Virgil Hilts

Abigail Spanberger is out here performing the political equivalent of a smoke alarm that only goes off when the neighbor’s kitchen is already on fire. She’s suddenly very concerned about process, timing, and “trust in institutions,” which is a curious priority when one of her closest allies just got federally indicted for allegedly running a family marijuana enterprise out of the state Senate like it was a side hustle with better parking. You sleep with dogs you wake up with fleas. The investigation didn’t start last week. It started under Biden, dragged on through the Trump transition, and produced an indictment that includes Lucas’s own daughters and grandson. Spanberger’s rapid response doesn’t read like a principled defense of due process. It reads like someone who just watched the first domino tip and is frantically checking whether her own name is on the next card. When the person who helped you get elected, who pushed the aggressive redistricting map, and who sits at the center of the cannabis legislative machine gets raided and charged, the people in the same orbit don’t stay calm. They issue careful statements and hope the cameras stay pointed elsewhere. There’s a reason she’s scrambling. Lucas wasn’t some random backbencher. She was a power center—Senate Finance chair, longtime operator, and a reliable ally who treated her cannabis business and her legislative portfolio as overlapping portfolios. Spanberger didn’t just tolerate that arrangement; she benefited from the political machine around it. Now that machine has federal charges attached, and the governor’s first instinct is to question the calendar instead of the conduct. That’s not leadership. That’s damage control from someone who understands that when one longtime operator in a tight political circle starts cooperating, the next names that surface are rarely random. She’s not defending the rule of law. She’s defending the circle. And circles like this have a habit of getting smaller once the indictments start landing. She is a fraud and needs to go! Do better Virginia!