>>14536219
These mught be hit pieces, take with a grain of salt
https://www.georgiasentinelnews.com/2020/09/02/vernon-jones-is-loathed-by-georgia-republicans-why-did-he-speak-at-the-rnc/
“Democrat politicians have personal security. Why don’t they give up their security and replace them with social workers?” Jones asked rhetorically at the RNC, and every Republican in the county must have done a double take. Vernon Jones spent hundreds of thousands on personal security, over the very loud objections of Republicans in DeKalb County as wasteful spending.
He withdrew from his reelection campaign to the state House under a legal challenge to his residency, facing both a strong primary challenger and the censure of his party. The last time he ran for a countywide seat in DeKalb County – which is 70 percent Black – he lost 3 to 1. It is better to think of Jones as a Black face on a convention led by a party composed primarily of white voters who want to be able to show it has Black support. But the effect of affront to Republicans on the local level will be quite substantive.
“As a lifelong Republican, I cannot explain this,” said Anne Blanton, a Republican activist from Brookhaven, in north DeKalb. “Why would you want somebody to come over to our side like that?” Blanton, 54, lives in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, captured in 2018 from Republicans by Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath. Given the presumed closeness of that race, Blanton wonders why no one from the campaign of Karen Handel, McBath’s challenger, sent up warning flags to the Trump campaign.
It’s not the first time Republicans muffed local sentiments in Georgia recently.
I am, perhaps, understating how much local Republicans dislike Jones. Here’s the background.
Before Jones became a spokesperson for Trumpism, he served as CEO of DeKalb County from 2001 to 2009, the top elected official for the county. Among his many failures while running county government, Jones’s hiring practices caused his administration to be found responsible for creating a hostile work environment and racial discrimination.
Jones was personally fined $27,750 in punitive damages by a court in 2011. The county lost over $3 million in damages and legal costs fighting the case.
A 2012 grand jury described Jones’s administration as corrupt, recommending that he be investigated for bid-rigging and theft. “Mr. Jones had an opportunity to assist this Special Purpose Grand Jury in its efforts to address and make right the many flaws of his administration. He failed to rise to the occasion,” the grand jury wrote. Also among its observations: wholesale corruption of the kind that gave a million-dollar tree-trimming contract to a company that didn’t even own a chainsaw. Nothing happened.
One would also think that the someone in the RNC’s ranks would have flagged Jones’s connection to the late, shamed megachurch leader Rev. Earl Paulk. A woman sued Paulk for sexual abuse in 2005, and Jones was set to testify in the case. His appearance was called off when Jones’s fraternity brother and current DeKalb Superior Court Judge Mark Anthony Scott ruled the case frivolous and awarded $1 million in attorney’s fees to Paulk – a bizarre ruling overturned on appeal.
The Republican enclave of Dunwoody, in DeKalb’s northern third, so detested the regular reports of corruption and Jones’s race-baiting response to criticism that they formed a new municipality in 2008 — the city of Dunwoody — in order to minimize their contact with county government.
“Vernon Jones has gotten himself out of more jams than Smuckers,” said Mike Hassinger, a political strategist in Georgia and a longtime observer of DeKalb politics. “The only reasons so few politicians get a second act is because Vernon Jones stole them all.”
“Seriously, the great opportunist rises from the ashes,” said former state Sen. Fran Millar, a Republican who represented the northernmost district in DeKalb for decades. “Twenty years I battled with him, but like Biden he is resilient.”
In full disclosure, Jones and I have a little history. I’ve been writing about corruption issues in DeKalb County for about a decade. Jones has regularly been accused of corruption in office. And Jones has taken issue with my commentary and the commentary of others in fairly personal terms before. As he was losing his race for county sheriff in 2014, he suggested that I was drinking Clorox — a racial insult — and then likened me to the house slave played by Samuel L. Jackson in