According to attorney Mark Bankston, who’s representing two Sandy Hook parents amid a Texas trial dealing with the imposition of financial penalties on Alex Jones over lies about the shooting, “law enforcement” personnel are interested in obtaining the contents of Jones’s phone.
Addressing the judge, Bankston said: “I am under request from various federal agencies and law enforcement to provide that phone. Absent a ruling from you saying, ‘You cannot do that Mr. Bankston,’ I intend to do so.” Gamble so far hasn’t issued any such ruling stopping Bankston. Amid that discussion, the judge spoke of the likelihood the House panel investigating the Capitol riot — one federal entity known to be pursuing the contents of Jones’s phone — would eventually get the materials. In reference to the panel’s interest in the texts and emails, the judge said: “They know about them. They know they exist. They know you have them. I think they’re going there either way.” The committee previously sought information directly from Jones, although they’d be obtaining these materials from Bankston, who indicated in court that messages with longtime Trump ally Roger Stone were among the documents.
Bankston made the revelation of law enforcement interest on Thursday, the day after he revealed in court that Jones’s legal team accidentally sent him a copy of the entirety of Jones’s phone. Bankston only brought the matter up in court after Jones’s attorney Andino Reynal evidently failed to take any substantive steps to get materials from the phone classified as privileged, meaning they’d be protected from further scrutiny. Reynal sent Bankston an email asking Bankston to “please disregard” the transferred materials, which created no legal obligation for action, Bankston said. On Thursday, Jones’s side pushed in court for the declaration of a mistrial, but Judge Maya Guerra Gamble, who’s handling the case, denied that request and expressed incredulity it was even made. She noted it was “like the 17th time” that Jones’s side sought a mistrial declaration.
Gamble ordered the plaintiffs’ side to delete any medical records — something they said was already done, and she outlined how Jones’s team could make claims of confidentiality over specific items from the phone, but she refused to completely shield it. It appears as though a paralegal was (allegedly) directly responsible for sending all those contents from Jones’s phone to the plaintiffs’ side in the ongoing Texas case, although the paralegal was acting on what sounds as though it essentially amounts to the behalf of the legal team as a whole. The relevance of the materials to federal investigators at any agency could be wide-ranging: Stewart Rhodes, a long-time associate of Jones who’s repeatedly appeared on his conspiracy-driven programming, is facing seditious conspiracy allegations in connection to the Capitol riot, and one could reasonably imagine something could be on Jones’s phone that’s relevant to that issue.
There could also be the possibility of perjury charges since Jones claimed he didn’t have messages about Sandy Hook but actually did. Jones is facing the imposition of steep financial damages in the Texas case and two other cases because he failed to comply with required steps in the discovery process. He lost in four defamation cases related to lies about Sandy Hook by default because of his non-compliance, which led to the trials for the specific question of the level of damages to impose. This trial is the first. Gamble admonished Jones in court after recent testimony for bringing up his supposed bankruptcy. Tens of millions in dollars in debt at Jones’s main company, Free Speech Systems, is owed to a Nevada company that is allegedly controlled “directly or indirectly by Jones, his parents and his children through an alphabet soup of shell entities.”
