Jay Jones, Who Discussed Shooting GOP Colleague, Also Said That Police Officers Might ‘Move On’ If ‘a Few of Them’ Died: Report

The beleaguered Democratic Virginia AG nominee is set to appear on the ballot next month

Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones, who sent text messages to a state lawmaker in 2022 about shooting a GOP colleague, also told the lawmaker that police might “move on” and “stop shooting people” if “a few of them died,” according to a Virginia Scope report.

Virginia house Rep. Carrie Coyner (R.) told Virginia Scope that during a “heated” phone call about qualified immunity for police officers, Jones said, “Well, maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people.” Coyner argued that qualified immunity—which shields officers from personal liability in their line of duty—protects the public by allowing police to make split-second decisions. Jones, she said, believed that ending the protection would force officers to “act differently” and reduce the number of people killed by police.

Jones on Monday denied Coyner’s claim, telling Virginia Scope in a statement, “I did not say this. I have never believed and do not believe that any harm should come to law enforcement, period.”

Coyner made the revelation when Virginia Scope asked her what Jones meant in a 2022 text message that read, “Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” after talking about shooting his Republican colleague, Todd Gilbert, and wishing for the death of Gilbert’s children.

Jones, who is challenging Republican incumbent Jason Miyares in the Nov. 4 election, has already faced widespread backlash since National Review on Friday revealed those controversial text messages he sent to Coyner.

“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. He also wrote that he would go to Republican colleagues’ funerals to “piss on their graves” and “send them out awash in something.” Jones then suggested in a call with Coyner that he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own child die so that Gilbert would change his political views.

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.”

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.

Jones was also convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after police clocked him speeding at 116 miles per hour on a highway at midnight, according to a Wednesday report. A Virginia state trooper pulled over Jones at 12:55 a.m. in January 2022 for driving 46 miles over the speed limit on Interstate 64, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, citing court records of his conviction.