In a month seemingly filled with scandals, trouble is continuing to unfold for Democrats in Old Dominion. According to court documents first obtained by National Review, Democratic nominee for Attorney General of Virginia Jay Jones is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation linked to a reckless driving conviction.

Jones was convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after having been stopped by police for driving nearly 120 miles per hour in a 70 MPH zone. He was fined and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service. Jones reported that over the course of 2023 he had completed his community service, working 500 hours for his own political action committee, Meet Our Moment (MOM) PAC, and the rest for Virginia’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“In order to complete that number of hours within one year, Jones would have had to dedicate ten hours of every week to MOM PAC and ten hours to the NAACP, all while working at the law firm Hogan Lovells full time,” National Review’s Audrey Fahlberg pointed out. Jones’s community service time and full-time work was in addition to campaigning across the state for Democratic candidates. New Kent County Commonwealth Attorney Scott Renick was assigned to investigate potential issues with Jones counting working for his own PAC as community service but requested that he be recused due to a conflict of interest. On Monday, Judge Elliott Bondurant granted Renick’s request and replaced him with a special prosecutor, James City County Attorney Nathan Green, noting that “the matter” is “currently pending in the General District Court in New Kent County.”

In addition to the ongoing criminal probe into his actions, Jones is also facing backlash for a series of disturbing text messages he sent, also in 2022, to a Republican colleague while the two were working in the Virginia House of Delegates. After then-Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert (R) paid homage to a Democratic former delegate who had passed away, Jones texted fellow delegate Carrie Coyner (R) and said if Gilbert and other Republicans “die before me I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves.” He then suggested that he would like to shoot Gilbert in the head. “Gilbert gets two bullets to the head,” Jones texted. He also suggested that Gilbert and his wife should have to see their children be shot and killed in order for the Speaker to change his mind on Second Amendment rights. When Coyner confronted Jones over the cruelty of his texts, he quipped, “I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes.”

Earlier on, during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots in 2020, Jones suggested that police institutions were inherently racist and that the problem could potentially be solved if more police officers were killed. According to a Major Cities Chiefs Association report, over 2,000 police officers were injured in the riots from May to July, with injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to fractures and gunshot wounds. Nearly 75% of police departments and law enforcement agencies had officers injured by rioters, and multiple officers were also reportedly killed.

Republicans have repeatedly called on Jones to suspend his campaign, following the publication of his violent text messages earlier this month. Jones’s opponent, Republican and incumbent Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, said that Jones’s violent rhetoric disqualifies him from office. He has also pointed to the criminal probe into Jones’s reckless driving conviction as disqualifying. “It is not possible for Jay Jones to fulfill the duties of the attorney general while under an open criminal investigation,” Miyares said in a statement. “If Jay stays in the race, it shows a contempt for voters never seen in modern Virginia political history.”

Democrats, however, have refused to ask Jones to drop out of the race and, in some cases, have even doubled down on their support for the nominee. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.), for example, recently reiterated, “I’m still supporting Jay Jones.” Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger has claimed that she does not condone Jones’s text messages but has refused to pull her endorsement of the candidate. She was repeatedly asked during a recent debate whether or not she supports Jones and repeatedly refused to rescind her endorsement. In a recent interview, Spanberger complained of having to defend Jones over the text message scandal, saying that she would much rather focus on policy issues.

“We are three weeks away from an election in Virginia. I have worked tirelessly for two years running for this office. I announced in November 2023,” Spanberger told interviewer Katie Couric. “The fact that I — and I say this with all due respect, because I think it’s a fair thing for you to ask me about — the fact that I have to spend even a moment’s time talking about somebody else’s text message from years ago rather than what I want to do as governor, is something that I am deeply unhappy about,” the Democrat continued. “The fact that I can’t spend every minute of the day talking about the plans that I have built out … like my multiple pages of plans, my affordability plan, my education plan, my growing our economy plan, because of the poor choices of another candidate is something that really clouds my view of all of it.”

Despite the scandals dogging Jones, he is recovering from a drop in popularity following the publication of his text messages, while Spanberger holds a commanding lead in the governor’s race, according to a new Suffolk University survey. Spanberger is leading her opponent, Republican gubernatorial nominee and incumbent Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears 51.8% to 43.2%, while Republican nominee for lieutenant governor John Reid is leading his Democratic opponent, Ghazala Hashmi, much more narrowly, 44.8% to 44.6%. Jones, on the other hand, is polling at 42.4% support against Miyares’s 46.4%, a narrower gap than was reported two weeks ago.