Burt Jones, the Republican front-runner in the Georgia governor’s race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor.
On the stump, he even boasts about it.
“You’ve got to think back to who was standing up — who was in the ditch, in the foxhole — with everybody when we were fighting in 2020,” Mr. Jones told a crowd recently while campaigning inside a gun store in suburban Atlanta.
Last week, Mr. Jones, with the help of an endorsement from President Trump, was the top vote-getter in the first round of Georgia’s Republican primary for governor. He now faces a June 16 runoff against Rick Jackson, a brash, pro-Trump billionaire.
But Mr. Jones still carries the baggage — or as some would have it, bragging rights — from the presidential election of six years ago, when there were few state officials who played more important roles than Mr. Jones in the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.
The New York Times reviewed the lengths to which he went, drawing on thousands of files from state and federal investigations, including public documents as well as leaked discovery material produced in the failed Georgia criminal case against Mr. Trump and his allies.
Taken together, they show that in the weeks after the election, Mr. Jones, then a state senator, coordinated with the Trump campaign and was even in contact with Mr. Trump himself, who would proclaim during a 2020 rally that Mr. Jones was “in my pocket.”
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