Sometimes the expression “better late than never” is not actually true. One such example came during a Tuesday Snopes article by Joey Esposito that fact-checked claims that Virginia Attorney General-elect Jay Jones “sent violent texts about GOP opponent and his children” and rated them “true” one week after Election Day.
Under the rating’s “context” subheading, Esposito confirmed, “Snopes has not reviewed the original text messages; however, speaking on camera in early October 2025, Jones publicly admitted to and apologized for sending the messages in question.”
Esposito then went into the details of Jones’s text messages where he claimed he would shoot State Speaker Todd Gilbert twice if given two bullets and the choice between shooting Gilbert, Adolf Hitler, and Pol Pot.
Additionally, Esposito showed Jones claiming “that only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy” and “If those guys die before me, I will go to their funerals to piss on their graves.”
This was the first time Snopes had written about Jay Jones.
Jones ended up defeating Republican incumbent Jason Miyares by about five percentage points. While it would be hyperbole to claim that Snopes waiting a week to confirm the Jones texts was the reason for Jones’s victory, as a matter of principle, there was no reason for Snopes to wait a week until after Election Day. This is especially true considering their justification for the true rating was that Jones “publicly admitted” the texts were real in October.
