been scrutinized after some lawmakers suggested their colleagues may have played a role in the riot. Representative Steve Cohen emphatically claimed that shortly before the riot, US Representative Lauren Boebert led a “big” tour of the Capitol. Boebert said she did not give tours to anyone outside of her family at the time and there is no evidence yet that any of the rioters benefited from inside help.
However, Boebert has been criticized for her ties to militia after she posed for a photo at a firearms rally in December 2019 where protesters flashed Three Percenter hand boards.