Jones, who is running to be Virginia’s top cop, has faced numerous scandals casting doubt on his commitment to law and order
Mavis Jones, the wife of Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones (D.), donated to a bail fund that frees murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals from jail, and urged her followers to do the same.
“I just donated to the Minnesota freedom fund,” Mavis Jones posted to X in May 2020, as Black Lives Matter rioters wreaked havoc in Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd’s death, and just months before marrying Jay Jones. She also linked to the group’s donation page before adding, “please consider doing the same or donating to any of the *legitimate* organizations supporting protesters.”
The Minnesota Freedom Fund, which former vice president Kamala Harris promoted two days later, raised more than $41 million in 2020, but the group only used a small fraction—$210,000—to bail rioters out of jail. The remaining funds helped post bail for violent criminals such as Christopher Boswell, a twice-convicted rapist who was freed from jail in 2020 pending kidnapping and sexual assault charges after the fund paid $350,000 for his release.
Mavis Jones’s donation is just the latest revelation as her husband faces questions over his commitment to law and order as he aims to become Virginia’s top cop. This month, texts surfaced showing him fantasizing about putting “two bullets to the head” of a GOP lawmaker and the death of that lawmaker’s children while musing about whether police officers would “stop shooting people” if “a few of them died.”
Jay Jones was also convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after police found him driving 116 miles per hour on a highway and was ordered to pay a $1,500 fine and serve 1,000 community service hours. An investigation was launched this month after it was revealed he spent 500 of those hours volunteering for his own political action committee—the rest were spent serving the Virginia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Completing that many hours within the 2023 calendar year, as he attested, would be difficult given he was working at a law firm full-time and was traveling the state campaigning for fellow Democrats throughout the year.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund’s track record likely won’t help Jones’s case—or his polling numbers, which have taken a nosedive as the scandals have piled on. His considerable lead has evaporated with recent surveys showing he trails his Republican opponent, incumbent Jason Miyares.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund helped release George Howard, a career criminal who was arrested by the Minneapolis Police Department after he allegedly shot 38-year-old Luis Martinez Ortiz to death following a road rage incident. Roughly three weeks earlier, the fund bailed out Howard following a domestic violence charge. It also freed Timothy Wayne Columbus, a 36-year-old man who allegedly penetrated an 8-year-old girl.
In August 2020, former Minnesota Freedom Fund interim executive director Greg Lewin told FOX 9, “The last time we were down there, the clerk said, ‘we hate it when you bail out these sex offenders, that is what they said.’”
The Jones campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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