NYT: “Burt Jones, the Republican front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor.”
New reporting from The New York Times today reveals the lengths to which Burt Jones – the leading GOP candidate for governor – went to undermine the 2020 election in Georgia and how he remains a “true believer” in Trump’s attacks on the integrity of Georgia’s elections.
The New York Times reports that Jones “tried to organize a special state legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump’s electoral loss,” including by arranging public hearings, backing litigation challenging Georgia’s 2020 election results, and joining a fake Electoral College contingent that sent false votes to Washington.
Rick Jackson has also been “adamant” on the trail that the 2020 election was stolen in just the latest sign that “the 2020 election is still relevant” in Georgia’s GOP primary.
Read the full story from The New York Times here.
Key Excerpts.
- “Burt Jones, the Republican front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor.”
- “On the stump, he even boasts about it.”
- “‘You’ve got to think back to who was standing up — who was in the ditch, in the foxhole — with everybody when we were fighting in 2020,’ Mr. Jones told a crowd recently while campaigning inside a gun store in suburban Atlanta.”
- “But Mr. Jones still carries the baggage — or as some would have it, bragging rights — from the presidential election of six years ago, when there were few state officials who played more important roles than Mr. Jones in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.”
- “The New York Times reviewed the lengths to which he went, drawing on thousands of files from state and federal investigations, including public documents as well as leaked discovery material produced in the failed Georgia criminal case against Mr. Trump and his allies.”
- “Taken together, they show that in the weeks after the election, Mr. Jones, then a state senator, coordinated with the Trump campaign and was even in contact with Mr. Trump himself, who would proclaim during a 2020 rally that Mr. Jones was ‘in my pocket.’”
- “Mr. Jones tried to organize a special state legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump’s electoral loss. He helped arrange public hearings in the State Senate, where Rudolph W. Giuliani demonized Atlanta election workers and advanced false claims that the election had been stolen. He joined a fake Electoral College contingent from Georgia that sent its false votes to Washington as part of a multistate effort to try to derail the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. He backed Texas litigation challenging his own state’s election results.”
- “If elected governor, Mr. Jones would join several Republican governors who are 2020 election deniers just as the Trump administration is using the Justice Department to seize 2020 ballots and revive old conspiracies.”
- “Mr. Jones was an early loyal supporter of Mr. Trump. He jumped on board in 2015, when many thought that a man known more for ‘The Apprentice’ than for politics would flame out.”
- “After the 2020 election, Mr. Jones cemented his role as a Trump supporter who would not accept the president’s defeat.”
- “In a call on Dec. 7, 2020, Mr. Trump pressed David Ralston, then the speaker of the Georgia House, to hold the special session, telling him, ‘Burt Jones is very much on our side.’”
- “Simultaneously, Mr. Jones worked on assembling a slate of fake electors to potentially replace the real ones.”
- “Mr. Jones would remain a true believer, even as Republican leaders in the Georgia legislature stripped him of a committee chairmanship for his efforts to overturn the election.”
- “Though Mr. Jones’s ironclad pro-Trump résumé should help him in the Republican runoff next month, it could drag him down in a general election as voters are unhappy about soaring inflation and the unpopular war in Iran.”
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