A Virginia Democrat is attacking the recipient of Democrat Attorney General candidate Jay Jones’ homicidal texts, accusing the moderate Republican of “betrayal” after she confirmed the authenticity of the unsolicited, threatening messages she received from Jones, The Daily Wire has learned.
House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott, a convicted crack dealer who Democrats installed as head of the statehouse, has embarked on an unusual effort to unseat Carrie Coyner, a Republican who is viewed as one of the chamber’s most bipartisan members and whose friendliness with Jones led to him confessing his desire to murder political opponents.
“I’m Speaker Don Scott. I’m here to tell you, Carrie Coyner is no moderate. She’s a MAGA Republican, blocking our agenda for Virginia families. Carrie Coyner has betrayed us too many times,” he said in an ad posted Tuesday by the campaign of Lindsey Dougherty, who is running to unseat Coyner in her Chesterfield, Virginia, district.
Scott went so far as to speak at a church in Coyner’s district on October 5, telling congregants using the pulpit to minimize Jones’ homicidal ideation and electioneer against Coyner, again accusing her of betrayal and linking it to the text messages. Coyner “has done nothing but try to betray the agenda that we’ve tried to move forward,” he said. “We can’t get distracted because they want us to get distracted by the text message here.”
Coyner told the Virginia Scope that Scott’s church appearance was “intimidating,” adding, “I didn’t do anything wrong in this, and I was honest when asked.” She and Gilbert did not return requests for comment from The Daily Wire.
National Review upended Virginia’s election cycle after reporting that in 2022, Jones had texted Conyer, at the time his colleague in the House of Delegates, about how he would rather kill then-Republican speaker Todd Gilbert than Hitler, and how he fantasized about seeing Gilbert’s children, whom he described as “little fascists,” die in their mother’s arms.
The story suggested that Coyner was not the source, but that she had sent screenshots of the conversation to others shortly after receiving them, and she confirmed their authenticity to National Review when asked. The story says Jones called Coyner to double down on the sentiments expressed in the text, which the outlet attributes to a third party with knowledge of the call.
When Democrats took control of the House, Gilbert, the Republican House Speaker whom Jones wanted dead, was replaced by Scott, the allegedly reformed crack dealer. This year, Jones went from being an obscure legislator to a candidate for attorney general, running against incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican.
Democrats, including gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger and lieutenant governor candidate Ghazala Hashmi, have refused to rescind their endorsements of Jones or call for him to step down from the race. They have said they condemn the texts, which Jones has apologized for. But efforts to target the perceived source of the revelation raise questions about whether they’re actually only angry that the public learned about them.
Scott did not reply to The Daily Wire’s questions asking whether the ad was retaliation for Coyner’s role in the Jones scandal, whether he thinks she handled it well, when and why he decided to get involved in her race, and how many other candidates he has cut ads for.
On October 6, the Virginia Scope published an interview with Coyner in which she elaborated on a reference Jones made in his texts to having “told you this before.” She said that in 2020, Jones wanted to change the law so that police officers could be personally sued by alleged criminals, while Coyner opposed it. She said Jones told her, “maybe if a few of them died, that they would move on, not shooting people, not killing people.” Jones denied making the statement, according to the Virginia Scope.
Coyner told the Virginia Scope that she had nothing to do with the release of the texts and did not know about their release until contacted by National Review. Before Jones apologized, he doubled down and claimed he was being “smeared” by his opponent, Miyares, even though Miyares had said that he, too, had nothing to do with the texts making their way to the media.
Scott’s campaign to oust Coyner is especially curious because Coyner has frequently worked with Democrats in the legislature, including Scott’s close ally and Senate leader Louise Lucas, to make community college classes free for high schoolers. According to the Virginia Public Access Project, Coyner broke ranks to vote with Democrats more than any other Republican. No Democrat was as bipartisan as she was, according to the data.
Yet even as Virginia Democrats have tried to win a purple state with messaging opposing “extremists,” the fact pattern suggests that some have contempt for all Republicans, however moderate. Jones’ infamous rageful texts were spurred by then-Republican Speaker Gilbert saying kind things about a Democrat who had died. “If those guys die before me, I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves,” he said.
In the gubernatorial debate on October 9, Spanberger’s response when asked about the Jones texts was to blame Republicans. She obfuscated when asked by the moderator whether she still endorsed Jones, given the texts. After the moderator noted that Spanberger was dodging the question, she said Republicans “held them for years so the public was unaware who had knowledge of these text messages.”
That apparent victim-blaming comes despite the fact that Coyner appears to have not told the public about the text messages precisely because she was collegial and forgiving. On top of that, the suggestion that Democrat legislators could only know how Jones felt about Republicans by hearing it from Republicans calls for believing that Jones was more open with his opponents than he was with his Democratic colleagues.
Republicans have continued to show compassion even as Democrats refuse to denounce a candidate who called for violence against Republicans. This month, a Democrat statehouse member, Candi Mundon King, had a daughter die. Gilbert, whose kind words for another deceased Democrat triggered Jones’ rage, offered condolences again, saying, “May God wrap his arms around Delegate Mundon King.” But on the same weekend that her daughter died, King reposted on social media a call for “punishing Confederates and erasing them” and “punishing trump & his MAGAt accomplices.”
Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Eugene Vindman, both Virginia Democrats, are set to appear alongside Jones at a fundraiser in Fredericksburg on Friday.
Virginia Congressman Don Beyer (D-VA) said he “very much hopes [Jones] prevails,” claiming that Jones’ express fantasies about murdering the family of a political rival are “no worse than what Donald Trump says almost every day.”
Related: Virginia Dems Say ‘Our Democracy’ Depends On Voting For Candidate Who Fantasized About Assassination
