But what is the materials in question were part of discovery and the lawyer who sent it was arguing that the materials didn’t exist?
I believe then the correct legal term is “tough cookies”.
His client could have sued if the withholding of the evidence wasn’t illegal in the first place.
Under Texas law, the messages now belong to Atty. Bankston. He notified opposing counsel as soon as he saw the improper upload, and waited the legal number of days (10) allowed a response. If no response, then the materials legally belong to the ‘wrong person’.
Yes, so anything else is moot. There’s no privilege; it was effectively waived.
Is it possible for Alex Jones to assert copyright? I’m not sure how copyright laws intersect with public court records.
Of course, no matter what he says, stupid shit like this is still up on his website.
It’s the Louis Gohmert defense: “It’s so unfair how they keep holding us accountable for lying under oath!”
Aren’t the lawyers in some hot water as well? Legally?
They have been saying the evidence does not exist in request for discovery and then they accidentally turn it over? Looks like will have several matters to answer for when called to the Bar.
Maybe his buddy Trump can front him the cash!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha < gasp> Ha ha ha ha ha!
Oh, that was a good one!
Apparently someone named “Andino” did respond, but all he said was to “disregard the link”. I am not a lawyer, so I have no idea if this would be considered sufficient.
This link is to a Twitter thread where the response is reproduced in a photo. Can’t link to the specific tweet, though.
F. Andino Reynal is Jones’ lawyer.
Apparently, Defenses request for a mistrial today was denied. They tried to argue that " he feared the text-message leak was introduced in court simply to create more press coverage"
No bonehead. It was introduced in court to show that your client lied while under oath. I think that’s pretty relevant.
And the Jan 6 committee has asked for the phone records, according to Bankston, who has indicated that he has every intention of complying.
Next up - Kiddie porn charges for Jones. I guess that would be a separate indictment, cause that sure wouldn’t be a civil suit. Hopefully it will be an orange suit.
IANAL…
Even if we assume that Jones has kiddie porn (or other criminal evidence) on his phone, I would assume that the lawyers would be ethically bound to searching the phone’s contents in specific aim of finding information relevant to their case and not just randomly looking through for their own fun and amusement. So, unless their targeted and reasonably conducted search for materials relevant to their case happened to reveal a picture of a naked kid - which is fairly unlikely - I wouldn’t expect any reports to come from them that there’s child nudity on the phone.
That said, if someone has reported Jones for child pornography, to the police, then those police might feel like now is a particularly good time to ask a judge to ask for the phone content, on the basis of the report.
Likewise, if there are a variety of people with access to the contents of the phone then there’s the chance that one of them might do an unethical search, file an anonymous report to the police, and hope that they can hide in the crowd.
But my guess would be that, outside of perjury, we shouldn’t expect that the phone leads to new crime reports. It might help already existing cases, though.
They can’t dismiss a piece of evidence until they look at the piece of evidence. If they find child porn, they will forward it to the proper authority. That I can guarantee you.
Add the fact that his lawyers sent the whole thing and didn’t claim any privilege at all. That means there doesn’t need to be a careful and reasoned search of the phone data. That data now belongs to the prosecution, in toto. In the Tinman and Cowardly Lion as well.
I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.
Technically, that’s only true up to the point that the judge said “You’ve got 24 hours to assert privileges on this stuff.” Prior to now, they might have had free access. Until the privilege claims come in tomorrow, though, they either need to ignore everything or go hog wild and not sleep all night, trying to find anything and everything that they can report to the police.
I don’t think that’s true, that ship seems to have sailed. Read this.
The judge rejected Reynal’s request to retract all the documents that were mistakenly sent to opposing counsel, but did say she ordered any messages containing medical information to be destroyed and allowed Reynal to go through and identify individual documents within the tranche that could be marked confidential.
Why would any of that be done if they could just claim the whole thing as privilege? That makes no sense. I think you’re incorrect.
If the judge says, “Tell me what’s privileged”, I would expect that means that they have the freedom to say that 100% of it is. I don’t think that the judge would buy that but I don’t see any reason that they couldn’t do that.
Now that the materials are accessible, I would expect that the judge will be pretty skeptical of any grand claims. And, given that they only have about 24 hours to scour through two years worth of emails and texts, and dealing with a judge who is pissed at them, I would expect that they’re going to have to do the work in a fairly slap-dash manner but they should be able to put a lot of stuff into quarantine, that gets filtered more carefully over time.