Top Georgia Republican’s Texts Highlight the Party’s Deep Divide on Trump
The New York Times
Messages sent by Lt. Gov. Burt Jones of Georgia, a Trump ally, show the state party’s leadership fracturing in real time after the 2020 election.
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones of Georgia, one of the state’s most powerful pro-Trump politicians, privately shared cutting criticisms of fellow Republicans in the weeks after the 2020 election as he sought to help the former president overturn his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to text messages obtained by The New York Times.
The texts were originally obtained by a special prosecutor who investigated whether Mr. Jones should be charged with crimes related to election interference, and were released under a public records request after the prosecutor decided against bringing charges last week.
The messages underscore the intraparty hostility that has badly fractured Georgia’s Republican leadership, which split over whether to support former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and remains divided heading into the November election.
The surfaced text traffic could also affect Mr. Jones’s ability to build coalitions within his party if he decides to run for governor in 2026. A number of the exchanges were with David Shafer, who at the time was the head of the state Republican Party. Mr. Shafer, along with Mr. Trump and 13 other defendants, has been charged with multiple felonies in an ongoing election interference case in Atlanta.
The day after the election, Mr. Jones texted Mr. Shafer, leveling criticism at Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state who was overseeing the counting of the votes. “What in the hell is SOS doing????” Mr. Jones wrote.
That same day, Mr. Jones referred to the election as a “theft” and texted that he was “drafting a letter blasting our Republican leadership” for “being quiet” about it.
