JOHN,

I'm going to write this as someone who spent 21 years in the cockpit, not as a candidate.

The war with Iran is back on.

This week, Donald Trump tore up his own ceasefire — the deal he was bragging about just last month — and ordered American forces back into the fight. We're now several nights into a new round of strikes.

For 21 years, I flew F/A-18s off the deck of an aircraft carrier. So I know that right now, on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, American sailors are loading ordnance and bracing to launch again. I have been in those crews. I have sat in that cockpit waiting for the order, trusting that the people who gave it had done their homework and told the truth.

This time, they didn't. And that is what makes me angry enough to be writing you today.

None of this had to happen. Again and again, Congress had the chance to force this president to prove his case before he pulled us back into war. Again and again, Rob Wittman — who sits on the very committee responsible for this — voted no. He voted to let one man decide, alone, whether your neighbors' sons and daughters get sent into a conflict with no plan and no end.

Now here we are. Right back in it. Exactly where the guardrails were supposed to hold.

It is a failure of the most solemn job Congress has — and the people of Virginia's First District are the ones paying for it.

I'm running because I have lived the cost of these decisions, and I will never rubber-stamp them. I know how to make a president answer for the orders he gives. And I know, down to my bones, what it costs when no one in Congress will.

VA-01 needs a change. Chip in $21 to my campaign today and help me go make that change.

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Thank you for standing with me,

Thank you,
Jason Knapp

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