Aug. 8 (UPI) -- A lawyer representing parents who sued Infowars podcast host Alex Jones has given a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol some two years' worth of the right-wing conspiracy theorist's text messages.
The trove of phone data was handed over to the House select committee on Monday by lawyer Mark Bankston, both The New York Times and CNN reported, citing an unnamed person familiar with the situation.
Bankston recently secured nearly $50 million from Jones in a defamation case brought against the podcast host by Scarlett Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of Sandy Hook shooting victim Jesse Lewis.
The pair had sued Jones over his years-long, widely debunked conspiracy theory that the 2012 massacre at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax perpetrated by actors in an effort to enforce gun restrictions.
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Bankston came into possession of the documents when Jones' legal team inadvertently sent them to him during the trial.
Jones, who was a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump and had helped organize a pro-Trump rally the day before the insurrection attempt, had spoken to the committee early this year as part of its investigation, invoking the Fifth Amendment nearly 100 times.
Following the revelation that the phone records exist, the House committee requested copies.
According to The New York Times, the data turned over does not include information from later than mid-2020, prior to Jones becoming involved in organizing pro-Trump rallies amid the former president's campaign to stay at the country's helm.
After it was revealed that the documents had been handed over to the plaintiffs, Jones' attorney, Federico Andino Reynal, had called for a mistrial and asked that Bankson be ordered to destroy the documents as well as bar him from being able to give them to the investigating committee.
The request was declined, with Judge Maya Guerra Gamble telling Bankston that she's "not standing between you and congress."
"That's not my job," she said. "I'm not going to do that.
