Mehta Has Never Faced Up To Her Role In The Unite The Right Riot
VA-01, looking like it is right out of an American history book, includes Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. It also includes all or parts of 19 counties and independent cities. Three of those with big populations are swing counties, Chesterfield (leans red), Henrico (leans blue) and James City (leans red). The district itself has an R+14 partisan lean, slightly worse than it was before the latest redistricting. Trump won the district by 6 points, the closest Virginia race won by the Republican.
This cycle, Virginia MAGAt Rob Wittman has drawn 2 Democratic challengers, Herb Jones and Leslie Mehta. Jones is a strong progressive, a retired army colonel and the 12 year Treasurer of New Kent County. You can contribute to his campaign here. We know less about Mehta, other than the big scandal… her part in setting up the deadly Unite the Right rally/riot. An ACLU attorney, she decided to represent anti-Semite, neo-Nazi Jason Kessler when he rejected the offer by Charlottesville to give him a permit to hold his 2017 white supremacist rally away from downtown, where it was— correctly— feared they would be a safety problem. They were. There were 3 deaths that day.
The city had had these neo-Nazis parading around a few months earlier, the reason why the permit was for Lee Park. But Kessler went to Mehta who decided to show what a great civil libertarian she is by taking the Nazis case and winning them the permit— a death sentence for Heather Heyer and two police officers, Berke Bates and Jay Cullen. Thirty others were injured. Leslie Mehta won her case against Charlottesville for the Nazi (who she says “promised” he wouldn’t engage violence). Are those deaths and injuries on her? I don’t know. But I sure wouldn’t vote for her.
She’s native of North Carolina and certainly is familiar with the legacy of racism and violence by people like Kessler. Her idea of “free speech” is twisted. “I think one of teh reasons why free speech is so important to me,’ she wrote, “is because… it exposes what you disagree with.” Yeah, tell that to Heyer, Bates and Cullen. Mehta still refuses to admit she made a mistake. She isn’t fit for office.
Abigail Spanberger, by far the most conservative Democrat in Virginia’s congressional delegation, has an “F” score from ProgressivePunch. They show that her voting record is ranked the 13th worst in the House. She hasn’t been endorsing in primaries— but she immediately jumped in and endorsed Mehta, even though in 2022 she had endorsed Jones. Apparently when it’s a choice between a full-on progressive and someone who is far more conservative, Spanberger just goes right to the conservative. It’s who she is; it’s why she should never be allowed to be elected governor of Virginia. In 2019 she said she doesn’t know if Trump is a racist.
“Democrats,” Jones told me this morning, “need a nominee laser focused on defeating Rob Wittman in November without any questions about past connections and work. I’m ready serve again by fighting for us in Congress— ensuring our reproductive freedom, safety from gun violence, investment in public education, and our right to free and fair elections.”
