CLAY: We are joined now by Jason Miyares. He is the newly elected and now inaugurated attorney general of the state of Virginia. Jason, thanks for making time with us. I’m sure it’s been a whirlwind. My first question for you, campaigning is tough. You’re in the middle of the battle day in and day out. Was there a moment during your campaign where you thought, “Hey, we may really do this? We may sweep the governorship, the lieutenant governorship, and the AG’s office”? Was there a moment that crystallized for you when it all seemed very possible?
MIYARES: Oh, wow, Clay. I would say Glenn and Winsome and I did a rally in Richmond the same day as President Obama. This is probably the first or second week in October. It was on a Saturday. When we saw that the crowd size for Obama was about a third of what he had four years prior when he had campaigned and that we, with no celebrities…
Terry McAuliffe brought in every single celebrity. I think he may have even had Pharrell there, but he had President Obama. At VCU, which is right in the heart of Richmond, very liberal campus, a campus of probably 18 to 20,000 students attend VCU, and we had as many. I think we had about five or six thousand people. We had more people at our rally than theirs. That’s when I realized there is something happening in Virginia.
People were just sick and tired of this far-left liberal monopoly that we had in Richmond, complete control the last few years. And I told people even before this election, listen, Virginia is not a red or a blue state. It’s a common-sense state, and common sense has gone out of the window the last two years in Richmond with the one-party rule we had by the far-left Democratic Party.
So that’s when I knew. We were drawing — just with Glenn, Winsome, and I — crowds bigger than President Obama and so many other celebrities there to campaign for McAuliffe. That’s when I felt there is something real happening and there is such momentum and I felt like there was just gonna be a wave taking us ashore, and that’s ultimately what happened, and we’re thrilled to now be inaugurated and be ready to serve.
BUCK: Attorney General Miyares, it’s Buck. Thanks for being with us the first time here on the show. I know that you have started two investigations — one into the Virginia parole board and one into Loudoun County public schools — right away. Can you just tell us what is behind the investigations and why are you launching them?
MIYARES: Yeah. Well, the first one, the parole board, you had once the far-left liberal majority got control, they started putting in wokesters and social justice warriors on the parole board. They were letting out cop killers, murderers, and rapists sometimes out with decades on their sentence and not even notifying the victims. Well, that’s against Virginia law to fail to notify the victims.
So you had a case, Patrick Schooley, who had gotten not one, not two, but three life sentences without the possibility of parole for the brutal home invasion and rape and murder of a 78-year-old grandmother, Bessie Rountree, and Bessie’s family found out about it when they heard about it on the nightly news. You countless cases so that was the first and it really summarizes criminal-first, victim-last mind-set we’ve been dealing with in Virginia the last two years, which not surprisingly now our murder rate has become the highest it’s been in decades.
And then the Loudoun County school board was you had a tragic incident of an individual — a brutal sexual assault — that happened against a 14-year-old girl inside of a bathroom at a Loudoun school and the school administrators simply now and then transferred the individual, the perpetrator into a second school in which a second alleged assault happened.
And then had the temerity of the school board sitting up at a public meeting and saying, “We don’t have any record whatsoever of any sexual assaults happening.” And so in the Virginia constitution, parents have a fundamental right to the care and upbringing and education. We have a right to an education in the Virginia constitution as well. So that first step is when you drop your child off to school is to know that they’re gonna be safe.
And the fact that we had possible school administrators playing politics with our kids’ safety, that’s a huge problem and so some of it dates back to the Democrats when they had control passed the bill that ended the mandatory reporting of crime in a sexual assault in schools, and so you had a lot of politicians out here trying to turn Virginia into California.
You had Virginians that really revolved at that in November and we’re trying to now push back and undo some of these policies that really made Virginians less safe including our school kids, and that’s the realm. There’s never… Rarely is there ever accountability and transparency in government. My goal is to bring some accountability and transparency, so this never, ever, ever happens again.
CLAY: We’re talking to the attorney general of Virginia, Jason Miyares, who is part of that trio that shocked so many people across the political establishment. Jason, how much of a lesson can the national Republican Party take from what happened in Virginia? How replicable do you think your success on a nationwide basis, and how much is unique to the particular politics of Virginia? How much of a lesson can you be as we move towards 2022 for other political parties, and how much are they asking you for advice?
MIYARES: Look, I think there is a lot of what happened here was the far left got power and really exposed themselves, and Americans reject wokeism. They don’t like it. They don’t like to have people that see everything in society through the lens of race, and they certainly don’t like… If there’s any silver lining of the school shutdowns is that kids are bringing home their homework and their school curriculum, and parents are seeing what was being taught in our schools, and it created great, great concern.
And I can tell you: That doesn’t mean we don’t teach all of our history including the worst chapters. But what it does mean is that somebody like myself in which… You know, my mother fled communist Cuba as a scared 19-year-old homeless and penniless teenager who didn’t know where she was gonna get her next meal. And the fact that she was able to come to this country and see 56 years later almost to the date that she left, her son get elected attorney general.
I love to say America’s given more second the chances more people from more backgrounds, more faiths, more races than any country in the history of the world. We are that last best hope on earth. We may be imperfect, and we never shy away from talking about where we have fallen short of our ideals, but we are overwhelmingly a force of good in this world. We sure as heck are not communist China.
So people want our history, all of our history to be taught. So I think parental empowerment is such an important part the national Republican Party should not be afraid of because when Terry McAuliffe, on debate stage with my dear friend, Glenn Youngkin, said parents should not have any role in the saying of what’s being taught in our schools, he said the quiet part out loud.
We’ve seen policy that essentially told parents, “Sit down. Be quiet. You don’t have any say.” And what we really stress is we’re about empowering parents, not far-left liberal school boards that are more concerned about pushing a social, far-left political ideology on our kids than parents. Parents know best for their kids. Empower parents. I think that’s one of the charges.
And then don’t be afraid to push back on this far-left wokeism that we’ve seen that has so encaptured the Democratic Party. Today’s Democratic Party is not your grandparents’ Democratic Party. It is so far to the left, it’s almost unrecognizable. You should not be afraid to call them out. Don’t be afraid to call ’em out on this criminal-first, victim-last mind-set. Don’t be afraid to call ’em out for going woke. I think that’s the recipe for people running for office at any level all across this country.
BUCK: Attorney general for the state of Virginia, Jason Miyares. Mr. Attorney General, thanks so much for being with us on Clay and Buck. We appreciate it.
MIYARES: Hey. Big fan. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.
BUCK: Thank you so much, sir.