Judge in Alex Jones Trial Refuses to Seal His Cell Phone, Which Apparently Contains ‘Intimate Messages with Roger Stone’
Alex Jones’s wild defamation trial for calling the Sandy Hook mass shooting a hoax continued on Thursday after the judge dismissed a motion by the defense for a mistrial.
Jones’s attorney, Federico Andino Reynal, requested the mistrial after the plaintiff’s attorney made public that Reynal’s team had sent him two years’ worth of information from Jones’s personal cellphone.
Mark Bankston, the attorney for the parents suing Jones for the years of harassment and threats they faced due to his false claims regarding their six-year-old son’s murder, used the information from the phone in open court on Wednesday to prove Jones was lying on the stand.
Jones is being sued for $150 million in damages and has already been found liable in the case. He is facing other suits from family members of the 20 school children and six adults murdered in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who Jones claimed on his far-right conspiracy theory show were “crisis actors.”
“And things like Mr. Jones and his intimate messages with Roger Stone are not confidential,” said Bankston arguing against the request.
“There’s been no protection ever asserted over these files. And frankly, your Honor, I think you realize that this is not the first time that defendants have come into this court with a frivolous motion accusing me of misconduct over the handling of confidential materials,” he continued.
“Pretrial we dealt with this exact same issue when they tried to claim that the release of Mr. Jones’s third deposition was a violation of confidentiality. Again, they asked you for the same thing,” Bankston added, noting the multiple requests from Jones’s attorney to dismiss the case.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble turned down the request to dismiss yet again and discuss with both lawyers whether or not to seal the phone’s contents.
“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,” Bankston later told Judge Gamble.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is reportedly interested in the phone as Jones was a prominent actor in D.C. in and around the 6th.
“They know about them. They know they exist. They know you have them. I think they’re going there either way,” Gamble concluded as she denied Reynal’s motion for a mistrial and added she will not “seal up the entire phone.”
Reynal also sought additional time to review the contents of the phone before Bankston turned it over to authorities. Judge Gamble also shot down that notion, noting that had Jones’s defense handed over all discovery when requested a year ago “then there would have been plenty of time to resolve it.”
