The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is now in possession of a trove of text messages from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ cellphone, it was reported on Monday.
CNN reports that lawmakers on the bipartisan panel were handed two years’ worth of correspondences to and from Jones, as they draw links between the US Capitol riot and Donald Trump and his allies’ attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
The panel reportedly obtained the texts from lawyer Mark Bankston, who is representing the parents of a 6-year-old killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The parents won a lawsuit against Jones last week after he repeatedly decried the massacre as a ‘false flag’ and claimed the children who were killed are crisis actors, in addition to a host of other inappropriate remarks about the shooting.
Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50 million to the two families in punitive and compensatory damages.
A spokesman for the January 6 committee declined to comment when asked by DailyMail.com.
Bankston apparently caught Jones by surprise when he revealed during cross-examination last week that the Defendant’s lawyer accidentally sent Plaintiff’s counsel a vast tranche of text messages – which Bankston said proved Jones lied under oath when testifying in his own defense.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay nearly $50 million in combined damages to the parents of a 6-year-old who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre
‘Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years?’ Bankston asked in the now-viral moment from the trial.
Presiding Judge Maya Guerra Gamble declined a request from Jones’ lawyer to shield the texts from House investigators.
‘I’m not standing between you and Congress,’ Gamble reportedly told Bankston.
Jones previously testified remotely before the January 6 committee in a closed-door session earlier this year.
He revealed the meeting on his radio show after the fact, and bragged that he invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination ‘almost 100 times.’
Jones said at the time, ‘The questions were overall pretty reasonable. And I wanted to answer the questions. But at the same time, it’s a good thing I didn’t, because I’m the type that tries to answer things correctly, even if I don’t know all the answers, and they can then kind of claim that’s perjury.’
The January 6 committee is now reportedly in possession of Jones’ text messages that were obtained by the Sandy Hook parents’ lawyer
A vocal Trump ally, Jones was a key promoter of the ex-president’s 2020 election fraud lies and is accused by the committee of having helped plan his Stop the Steal rally at the White House Ellipse shortly before the riot.
Jones was also present on US Capitol grounds on January 6 but did not enter the building, according to a letter from committee Chair Bennie Thompson sent to Jones in November 2021.
It’s not immediately clear when the committee will get to pour over the new trove of texts or whether they will inspire more lines of inquiry.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the panel, said she was interesting in looking at Jones’ texts but as of Sunday had not yet seen them.
‘Well, we know that his behavior did incentivize some of the January 6 conduct and we want to know more about that,’ Lofgren told CNN.
‘We don’t know what we’ll find in the texts because we haven’t seen them. But we’ll look at it and learn more, I’m sure.’
If they prove useful the texts could play a starring role in the committee’s next round of hearings, which were revealed by Vice Chair Liz Cheney in the eighth and final installment of the panel’s summer series of presentations.
