Jay Jones, the attorney general-elect, rolled out his inaugural committee and announced additional members of his transition team on Monday.
Shockingly, I am on neither.
Jones unseated Jason Miyares, the MAGA who spent the last four years either suing the Biden administration or making life harder for trans teens, doing both when he could, in last week’s election.
Good news, Virginia: in a few weeks, we will never have to think about Jason Miyares again.
I still stand on Jay Jones where I was a few weeks ago – that the death-texts scandal that put the big wins we ended up seeing on Nov. 4 in jeopardy should be disqualifying, and that whoever has the sway to do it should persuade him to not take the oath of office in January.
ICYMI
- Immediately, if not sooner | Jay Jones needs to end his attorney general campaign
- Taking the temperature of the Jay Jones-Jason Miyares AG race: It’s pretty much Sophie’s choice
- ‘Office’ references that Jay Jones could have made that would have kept him out of trouble
To reiterate, Jones knew his stupid texts from 2022 wishing death on Todd Gilbert, and then on his young kids, the death wish for the kids being so that Gilbert and his wife would have to see the error of their ways in terms of what they support in policy on gun rights, were out there, being passed around by every Republican in Richmond, just waiting to be used against him when the time was right.
We conceive of attorney general being the top prosecutor in the state, but in reality, it’s an administrative job – the AG really just runs the state’s biggest law firm, with myriad duties, including, but not most definitely not limited to, prosecutions.
I point that out to be able to say, no, the issue here with Jay Jones being our AG isn’t, we just elected a guy who made a dumb reference to an old gag from “The Office” the state’s top cop, but rather, we just elected that guy to oversee criminal justice at the state level, and also provide legal advice to the governor, state agencies and our public colleges and universities, and enforce antitrust and consumer-protection laws, among many other things.
To reiterate, again, we backed Jay Jones in the June Democratic Party primary because what we knew of him going into the primary was that he was pledging to focus on civil rights and environmental issues, and also because we were wary of Shannon Taylor, the four-term Henrico County Commonwealth’s attorney, because of the gobs of money Dominion Energy was throwing at her campaign.
If the Taylor campaign had come across the death texts in the spring, we’re not having this conversation.
Applying the lesser of three evils test – a candidate beholden to the utility company, a candidate beholden to Donald Trump, and a candidate who texts a not-random Republican friend about how he’d be OK with a political rival’s kids being offed to teach him a lesson – yeah, it’s obvious.
And let’s not understate this: Taylor, in this political climate, would have gotten across the finish line same as Jones did, probably a point or two better than he did.
I’ll be using these lists of Jay Jones inaugural committee and transition team members for different purposes than they were intended.
Jay Jones, dating back to his first run for AG, in 2021, against a two-term sitting Democrat, has revealed himself to be a craven opportunist; the people signing on to be on his team are telling us the same about themselves.
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Chris Graham
