Rep. Jasmine Crockett defended Democrats’ response to Virginia AG Jay Jones’ violent text messages, calling the uproar a “distraction” and urging party members to focus on broader fights rather than self-inflicted political chaos.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) pushed back when asked about the fallout from Jay Jones’ 2022 text messages that fantasized about political violence. Crockett framed the controversy as one of many partisan attacks designed to derail Democratic priorities and force internal panic.
The Congresswoman made her case on Roland Martin’s Unfiltered, arguing Democrats are learning not to play into Republican traps. “What the Republicans have been effective at doing is they love to throw a bomb, right? Usually, the Democrats will scurry and go ahead and spread the news about the bomb, right?” Crockett said. “I am so appreciative of our party because they are like, ‘You know what? We’re not falling for that anymore.’ Hopefully, we can keep up this energy.”
Crockett noted the early outcry inside her own party over Jones’ messages, and she resisted calls for immediate fallout. “If you remember, there were a lot of people saying that Jay Jones was not going to pull off the attorney general position in Virginia. There were Democrats saying, Oh, my God, he this terrible text message. He needs to resign and not run, and we not have anybody.” Martin pushed back with a historical perspective, saying, “Oh, 10 years ago, he would have been forced to resign. He would have been forced to drop out of the campaign.”
Jones’ texts were extreme and alarming in their content. He suggested that then-House Speaker Todd Gilbert deserved “two bullets to the head” and compared him to dictators like Hitler and Pol Pot, and he wrote that Gilbert and his wife were “breeding little fascists” while saying they needed to experience losing their children to violence to change their views. That record is the backdrop to Crockett’s argument that Democrats chose damage control over purging a nominee.
Crockett doubled down on the tactical choice, saying party leaders should denounce harmful behavior but also weigh political consequences. “Listen, there were still Democrats that were talking about it. My deal was, say what you got to say, denounce what he did. But in this moment, do you trust this Republican attorney general to stand up when it is the state legislature that decides that they need to fight fire with fire and give us more seats out of Virginia to go to the US House because they’re trying to balance out this power struggle that Trump is on?”
Her stance drew immediate criticism from Republican commentators who called it hypocrisy. From that viewpoint, Crockett’s tolerance for Jones contrasts sharply with the outrage she would have shown if a Republican had sent comparable messages, and the inconsistency fuels claims that partisan loyalty trumps basic accountability.
Despite the scandal, Jones still managed to win the attorney general’s race — barely — which further complicates the narrative. His narrow victory was taken by some as proof that voters weighed multiple factors beyond the texts, while others saw it as evidence that political expediency can trump moral clarity in close contests.
Crockett also framed the GOP response as opportunistic finger-pointing, tying criticism of Jones to broader attacks on Democrats. She said, “it seems like people did not get caught up in the distractions,” and that “there’s no way that the Republicans get to point fingers while we have the most corrupt president ever in the history of this country sitting on his wannabe throne.” Those words show how heated the partisan framing has become around scandals and accountability.
Republicans reading the episode see a pattern: when Democrats hold power, mistakes get sanitized, and when Republicans slip, the media and the left demand resignations. That double standard is the core of the critique lodged against Crockett and her colleagues, who are accused of defending allies to preserve short-term advantage.
Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points. This line of criticism ties the Jones episode to a broader argument that political theater has become a preferred substitute for consistent standards of conduct.
Martin’s observation that a decade ago a scandal like Jones’ would have ended a campaign underscores how norms have shifted. For many conservatives, the story is less about a single pair of messages and more about a normalization of political violence and selective accountability that leaves voters wondering which standards still hold.
