Private messages show Trump’s running mate entertaining conspiracy theories and scorning the late Sheldon Adelson. The day after JD Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, he received a congratulatory text from Charles Johnson, a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories. Johnson assumed the posture of a wise mentor, cautioning the first-time officeholder to choose his staff carefully and repeatedly pressing him on his committee assignments. “Got to keep you out of trouble,” wrote Johnson, who now describes himself as a government informant seeking to protect the United States from foreign influence. Their correspondence over the next 20 months — extending into the weeks before former president Donald Trump picked Vance as his running mate — offers a glimpse of the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s off-the-cuff musings, often matching his public expressions but voiced with much less polish. Vance was just as casual in discussing America’s foreign alliances as he was in evaluating his own private alliances with the GOP’s moneyed class. With Johnson, he pondered responsibility for the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines and crudely described his aversion to the Ukrainian government and refusal to consider its pleas for U.S. assistance. (…) The texts, sent over the encrypted messaging app Signal and provided by Johnson to The Washington Post, show the 40-year-old senator engaged in the kind of freewheeling communication ordinarily tightly controlled by congressional staff. As a newly minted senator, Vance solicited Johnson’s views on many topics, including UFOs (“What is your read”), the Republican Party’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (“What is GOP Bibi problem?”) and the death of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (“Do you think Epstein actually killed himself?”). When Johnson suggested that the senator should work to restrict foreign ownership of U.S. housing, Vance responded with a “thumbs up” emoji.
via washington post: JD Vance in texts with far-right figure: Profane and off-the-cuff