JD Vance in texts with far-right figure: Profane and off-the-cuff
Private messages show Trump’s running mate entertaining conspiracy theories and scorning the late Sheldon Adelson.
The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.
Johnson assumed the posture of a wise mentor, cautioning the first-time officeholder to choose his staff carefully and repeatedly pressing him on his committee assignments. “Got to keep you out of trouble,” wrote Johnson, who now describes himself as a government informant seeking to protect the United States from foreign influence.
Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance.
“Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine,” he told Johnson in October, about three weeks after House Republicans blocked additional aid to help Kyiv repel the Russian invasion. “Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.”
In response to questions about his correspondence with Johnson, Vance spokesman William Martin said the two were never close and don’t share the same politics. “Chuck Johnson spam texted JD Vance,” Martin said. “JD usually ignored him, but occasionally responded to push back against things he said.”
The texts, sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal and provided by Johnson to The Washington Post, show the 40-year-old senator engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff.
As a newly minted senator, Vance solicited Johnson’s views on many topics, including UFOs (“What is your read”), the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“What is GOP Bibi problem?”) and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Do you think Epstein actually killed himself?”). When Johnson suggested that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of U.S. housing, Vance responded with a “thumbs up” emoji.
The mostly friendly conversation with Johnson reflects how Vance gravitates to people on the political fringe — a cohort emboldened by Trump’s insurgent campaign in 2016 and highly active online in the years since. After Trump picked Vance as his running mate on July 15, Johnson has been criticizing his onetime interlocutor and threatening to release their communications. He said he has grown disillusioned with Vance, especially over the senator’s favorable view of the Israeli prime minister, and now supports President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.
Johnson, 35, has spread fantastical claims about a wide range of politicians and journalists and has made comments casting doubt on the Holocaust. He was banned from Twitter in 2015 for soliciting donations aimed at “taking out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. He argued at the time that he was referring to journalistic sleuthing, and his account was restored under the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Johnson has provided information to the FBI in recent years about some of his associates and maintains that his access to far-right circles has allowed him to expose wrongdoing and serve the public good, saying, “My admittedly controversial associations have allowed me to get entry to some of the most fringe spaces, but my commitment to our country hasn’t wavered.”
Vance is perhaps the most high-profile emblem of a new breed of conservative politician willing to entertain and endorse provocative or offensive figures. Trump has displayed similar impulses, including in 2022 when he dined at his Mar-a-Lago Club with Nick Fuentes, an outspoken Holocaust denier.
Unlike Trump, however, Vance has turned his ideological permissiveness into a political philosophy — an open embrace of the unvetted and the indecent aimed at undermining conventional norms of truth and decorum. Vance has defended his vision as a big tent representing how many Americans actually think. Democrats have described his approach as “weird,” a label that Harris allies have increasingly applied to the Trump ticket.
Vance has bragged about being “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures.” He wrote a positive blurb for a book by Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist who advanced the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. And he has defended Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host who spread lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
“Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected,” Vance said in a 2021 speech to the conservative Teneo Network that was recently published by ProPublica. “Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be okay with nonconventional people.”
In the texts, Vance often seemed skeptical of Johnson — not because of his associations with far-right causes but rather because of his self-presentation as a spook. “If you are who you say you are then don’t you have my phone tapped?” Vance wrote last fall, adding an emoji signaling that he was laughing so hard he was crying.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/07/jd-vance-charles-johnson-texts/
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