The FXBG Advance Interview with Jason Miyares
The incumbent Virginia Attorney General is seeking reelection in November.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Jason Miyares recently sat down with the Advance to discuss the early influences in his life, his deep belief in gratitude, his accomplishments as Attorney General, the challenges facing law enforcement officers, and what he would look to achieve should he win a second term.
FXBG Advance: Your mother was a Cuban refugee. How has her life experience helped to shape you and your values?
Jason Miyares: We each have those moments that will impact us and stick in our brains at a very early age. For me, I remember my mother coming into our kitchen and asking me to teach her the Pledge of Allegiance.
I was six years old, and I kind of was beginning to realize, well, why would I need the teach her the pledge? Why does she not know the pledge?
And that's when I really realized that it was for her citizenship. She had to learn it for her ceremony. So I remember sitting as a little kid in her kitchen, teaching my mom how to say the pledge of allegiance, and then going to federal court not quite understanding what was happening. That she was becoming a citizen. How proud she was. That left a huge impression on me.
I was raised to have this enormous gratitude that I was in this country, and I fully recognize that what we have is a very, very precious and beautiful thing, and it goes back to that sense of gratitude.
I got a chance to speak at Boys State earlier this year, and I told that group of young men that on paper, you should be the happiest generation in American history. Because on paper you're the most educated generation America's ever seen, and you’re the most financially secure generation that Americans have ever seen. And yet, you’re the most depressed.
There's a lot of reasons for this. The high levels of addictions and depression we're seeing are higher than the generation that got through the great depression and stormed the beaches of Normandy. Fifty percent of Americans don't know the name of their neighbor. But also, there is one survey that found only about 30% of 18- to 29-year-olds have a love of America.
And that's so different than how I was raised. I told those young people that 99% of human beings that have ever lived have not had freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of assembly. And 99% of human beings who ever walked on planet Earth did not have the ability of casting a ballot for their leader.
We think what we have in America is normal; it's abnormal. And this has given me such an appreciation for what I call the American miracle.
My mom fled Cuba in the fall of 1965, literally as a scared, homeless, and penniless teenager.
In the fall of 2015, almost 50 years to the day from when she left Cuba, she got a ballot with my name on it to represent her in the oldest democracy in the Western hemisphere, and so that's a beautiful example of what we are.
FXBG Advance: Is your mother the reason you became an attorney?
The whole reason why I became a lawyer is not just my mother, but my uncle, Angel Miyares. He was arrested at Bay of Pigs in the middle of the night. He was not in the invasion, but Castro arrested anybody that could rise up. My uncle got arrested, and my mother has memories of waking up with Castro’s security forces there to arrest them. Machine guns drawn. She didn’t know where her brother was for several days.
He went to an empty base baseball stadium where they held everyone they suspected, and they told them that if the Yankees were successful, they would machine gun all of them.
I'm not sure what my uncle said to the wrong person, but he and some other folks were taken out and went through the humiliation of a mock execution.
So I remember at an early age asking my uncle, like, how could they have done that? You know, on TV you have a trial.
My uncle said you don't understand, because in America we have laws, we have the Constitution. You don’t really have that in Cuba. And that's another big guidepost for me and why I became an attorney.
FXBG Advance: You reference speaking to Boys’ State. What do you wish young people better understood?
Miyares: What I tell young people is to appreciate what you have.
It’s an amazing, beautiful thing to remember that somebody woke up this morning on this planet just as smart as you, just as talented, but they live in a very different society. And they look at you and they wish they could have what you have, to be an American citizen.
So carpe diem, seize the day, don’t let anything hold you back.
It breaks my heart that there’s so many young people that feel so depressed, or they look at America and think it’s so wrong.
Yes, we have problems, but gosh, this is an amazing place, an amazing moment, and an amazing time. Enjoy your freedoms.
FXBG Advance: You spent some time in private practice. What brought you back to working for the Commonwealth’s Attorney?
Miyares: I was in private practice for a period of time and got a little bored. I will never say anything ill about the firm I worked for, it was a good group of folks, but it was all transactional law, and I was never in court.
One day I ran into the Virginia Beach commonwealth’s attorney, Harvey Bryant, who asked what I was doing. I told him I was working for this firm, and he said, well, we have some openings. Why don't you come sit down with me? And so the rest is history.
I loved the office and learned a lot in my time there. You average anywhere from 50 to 70 felonies at any one time on your caseload. You’re in court every day.
That’s also when I started working closely with law enforcement. I great appreciation for the work they do, as well as the criminal justice system.
Your eyes get opened to law enforcement work when you're in it, versus how it's portrayed either in the media or maybe sometimes on television.
FXBG Advance: What about law enforcement work do most people not understand?
Miyares: How hard it is.
It’s the hardest job in America. I go to work with a phone and a tie; they put on a bullet-proof vest.
The other thing is how fast everything happens.
I’ve been down to the simulation center, and they do a simulation of what it is like at a stop, and it’s 360-degrees. You see where you fire, and you see how quickly things happen. The first time I went through the simulation of a traffic stop and I had to pull a gun, it did not go well for me.
You realize just how quick in these moments that they have to react. It's harrowing.
As I often point out, every day, law enforcement is dealing with people oftentimes on their worst day, but it's an incredibly noble profession.
