LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The attorney for Clark County Commissioner Justin Jones said Monday that Jones deleted text messages sought in a development lawsuit as a "political cleansing" to put a long-running controversy behind him.
The remark came during the first day of a three-day hearing before the State Bar of Nevada, which is arguing to suspend Jones's law license for five years, after both state and federal judges accused him of destroying text message evidence relevant to a lawsuit.
Rob Bare, a former Clark County District Court judge now in private practice, said Jones was embarrassed by some of the messages he'd sent, including one that harshly criticized his predecessor on the Clark County Commission, Susan Brager.
"This gives insight as to why Justin Jones did the act on his cell phone on April 17, 2019," Bare told the three-member Bar panel. "It was a political cleansing. You know, that just hit me. I think that's exactly what this was."
Jones, for his part, said he had no specific memory of deleting the texts, but expressed remorse for doing it.
"And I regret deleting the text messages. It was stupid," said Jones, answering questions from Senior Bar Counsel Daniel Hooge. "I wish I had never done it, because it's only created heartache for me personally, for my family, for the county, it's wasted a lot of people's times."
But for Hooge, Jones didn't make a simple mistake. Instead, he said he acted to cover up a crime.
"This case is really about two things: corruption and cover-up," Hooge said at the start of an all-day hearing Monday. "Not only did he delete the text messages, but over the course of litigation, he denied the truth of the matter. He consistently denied what had happened."
The saga of Blue Diamond Hill
The controversy began long before Jones became a county commissioner in 2018.
In 2003, developer Jim Rhodes purchased land near Red Rock Canyon with sweeping vistas of the Las Vegas Valley, intending to build a subdivision on it. The idea drew significant opposition, and both state and county governments passed laws to prevent dense development on the parcel.
Rhodes sued, and the lawsuit was settled, with Clark County agreeing to evaluate any new development proposal in good faith.
The county approved a development plan in 2011 with two main conditions: Rhodes and his company, Gypsum Resources, could not build an access road from State Route 159, a scenic route popular with runners and cyclists. The second condition required Rhodes to get permission from the Bureau of Land Management to cross federal land to build a road leading to the development.
Things stalled until finally Rhodes appealed for a waiver of the second condition.
That motivated the group Save Red Rock to protest, aided by Jones, who provided pro bono legal services in the days before he decided to seek a seat on the Clark County Commission. (Jones had previously served a single term in the Nevada State Senate, from 2012 to 2016.)
As the 2018 election loomed, Jones sought to persuade then-Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak to vote against waivers for the Blue Diamond Hill development conditions. Sisolak was running for governor at the time.
According to an email disclosed by an environmental group — and later by Jones himself — in a lawsuit filed by Gypsum against the county, Jones sought Sisolak's help by promising him environmental group endorsements, including from Save Red Rock, in exchange for a no vote on the project.
Ultimately, Sisolak and the commission voted to delay the waiver issue until early 2019, when Jones would be elected to the commission and Sisolak to the governor's mansion.
Notably, Sisolak won his race against Republican Adam Laxalt handily, especially in Clark County, where he bested Laxalt by more than 86,000 votes.
With Jones now on the commission, the waiver issue finally came to a vote in April 2019, where it was unanimously rejected. Jones, whose district includes Blue Diamond Hill, made the motion, as is customary on the commission.
Hooge argued the deal with Sisolak was a corrupt bargain.
"What we uncovered was a scheme, a corrupt and illicit scheme, to block the development of the Blue Diamond Hill development," Hooge said.
But Bare chalked the entire issue up to politics. Jones advocated for and voted against the project, Bare said, because that's what his constituents elected him to do in 2018.
(Jones, too, won his 2018 race over Republican Tisha Black by a safe margin, 54% to 36%.)
Jones even sought an opinion from the Nevada Ethics Commission, which gave him permission to vote if he disclosed his former legal work for Save Red Rock, but Hooge said Jones was selective in what he told ethics commissioners.
Texts go missing — at a suspicious time
Just after 6 p.m. on April 17, the day of the vote to deny Gypsum's waivers, Jones deleted all the text messages on his cell phone, including texts that pertained to the Blue Diamond Hill development.
Those messages were sought by attorneys for Rhodes, who suspected the county had not treated the development application fairly. Some of them were later recovered from the cell phones of people Jones texted, although most were lost.
That led both a federal magistrate judge and a Clark County District Court judge to conclude that Jones had acted intentionally to keep evidence from Rhodes's attorneys. (Bare noted that other commissioners routinely and automatically deleted their text messages.)
In court, Jones repeatedly said he didn't recall how the messages were deleted, but acknowledged that a forensic examination of his cell phone showed it had happened on the day of the Red Rock vote.
After the court findings, the State Bar of Nevada opened an investigation, and charged Jones not only with deleting evidence but also for making what Bar lawyers called a corrupt bargain with Sisolak. (For his part, Sisolak has denied any wrongdoing in connection with the matter. Neither Jones nor anyone else has faced criminal investigations or charges related to the Blue Diamond Hill development.)
The Bar also sought to include old allegations that Jones concealed evidence in a separate case, but a hearing master denied that motion.
▶ Watch Embattled commissioner wins first round at State Bar hearing
Now, Jones faces at least two additional days of hearings, with witnesses including current and former county commissioners, political figures and lawyers. The Bar panel could decide the case immediately after attorneys finish their cases or could take the matter under advisement and decide later.
Either way, Jones's future as a lawyer and a politician hangs in the balance. He's eligible to run for one final term on the commission in 2026, although publicity from the text message case will certainly make a bid more difficult, to say nothing of the effects of a suspension of Jones's law license.
If you have questions about politics, elections, government or law, email us using the Ask Steve link on our website.
Local News