Top Georgia Republican’s Texts Highlight the Party’s Deep Divide on Trump

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.

On Nov. 7, Mr. Jones exchanged texts with Josh McKoon, a former Republican state senator who would later go on to head the state party. Mr. McKoon shared ideas for legislation that would restrict some forms of voting, apparently in the interest of combating voter fraud.

“I like it,” Mr. Jones responded. He added a note of exasperation over Gov. Brian Kemp, who was refusing entreaties from some Republicans to call a special session of the legislature in an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss. “Kemp will not call a special session…. that guy,” Mr. Jones wrote.

Mr. Jones also lamented that Mr. Kemp and the state’s two Republican U.S. senators at the time, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, were not doing more to help Mr. Trump’s cause. “They have left Trump out to die in the field,” he wrote, adding that the three had “abandoned” Mr. Trump.

Two days later, the two Republican senators would openly call for Mr. Raffensperger to resign over unfounded claims that the election process had been riddled with flaws — a move that showed the senators were ready to expend significant political capital to help Mr. Trump.

In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Jones, who served as one of 16 fake electors for Mr. Trump, called the recent criminal investigation of him a “charade” that “has been a massive waste of taxpayer dollars.”

His comments about other Republicans, he said, “were made at a heated time — we are now all back on the same page working to win this election.”

But he did not retract some of his most derogatory comments, which he had reserved for Geoff Duncan, a Republican former lieutenant governor. Just after the November 2020 election, Mr. Duncan made numerous TV appearances asserting — accurately — that there was no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia.

Those appearances infuriated many pro-Trump Republicans, including Mr. Jones. “Unleash the POTUS on him,” Mr. Jones texted to a Trump campaign official named Billy Kirkland on Dec. 1, 2020. “His ass needs to be brought down a notch or 4 spots, he has let the LT spot go to his head.”

In another text thread, Bernard B. Kerik, the pro-Trump former New York police commissioner, told Mr. Jones that Mr. Duncan was a “traitor to the party and country.”

“Yes sir, no doubt,” said Mr. Jones. (In an email, Mr. Kerik reiterated his view that Mr. Duncan is “a traitorous snake.”)

In his statement on Thursday, Mr. Jones said: “I stand by the comments about Geoff Duncan.” He then repeated a vulgar personal insult he had directed at Mr. Duncan in the texts, and also alluded to Mr. Duncan having endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in the current presidential race. “We’re glad he’s found his home with the Democrats,” Mr. Jones said.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Duncan said that he was still a Republican. Mr. Jones’s comments were “not surprising,” he said, “based on the fact that Burt Jones was Trump’s chief cheerleader in trying to usurp democracy here in Georgia.”

In another text from December 2020, Mr. Jones appeared to call for Mr. Trump to “declare a national emergency and suspend the transition of power,” but Scott Paradise, a Jones adviser, said the text was forwarded from someone else.

“He 100 percent was not calling for a state of emergency,” Mr. Paradise said.