More than ever, Virginia needs an Attorney General focused on Virginia.
Prosecuting violent crime. Keeping repeat offenders off our streets. Holding corporate interests accountable to the communities they operate in.
That’s not what Virginia has.
Instead, the Office of the Attorney General is occupied by a 37-year-old activist far more interested in making a name for himself in progressive activist circles than in doing the job Virginians hired him for. And he’s using your tax dollars to do it — this month he stood up a four-lawyer unit inside the AG’s office dedicated to fighting the Trump administration.
Surprising? Not if you know Jay “Two Bullets” Jones.
On August 8, 2022, Jay Jones sent a text message about Todd Gilbert, then the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. He set up a hypothetical. Three people, two bullets: Gilbert, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Gilbert, he wrote, “receives both bullets every time.”
He was texting a Republican colleague, Delegate Carrie Coyner. She wrote back twice: “Jay.” And then, “Please stop.” By Coyner’s own account of that thread, Jones also talked about Gilbert’s wife and children in terms she found monstrous.
The texts came out in October 2025, in the middle of his campaign for this office. Republicans put seven figures behind ads about them. Jones apologized and said reading his own words made him sick to his stomach.
He also picked up a name that stuck. To a lot of Virginians he has been Jay “Two Bullets” Jones ever since. They elected him anyway, over a sitting attorney general named Jason Miyares.
That is the man now running law enforcement for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Miyares treated the office like what it is: the Commonwealth’s prosecutor. He built Ceasefire Virginia around repeat violent offenders in the neighborhoods where people were actually getting shot. He launched One Pill Can Kill to go after fentanyl, which is killing Virginia teenagers who think they are taking something else.
And he went after the drug companies. Under Miyares, Virginia collected more than $1 billion in opioid settlements, money aimed at treatment and recovery in the communities the epidemic hit hardest.
Fentanyl. Violent crime. Corporations that poisoned people for profit. Not glamorous, and not the kind of work that gets a Virginia politician booked on national television.
Jones was sworn in on January 17, 2026. His first official act was joining nine separate lawsuits against the federal government, plus a review of which other suits to sign onto. Not a crime initiative. Not a fentanyl push. Litigation against Washington, on day one.
He has kept that pace ever since. Every two or three weeks brings another federal filing or another press release. In August he made it permanent and stood up a four-attorney Federal Accountability Unit whose full-time assignment is fighting the Trump administration. He described it as putting “dedicated personnel and resources” on that fight. Those personnel and resources are paid for by Virginians.
He also publishes a running newsletter called “What Virginians Are Seeing” — a numbered, week-by-week scorecard of what he did to Washington. There is no weekly newsletter about fentanyl dealers.
Is this just the ordinary work of an attorney general? Jones answers that himself. On his campaign website, still live today, he calls Miyares a “MAGA extremist” who “refused to do his job of defending Virginia, instead putting partisan politics first.” Miyares’s offense was declining to sue the President enough. Jones ran on the idea that suing Trump is the scorecard. He was not hiding it, and he is not doing anything now that he did not promise.
So here is the first question, and every Virginian who pays for that office is entitled to ask it out loud.
He wrote that a Republican leader deserved two bullets. He ranked a colleague below Hitler and Pol Pot. He then campaigned on the idea that a good attorney general is one who fights the President hardest. Should we expect that man to spend his days keeping our neighborhoods safe? Is there anything in that record that says he will?
Here is the second question, and it is the harder one.
Are we the unreasonable ones here? Is it too much to expect an elected official to do the work his office was built for? Virginia did not create an attorney general to make him a national name. It created one to prosecute criminals, protect consumers, back up local police, and hold companies to account. Wanting that is not a partisan demand. It is the job.
Two Bullets Jones is not on a ballot again until 2029. Until then, Virginians can keep asking one thing. Why does the man we hired to prosecute crime spend his weeks writing a newsletter about Washington? He has never answered that.