WASHINGTON — The lawyer for plaintiffs who’re suing the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said Thursday that he plans to show over two years of text messages from Mr. Jones’s phone to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The lawyer, Mark Bankston, who represents Sandy Hook parents suing Mr. Jones in defamation lawsuits for lies he had spread concerning the 2012 school shooting, said in court in Austin, Texas, that he planned to show over the texts unless a judge instructed him to not accomplish that.
“I actually intend to try this, unless you tell me to not,” Mr. Bankston told the judge, Maya Guerra Gamble, who appeared unsympathetic to requests from Mr. Jones’s lawyers that Mr. Bankston return the materials to them.
When lawyers raised the chance that the texts might be subpoenaed by the committee, the judge replied, “They’re going to now. They learn about them.”
An individual acquainted with the House committee’s work said the panel had been in contact with the plaintiffs’ lawyers about obtaining materials from Mr. Jones’s phone.
The Sandy Hook School Massacre
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A devastating attack. On Dec. 14, 2012, a 20-year-old gunman killed his mother after which walked into the elementary school armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle. He killed 26 people there, 20 of them children, before killing himself.
The push for gun control. Then-President Barack Obama vowed to “use whatever power this office holds” to stop such massacres from happening again. Though legislative efforts to pass a ban on assault weapons and expand background checks failed, a latest wave of activism focused on gun control gained traction following the shooting.
Mr. Bankston said in court that Mr. Jones’s lawyers mistakenly sent him text messages from Mr. Jones, as they attempted to defend him in court for broadcasting conspiracy theories that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and that the families were actors.
Mr. Bankston said they included texts with the political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. Mr. Bankston said he had heard from “various federal agencies and law enforcement” concerning the material.
“Things like Mr. Jones and his intimate messages with Roger Stone should not confidential. They should not trade secrets,” Mr. Bankston said.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been pushing to acquire Mr. Jones’s texts for months, saying they might be relevant to understanding Mr. Jones’s role in helping organize the rally on the Ellipse near the White House before the riot. In November, the panel filed subpoenas to compel Mr. Jones’s testimony and communications related to Jan. 6, including his phone records.
The committee also issued a subpoena for the communications of Timothy D. Enlow, who was working as Mr. Jones’s bodyguard on Jan. 6.
In response, Mr. Jones and Mr. Enlow sued in an try and block the committee’s subpoenas. Mr. Jones eventually appeared before the panel in January and afterward said he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nearly 100 times.
“I just had a really intense experience being interrogated by the Jan. 6 committee lawyers,” he said on the time. “They were polite, but they were dogged.”
Despite the fact that Mr. Jones refused to share information with the committee, he said the investigators looked as if it would have found ways around his lack of cooperation. He said the committee had already obtained text messages from him.
“They’ve the whole lot that’s already on my phones and things,” he said. “I saw my text messages” with political organizers tied to the Jan. 6 rally.
Based on the Jan. 6 committee, Mr. Jones facilitated a donation from Julie Jenkins Fancelli, the heiress to the Publix Super Markets fortune, to offer what he described as “80 percent” of the funding for the Jan. 6 rally and indicated that White House officials told him that he was to guide a march to the Capitol, where Mr. Trump would speak.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Stone were among the many group of Trump allies meeting in and around, or staying at, the Willard Intercontinental Hotel, which some Trump advisers treated as a war room for his or her efforts to get members of Congress to object to the Electoral College certification, which was going down when the riot swamped the constructing.
Mr. Jones conducted an interview with Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Mr. Trump, from the Willard on Jan. 5 during which the boys spread the false narrative of a stolen election.
Mr. Jones was then seen amongst the group of Mr. Trump’s supporters the subsequent day, amplifying false claims but in addition at times urging the group to be peaceful. Amongst those that marched alongside him to the Capitol was Ali Alexander, a promoter of the “Stop the Steal” effort who has also been issued a subpoena.
“The White House told me three days before, ‘We’re going to have you ever lead the march,’” Mr. Jones said on his web show the day after the riot. “Trump will tell people, ‘Go, and I’m going to satisfy you on the Capitol.’”
