Virginia Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones in 2022 "fantasized" about shooting then-Republican colleague Todd Gilbert twice and wished death on Gilbert’s children, National Review reported Friday.
"Gilbert gets two bullets to the head," Jones told Republican House delegate Carrie Coyner as he laid out a hypothetical "three people, two bullets" scenario in which he listed Gilbert alongside Hitler and Pol Pot, according to text messages dated August 8, 2022, obtained by National Review. "Spoiler: put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time," Jones wrote.
Jones was angry at how Gilbert, who served as Virginia house speaker at the time, and other Republicans were eulogizing the late Democratic state legislator Joe Johnson Jr. "If those guys die before me," Jones texted Coyner, referring to his Republican colleagues, "I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves" to "send them out awash in something."
When Coyner pushed back on the texts, Jones called her and "doubled down," saying that lawmakers change their positions only when they personally feel pain, such as losing a child to gun violence, according to National Review.
In the phone call, Jones suggested that he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her own children die so that Gilbert would change his political views. Coyner hung up the phone in disgust and later rebuked Jones in a text for "hopping [sic] Jennifer Gilbert’s children would die." Jones, however, appeared unmoved by the pushback and went on to claim that Gilbert and his wife are "breeding little fascists."
The revelation comes as Jones is running a second time for Virginia attorney general, challenging Republican incumbent Jason Miyares in the Nov. 4 election. Jones sent the text messages 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 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.
