A far-right extremist group leader was sentenced on Friday to more than five years in prison for repeatedly assaulting police officers with makeshift weapons during a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol over three years ago.
Scott Miller, who helped lead a Proud Boys chapter for Maryland and Washington, D.C., coordinated with other group members before they invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to federal prosecutors. Miller, 33, attacked police seven different times with weapons, including a bottle, a stick and poles.
Notes found on Miller’s cellphone indicate that his white supremacist ideology and antisemitic views influenced his decision to storm the Capitol, a prosecutor wrote in a court filing.
He expressed his intent to “fight” in order to protect “White America,” the filing says. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing former President Donald Trump’s election interference case in Washington, said an attack like the Jan. 6 insurrection “can happen again” in the U.S. “Extremism is alive and well in this country,” she said before sentencing Miller to five years and six months behind bars. Miller apologized for assaulting police at the Capitol.
He acknowledged that he embraced extremist ideologies before the Capitol riot, but told the judge that he is “reforming” himself.
“I am not a violent or hateful person despite some of the things you’ve seen,” he told Chutkan. Investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and memes promoting racially motivated violence when they searched Miller’s Millersville, Maryland, home and his phone.
A photo found on Miller’s phone shows him posing and smiling next to a news story describing the drowning of migrants, prosecutors said.
Authorities also found a shirt that Miller wore for Halloween to dress up as Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, a Black man, in the summer of 2020.
Miller posed for a photo wearing the costume while kneeling on the floor. Chauvin pressed a knee on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes.
