During a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol more than three years ago, a far-right extremist group leader repeatedly attacked police officers with homemade weapons. On Friday, the group leader received a sentence of more than five years in jail.
Federal prosecutors claim that before the gang attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Scott Miller, who assisted in leading a Proud Boys chapter for Maryland and Washington, D.C., coordinated with other group members. Miller, 33, used a bottle, a stick, and poles among other items to attack police seven times.
According to a prosecutor’s court file, notes discovered on Miller’s cellphone suggest that his antisemitic beliefs and white supremacist ideology had a role in his determination to storm the Capitol.
According to the filing, he declared his intention to “fight” for the defense of “White America.”
The judge in charge of former President Donald Trump’s election meddling case in Washington, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, stated that an incident similar to the uprising on January 6th “can happen again” in the United States.
She declared, “Extremism is alive and well in this country,” before imposing a five-year, six-month prison sentence on Miller.
Miller expressed regret for hitting the Capitol cops. Although he admitted to the judge that he had supported radical ideas prior to the Capitol violence, he claimed to be “reforming” himself.
“I am not a violent or hateful person despite some of the things you’ve seen,” he said to Chutkan.
Investigators examined Miller’s Millersville, Maryland, home and phone and discovered Nazi memorabilia and messages encouraging racialized violence.
Prosecutors claimed that a picture discovered on Miller’s phone depicts him grinning and posing next to a news report detailing the drowning of migrants.
Authorities also discovered a clothing that Miller had worn to dress up as Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer found guilty in the summer of 2020 of killing a Black man named George Floyd.
Miller kneeled on the ground and posed for a picture while donning the outfit. Chauvin had Floyd’s neck pressed to his knee for more than nine minutes.
Chutkan expressed doubts about Miller’s sincerity and ability to change so quickly, given the severity of his violent beliefs and the racist and antisemitic content he had saved on his phone.
Chutkan has been among the most severe penalizers of the offenders from January 6. In 45 cases, Miller’s prison sentence is the longest one that she has issued, according to court documents reviewed by the Associated Press.
Miller was taken into custody in December 2022, and the prosecution proposed that he serve five years and eleven months in prison. In January, he entered a guilty plea to using a deadly weapon to assault a police officer.
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Miller and other Proud Boys members talked about their intentions for the day of the Jan. 6 riot and the potential for violence in the days preceding it, according to the prosecution.
After the disturbance broke out, Miller came at the Capitol with a military-style backpack, ski goggles, and gloves with rubber knuckles.
He joined the crowd beating police personnel stationed to protect a tunnel that led to the Lower West Terrace entrance of the Capitol, the scene of some of the bloodiest violence. He grabbed a stick and charged at the police, hitting an officer multiple times with it.
Miller threw other objects at the cops before picking up a second pole and repeatedly hitting at least two of them. In the mob outside the Capitol, he also took a shield from a police officer and gave it to other rioters.
Defense attorney Elizabeth Mullin stated in a court document that Miller is embarrassed of his behavior on January 6 and severed his connection with the Proud Boys around one month following the riot.
Mullin stated that Miller’s plans to harm cops are unfounded.
