The House committee investigating last year's U.S. Capitol riot is seeking phone records and other communications made by one of Alex Jones' employees.
The panel subpoenaed phone records for Timothy Enlow, the security operations manager of Free Speech Systems, a media company owned by Jones, a conservative radio host. The request was made for text messages and phone calls placed between November 1, 2020, and January 31, 2021, The Hill reported.
Enlow had accompanied Jones to Washington as his security guard on January 6, 2021, and marched with him from President Donald Trump's rally on the Ellipse to the Capitol before the riot broke out. This past December, Jones sued the committee in an attempt to block a subpoena allowing it to obtain his phone records and requiring him to testify before the panel. Jones now says the committee is targeting his employee to get information it may be unable to obtain from him otherwise, according to Politico.
On February 9, Enlow was notified by AT&T that the House committee had subpoenaed his "communications" records, according to a court document filed Tuesday. In it, Jones asks U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to add Enlow to his lawsuit against the panel.
AT&T didn't release Jones' phone records but said in the filing it would follow the subpoena request for Enlow's records by February 23, 2022, "unless he presented them with a legal filing that asserted his rights against the production."
Jones said the committee went after Enlow because "they assumed [he] was less financially able to defend himself against the subpoena," Norman Pattis, an attorney for Jones, wrote in the court filing.
Pattis also said in the filing that Jones and Enlow believe the subpoena is "merely a back door to obtain Jones' communications in the face of pending litigation seeking to protect those communications from the Defendants' eyes."
Pattis added, "Given the broad scope of the Defendants' investigation and their goals in pursuing information and documents from Jones and Enlow, there is a clear logical relationship between their claims because the Defendants seek to use Enlow as a gateway to Jones' communications regarding the events of January 6, 2021 and suspect Enlow of being involved as well."
Jones also said the committee's subpoena of Enlow's records was intended to obtain his information through a third-party disclosure, according to the filing. The radio host appeared before the committee last month but pleaded the Fifth Amendment "nearly 100 times" and provided "limited documents" in response to a previous subpoena, Politico reported.
Enlow anticipates that the committee will issue him additional subpoenas for documents and deposition testimony in the future, according to the filing.