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When Vem Miller was arrested outside a Donald Trump rally in California on Saturday, authorities said they noticed something strange about his license plate: It was “obviously fake.”

The 49-year-old Las Vegas resident was stopped about a half-mile from the campaign rally in the Coachella Valley armed with an unregistered shotgun, a loaded handgun and a high-capacity magazine.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco said at a news conference that his deputies had “probably” just foiled a third assassination attempt on Trump in as many months, although the Secret Service has since said Trump is “not in danger.”

After Miller's arrest, Bianco said the “homemade” license plate on his black SUV was “indicative of a group of individuals who claim to be sovereign citizens.”

“They are certainly considered a right-wing extremist group,” he added at the press conference.

The sovereign citizen movement is made up of anti-government individuals who all share the same belief: that the law does not apply to them.

Although they physically live in the United States, they believe they are separate—or sovereign—from the nation.

In the past, some have put forward pseudo-legal arguments as to why they should not follow the law, insisting, among other things, that they can ignore motor vehicle regulations because they are “travellers” and not “drivers”.

In addition to the allegedly false license plates, identification documents under several names were also said to have been found on Miller.

Shortly after his release on $5,000 bail, Miller repeatedly denied that he intended to harm Trump, calling the allegations “complete nonsense” in an interview with the Southern California News Group.

In fact, Miller described himself as a staunch Trump supporter, telling Fox News that the Republican presidential nominee was a man he “deeply admires.”

Miller has posted photos of himself with several MAGA-affiliated people in the last few weeks alone, including former third-party presidential candidate and Republican Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and British comedian Russell Brand.

Around the time of the first assassination attempt on Trump at a butler in Pennsylvania in July, Miller posted a picture of the bloodied former president raising his fist in the air.

“I'm ready to fight non-stop for the next four years with everything I have to help this country and this man,” he captioned the post.

A major source of new recruits for the sovereign citizen movement has been the MAGA and QAnon movements, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The Southern Poverty Law Center adds that the spread of conspiracy theories surrounding public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic also attracted new followers to the movement.

On his website American Happens Network, Miller sells bottles of chlorine dioxide, a bleach-like disinfectant that he promises can help “remove things from your body that shouldn't be there” — including Covid-19 and HIV.

However, Miller has also dismissed suggestions from Bianco that he is affiliated with the sovereign citizen movement.

“That’s a nonsensical statement,” he told Fox News. “I don’t think there is such a thing.”

“The government is an inanimate object, it's the individuals within the government that matter, so no, I'm not a part of it,” Miller said of the citizens' movement.

He also claims that none of the documents found by police are forgeries, adding that sometimes he uses his Armenian name and sometimes he doesn't.

Miller said he bought the firearms because of death threats since he launched America Happens Network, a series of podcasts and documentaries that explore “topics of corruption, controversy and conspiracies.”

He told Fox News that he had “never fired a gun in his life,” even though police found the loaded handgun in his car.

His business partner at the American Happens Network, self-described “anti-government libertarian” Mindy Robinson, agreed that Miller is innocent.

“There is no universe in which he had any intention of killing Trump, he has worked too hard in this movement to expose the Deep State and all the people who are against him,” she wrote on X on Sunday.

Miller has not been charged with any federal crimes in connection with the Trump rally and an investigation into the incident is ongoing.