A trove of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ text messages spanning a two-year period has reportedly been turned over to the House January 6 select committee.
According to CNN, the text messages are from the same cache revealed last week during Mr Jones’ defamation trial in Travis County, Texas, by attorneys representing parents of children killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
The attorney for the Sandy Hook parents, Mark Bankston, said Mr Jones’ lawyers had “messed up” by inadvertently sending him a digital image containing the entire contents of the conspiracy theorist’s mobile phone.
Mr Bankston also said the select committee had expressed interest in the messages, which could potentially shed light on whether Mr Jones had contact with the White House in the days before the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Though Mr Jones’ lawyer had asked Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, the Texas jurist overseeing the case, to order the copy of Mr Jones’ phone destroyed, she declined to do so.
“I’m not standing between you and Congress,” she said after Mr Bankston asked about providing the select committee with Mr Jones texts. “That is not my job. I’m not going to do that”.
Mr Jones has previously given evidence in a deposition with the panel, but he has said he repeatedly invoked his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat on the select committee, told CNN on Sunday that the panel would like to know more about his role at the Capitol on the day of the attack.
“Well, we know that his behavior did incentivize some of the January 6 conduct and we want to know more about that,” Ms Lofgren said. “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.”
