Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) called Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones’s text messages about putting two bullets into the head of a GOP colleague “indefensible”—before going on to defend Jones, according to a new report.
The Democratic senator claimed to have a different perspective on Jones, noting that he has “known Jay since he was a teenager” and still supports Jones’s bid for Virginia attorney general, Semafor journalist Burgess Everett reported Monday on X.
“[Jones] is an individual who clearly was really hacked off about something and expressed it in a bad way,” Kaine told Everett. “I do not think this is really who he is.” Kaine, for his part, came under scrutiny for repeatedly using his political position to benefit his wife’s career for years—even after a warning from the Senate ethics office.
Jones has faced widespread backlash since National Review on Friday revealed messages he sent in 2022 to Virginia house Rep. Carrie Coyner (R.), where he discussed shooting his Republican colleague, Todd Gilbert. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones told Coyner as he laid out a hypothetical “three people, two bullets” scenario in which he listed Gilbert alongside Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.
The Democratic attorney general nominee also wrote that he would go to Republican colleagues’ funerals to “piss on their graves” and “send them out awash in something.” He then suggested in a call with Coyner that he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own children die so that Gilbert would change his political views.
Jones, who is challenging Republican incumbent Jason Miyares in the Nov. 4 election, sent the texts just months after he resigned as a state delegate representing the city of Norfolk and a year after his loss in Virginia’s 2021 Democratic primary for attorney general.
Coyner, in a statement to National Review, condemned Jones’s text messages. “Jay Jones wished violence on the children of a colleague and joked about shooting Todd Gilbert,” Coyner said. “It’s disgusting and unbecoming of any public official.”
Jones’s controversy didn’t end there. Coyner revealed on Monday that Jones told her in 2020 that police might “move on” and “stop shooting people” if “a few of them died,” according to a Virginia Scope report. Jones was also convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after police clocked him speeding at 116 miles per hour on a highway at midnight, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported last week, citing court records of Jones’s conviction.
While many Virginia Democrats have shrugged off Jones’s comments, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a prominent Democrat, has called on Jones to drop out of the election. “He should probably be forced to withdraw from the race, and ‘probably’ is doing a lot there,” Scarborough said.
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