October 16, 2025

JAY JONES FEIGNS BEING HAUNTED BY TEXT MESSAGE SCANDAL:

Virginia Democrats’ embattled attorney general nominee walked onto the debate stage Thursday night knowing he’d need to address the elephant in the room head-on.

“Let me be very clear. I am ashamed. I am embarrassed. And I am sorry,” Jones said in his opening statement, in which he also apologized to former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, his own family, and Virginia for the recently revealed texting scandal that has upended his campaign. He said that he cannot “take back” what he said in texts to a former colleague in 2022, but that moving forward, he will always take accountability for his mistakes.

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“Obviously, those text messages are indefensible, but I’ve known Jay Jones for a long period of time,” former Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney said in a recent interview with National Review. “He’s a friend. He made a mistake, he apologized, he’s been accountable for that.”

“There are those on the right, particularly Donald Trump, who say wild, outlandish things and take no responsibility or accountability for what they say,” added Stoney, who ran unsuccessfully against Spanberger and then lieutenant governor nominee Ghazala Hashmi this cycle. “Jay, at least, has done that, and I think he still deserves to be the next attorney general.”

But behind closed doors, Virginia Democrats are in a panic. Jones’s donors and fundraisers are furious with Jones and have been inundated with text messages from friends asking whether they knew about the attorney general nominee’s skeletons before they agreed to help his 2025 campaign. Democratic operatives are in a tizzy over how to respond to the scandal. In private conversations, they’ve held out hope that early voting — which began on September 19 — will get Jones across the finish line and that he’d use the October 16 debate to convince voters that the 2022 text scandal does not reflect his character.

But the scandal is flooding the Virginia media and advertising market, forcing Democratic candidates up and down the ballot to address it in interviews — throwing a wrench into Virginia Democratic candidates’ closing pitch to voters as a result. Further complicating matters, Jones has been hit with bar complaints in Virginia and the District of Columbia, where he previously served as an assistant attorney general in the Office of the Attorney General’s consumer protection bureau.

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Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll