[ad_1]
If you’re an attorney, it’s hard to top being accused of soliciting perjury on the witness stand, only to have the judge agree that your client is one hundred percent lying his ass off in open court. And yet Alex Jones’s lawyer F. Andino Reynal managed to do it yesterday in the Texas trial where his client is being sued for defamation by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, who was murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
“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, and when informed, did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protect it in any way?” the plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Bankston asked Jones as he sat sweating on the witness stand. “And as of two days ago, it fell free and clear into my possession. And that is how I know you lied to me about not having any messages about Sandy Hook.”
HO. LEE. SHIT.
In case that wasn’t totally clear, a lawyer in receipt of accidentally transmitted material is obliged to tell opposing counsel about the error. Apparently under Texas law, there’s a 10-day period to reclaim the mistaken transmission, after which there’s no getting it back. In a hearing this morning on Reynal’s emergency motion to reclaim the phone data, or at least get it sealed, it emerged that Reynal’s paralegal put the digital copy of Jones’s phone in a Dropbox folder the parties were using for shared evidence.
Realizing the error, Reynal asked Bankston to “please disregard” the link. Which is not “this link contains privileged materials which have been sent to you in error, please delete and destroy all copies,” and it imposed no legal duty on Bankston to do anything of the kind. So when Reynal asked for a mistrial this morning, Judge Gamble wasn’t having it. And she didn’t seal the contents of the phone either, although she gave Reynal until the end of the day to designate specific emails and texts as attorney-client communications.
That means that the House January 6 Select Committee, which has asked Bankston for the device image, is going to get it today. As will the other Sandy Hook plaintiffs in Texas, who are represented by Bankston, and in Connecticut, with whom Heslin and Lewis have a discovery sharing agreement. Womp, and also womp.
It’s a fitting coda for the hearing yesterday, when Bankston used the communications on the device to impeach Jones on the witness stand.
“I must have dictated that to my assistant,” Jones admitted when confronted with an email he wrote, just seconds after testifying that he hadn’t used email in 10 years. And his years-long insistence that he had no text messages pertaining to Sandy Hook was belied by a message from former host Paul Joseph Watson about an Infowars story suggesting that a news clip that showed doctors intubating a mannequin was evidence that coronavirus wasn’t causing hospitals to be overwhelmed. (Presumably the mannequin had signed the HIPAA form allowing the news team to witness the procedure.)
“This is a video of a medical student training to intubate,” Watson texted Jones in April 2020. “This makes us look ridiculous suggesting COVID is fake. Sandy Hook all over again.”
“I get it,” Jones replied, tacitly acknowledging that his site’s “reporting” that the massacre of 20 children and six adults in 2012 might be “staged” or a “hoax” was bullshit.
On the witness stand, Jones tried desperately to paint himself as an innocent victim. Of gun control advocates, who made him feel bad for being a gun owner after the Sandy Hook shooting, which forced him to suspect that the entire thing was a staged operation as part of an elaborate plot to repeal the Second Amendment. Of Megyn Kelly, who is “in with the Sandy Hook groups” and edited his interview to make him look bad. Of bad sources, who mislead him. Of the Clinton campaign, which “weaponized” his words, even after he “quit drinking for a while” and realized that maybe the kids at Sandy Hook actually were murdered after all. Of the social media platforms, who “stole my identity” by not letting him respond to his critics, which is just like a “social credit score” in China, watch for it folks they’re not just coming for me, they’re coming for you.
Jones even went so far as to affect — or at least play up — a cough from his supposedly torn larynx, hacking theatrically into the microphone both on the witness stand and off, particularly when things went south (or south-er) for him.
It was disgusting, on every level.
As the plaintiffs’ attorney Kyle Farrar noted during his closing statement, “They called them liars for 10 years to make money, and they’re calling them liars here to save money.”
Reynal saved one last bit of nastiness for the very end, invoking Holocaust survivor Martin Niemöller’s famous anti-Nazi poem which ends “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me” to defend Jones’s “right” to defame the parents of a dead child. The implication being that jurors should speak up for poor, hunted, victim Alex Jones, lest there be no one left to speak for them when they inevitably come. It was filthy, particularly in defense of a man who makes his living screaming about “globalists” and “Soros” and “the Rothschilds” and the “Jewish mafia.”
The case is with the jury now, which can’t LOCK HIM UP, but can’t take all his money. Fingers crossed.
PREVIOUSLY! Alex Jones Thinks He’s Going To Beat The Legal System. He Is Wrong.
Follow Liz Dye on Twitter!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you’re ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons.
[ad_2]
Original Source Link