One of my first moments as Attorney General was speaking at Officer Chandler’s end of watch in Big Stone Gap. The same minister that had married him a month before was now burying him.
I remember talking to his cousin, who's also law enforcement, and he talked about the burden of the badge.
It's an incredible job, but you carry with you the weight of what you see and experience every day. Sheriff Holcomb down in Virginia Beach liked to say the badge was only an ounce, but at times it's so heavy.
There’s this unspoken bond among law enforcement officers that if one is injured, we’re all injured, and we're going to be there. So I have great appreciation for them.
Yes, there are bad cops. I'm not naive on that. Every profession is going to have a small subset of bad actors, and I particularly loathe bad actors that are in law enforcement because you break trust.
It's a tough job and a tough world. And they really do great work, and America is really blessed as a whole to have an incredibly professional police force, because in a lot of countries, the police force is corrupt. That's not the case here overwhelmingly; they do great work and under very difficult circumstances.
FXBG Advance: What are you most proud of in your tenure as Attorney General?
Miyares: I say as Attorney General we're the people's protector. That's my mindset. When I was running for office, I said that I wanted to get back to public safety. I remember meeting with prosecutors after getting elected and asking them what they wanted from us to make sure they can do their jobs. And I remember one prosecutor saying, you know, we want our badges back.
Now, when I was in the Virginia Beach commonwealth attorney’s office, prosecutors had badges. So I asked, “Why don't you have badges?” And they said, well, our predecessor didn't like the fact that we had badges.
So I ordered badges.
I also spent the first six months in the office meeting law enforcement in small settings. They felt really beat up, candidly, rhetorically. They felt like a lot of politicians had attacked them. A lot of it was working with them and making sure the morale gets up.
I’m also a data-driven guy, and I saw that our murder rate was at a 20-year high in Virginia. But this rate was primarily driven in certain localities, and what we saw statistically speaking was that roughly 5% of felons committed over 50% of the violent felonies. So we had to go after this small subset.
Operation Ceasefire has been up and running a little over 2 years now, and the numbers have been remarkable. We went from a 20-year high in the murder rate to a 30% drop in the murder rate. Of that drop, 66% was just from our 13 Ceasefire cities.
I’m also proud of the work we’ve done tackling addiction. We decided to tackle it from both the supply-side and the demand side.
On the demand side, we had to get a message out on getting treatment. And part of what I'm most outraged about with the whole addiction crisis is that it started in Virginia. You literally had some of the largest pharmaceutical companies on the planet treat Virginians like we were chemistry experiments.
They went out to the coal fields in Appalachia and into these coal mining towns, and it was by design, and said, we have this great new wonder pill for back pain and work-related injuries. It's called oxycontin. You don't have anything to worry about, it's not addicting.
Now we know that they knew these were some of the most addictive chemicals known to man. And it just destroyed communities. So we aggressively went after the pharmaceutical companies.
It's ongoing, but we're at $1.5 billion and counting. This is not money that we get. The opiate abatement authority was set up, and that money is given grant money that goes out.
It's actually the largest influx of money for in-person treatment we’ve ever seen. Our message to Virginians is that asking for help is a sign of weakness. It's one of the most beautiful things you could do get help.
I cannot sing enough the praises of some of the nonprofits we’ve worked with. I was recently at a men and women’s recovery center, the first of its kind in a 150-mile radius, and their stories were just amazing. They got a six-figure grant from us to help open up.
Our office has gotten enough fentanyl off the streets that could have taken the lives of close to 7 million Virginians.
So probably my most proud moment as Attorney General was earlier this year when I stood with Governor Youngkin at DEA’s national headquarters where DEA announced that Virginia was not Top 10, not Top 5, but we were the Number One state in the entire country in the drop in addiction deaths.
FXBG Advance: Virginia is staring down the possibility for the first time in 20 years having Republicans and Democrats split the top three elected offices in the state. Should you be re-elected and Abigail Spanberger were to become governor, how would you work with her?
Miyares: If I have the honor of serving again, whoever is in the governor's mansion, as long as they value law enforcement, want to keep Virginians safe, and want to continue the progress we've made, then I will work with anybody, anywhere, anytime.
FXBG Advance: Why are you seeking a second term?
Miyares: I’m asking Virginians to rehire me to continue to protect them.
I’m asking for this because my opponent is asking Virginians to hire him to be Virginia’s top prosecutor and he’s never prosecuted a case in his life, and I think the best predictor of future performance is past performance.
I think my opponent’s record in the General Assembly advocating for things like no-cash bail makes us less safe, voting no on 60-day mandatory minimum for repeat spousal abuse makes us less safe, ending the mandatory reporting requirement of sexual assault in our schools makes us less safe.
And so I think as we both apply for this job, I think it’s important to look at both of our records. I’m incredibly proud of being the people’s protector, and I think the contrast to my opponent is profound.
FXBG Advance: Is there one goal you would like to see achieved in a second term?
Miyares: Well, I want to make sure that Virginia maintains our Number One ranking in the drop of addiction deaths. I want to see truth in sentencing brought back to Virginia. And our next ongoing goal is litigation that gets filed against TikTok and Meta. I think Big Tech has targeted our children. These are some of the biggest corporations on the planet. So we are in a huge fight over discovery and these investigations, but just like Big Pharma, Big Tech's going to go down because of the way they've targeted our children.
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