The Republican Attorneys General Association called the text revelations ‘this year’s biggest political scandal.’
The executive board of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a Republican spending group that helps elect GOP attorney general candidates nationwide, is calling on its Democratic counterpart to pull its political and financial support for Virginia Democrats’ 2025 attorney general nominee Jay Jones following National Review’s Friday report on the disturbing rhetoric he expressed in private correspondence with a colleague three years ago.
In an announcement first shared with National Review on Monday, RAGA’s executive board called the text revelations “this year’s biggest political scandal” and demanded that Democratic attorneys general and their political arm, the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), “show accountability and suspend all financial and political support for Jay Jones, including pulling previously booked ads.”
“Actions speak louder than words and DAGA’s silence on Jay Jones speaks volumes,” Kansas Attorney General and RAGA Chairman Kris Kobach said in a statement to National Review coinciding with the announcement. “If Democrats are serious about joining Republican calls to tone down the rhetoric that led to political violence killing both Charlie Kirk and legislators in Minnesota this year, DAGA will withdraw their support of Jay Jones.”
RAGA’s demands that DAGA sever its financial and political support for Jones come after a series of high-profile Republicans called on Jones to drop out of the race over the weekend, including President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
DAGA’s press team did not immediately respond to National Review’s request for comment for this story.
As NR first reported on Friday, Jones sent texts to a former colleague on August 8, 2022, in which he expressed disgust with how Republican state legislators in Virginia were eulogizing then-recently deceased Democratic House Delegate Joe Johnson. “If those guys die before me,” Jones wrote in a string of text messages to Republican House Delegate Carrie Coyner, “I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves” to “send them out awash in something.”
Jones suggested that, presented with a hypothetical situation in which he had only two bullets and was faced with the choice of murdering then-Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates Todd Gilbert or two dictators, he’d shoot Gilbert “every time,” prompting pushback from his former colleague.
That pushback prompted Jones to call Coyner over the phone to double down on his reasoning. Jones suggested that the only way public policy changes is when policymakers feel pain themselves, like the pain that parents feel when they watch their children die from gun violence, according to a source familiar with the phone call. He asked her to provide counterexamples to disprove his claim and suggested that he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die in her arms so that Gilbert might reconsider his political views, prompting Coyner to hang up the phone in disgust.
Virginia Democrats, including the party’s gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger and lieutenant gubernatorial nominee Ghazala Hashmi, responded to the text revelations by condemning Jones’s rhetoric while stopping short of calling on him to withdraw from the race.
And Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, a Democrat, criticized Jones’s rhetoric over the weekend only to suggest on Sunday that Democrats can’t “get distracted” by the political fallout of Jones’s texts.
“So, we need to understand something,” Scott told Democrats from a church pulpit on Sunday. “We have to be mature in our thinking and how we vote. We can’t get distracted because they want us to get distracted by the text message here or something else. Stay focused.”
Republican attorneys general are demanding that Virginia Democrats – and the party writ large – rescind their support for Jones following NR’s report.
“Democrats like Jay Jones have to stop calling Republicans fascists and comparing us to Hitler,” South Carolina Attorney General and RAGA Vice Chairman Alan Wilson said in a statement. “This type of violent political rhetoric —not only endorsed by, but spoken by Jay Jones, an elected official— is what encourages and emboldens people like Charlie Kirk’s murderer to take the most extreme and deadly measures. DAGA must condemn these text messages and withdraw their support of Jay Jones.”
“The content of Jay Jones’ text messages is abhorrent, but the context makes them worse,” Nebraska’s Republican Attorney General Mike Hilgers said in a statement. “He sent these messages while Republicans and Democrats were eulogizing a former Virginia Delegate, a Democrat known for working across the aisle. Jones rejected the bipartisanship of the moment, and ultimately the humanity of his colleagues, by sending texts talking about desecrating legislators’ graves, and shooting the House Speaker, and his hope that the Speaker witness his own children dying.”
“This is evil and feeds poison into our political culture,” Hilgers added. “DAGA should send a statement that it does not support those who push a culture of political assassination and remove its support of Jones immediately.”