Representative Van Taylor, R-Texas, is pictured during a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill in September 2020. Taylor announced Wednesday that he will bid for re-election.
Caroline Brehman / AP
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Caroline Brehman / AP
Representative Van Taylor, R-Texas, is pictured during a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill in September 2020. Taylor announced Wednesday that he will bid for re-election.
Caroline Brehman / AP
DALLAS – U.S. Representative Van Taylor of Texas said Wednesday he is ending his re-election campaign and admitting to an affair after it was reported he had an affair with the widow of an employer. of American descent for the Islamic State group.
The North Texas congressman’s statement came a day after former Collin County judge Keith Self forced Taylor to go into labor for the Republican nomination.
A few days before Tuesday’s primary election, several right-wing websites reported on an interview with Tania Joya, who said that she had an affair with Taylor that lasted from October 2020 to May. June 2021. Joya, in the Dallas suburb of Plano, says. Dallas Morning News on Monday night she met with congressmen through her work as a jihadist veteran helping to reprogram extremists.
Taylor apologized for the incident in a statement shared with supporters on Wednesday. It does not mention Joya by name or refer to her late husband, who recruited the Islamic State group.
“About a year ago I made a terrible mistake that caused deep and painful trauma to the people I love most in this world,” he wrote. “I had an affair, it was a mistake, and it was the biggest failure of my life.”
Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday that Joya had been in contact with Suzanne Harp, another candidate who opposed Taylor in the primaries, hoping Harp would confront Taylor privately and convince him to drop out and resign from the National festival.
“All I wanted was for Suzanne Harp to just say, ‘Hey, I know your little scandal with Tania Joya. Do you want to resign before we embarrass you?’ But it didn’t turn out like that,” Joya told the newspaper.
Instead, the paper reported, Harp sent a facilitator to interview the woman, then shared the interview with a pair of right-wing websites.
In a statement, Harp said the revelations were “deeply concerning and I am praying for all involved.”
“Politics should build our families, our communities, and our political parties. This story breaks my heart, both as a wife and as an American. Politics should never be. tear down these sacred institutions,” she said.
Taylor, a Marine veteran who fought in Iraq, was considered one of the most conservative members of the Texas delegation when he was elected in 2018. But he has been criticized by the party’s right for being gay. for voting to certify the 2020 election results and for supporting a committee investigating the January 6 uprising on Capitol Hill.
Joya’s first husband, John Georgelas, grew up in Plano, converted to Islam and became a top recruiter for the radical Islamic State group. In 2013, he took her and their three children to northern Syria, where Yahya Abu Hassan, he became the most important American fighting against IS. He was killed in 2017.
Three weeks after they arrived in Syria, pregnant Joya fled to Turkey with her children, then to Plano to live near her husband’s house. The couple has been covered by the tabloids in her hometown for many years and featured in American publications.
At the end of her affair with Taylor, Joya said she asked for help paying off her credit card debt and several other bills. He gave her $5,000, she said.
“I need help. I want, just help me because it’s the least – the least – he can do,” she told the newspaper. “For him, it was like, ‘Okay, provided you don’t tell anyone.’ …I don’t want to tell anyone anything.”
Taylor took 48.7% of the vote on Tuesday, 823 votes short of what he needed to avoid an outflow with 63,981 votes. Self scored 26.5% of the vote, while Harp got 20.8%.
I am a former soldier and graduated from the United States Military Academy. He insists Taylor has moved away from his conservative roots in an area dominated by the GOP. He was among those who heavily criticized Taylor’s vote over the election results and the insurgency investigation and Taylor’s vote to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol.
