Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed to have pleaded the Fifth this week during a closed-door deposition with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
On Monday evening, in a segment of his InfoWars radio program first flagged by Politico, Jones then proceeded to divulge about his experience during the attempted insurrection and revealed the questions asked of him by the congressional committee.
“I just had a very intense experience being interrogated by the Jan. 6 committee. They were polite, but they were dogged,” Jones said as part of his “unofficial testimony” to his radio listeners.
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“The questions were overall pretty reasonable,” he added. However, citing the “advice of counsel,” the far-right media star claimed he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights “almost 100 times” during the interview.
“And I wanted to answer the questions, but at the same time, it’s a good thing I didn’t,” Jones explained, “because I’m the type that tries to answer things correctly even though I don’t know all the answers. And they can then try to claim that’s perjury.” He added: “It’s too dangerous a process.”
Jones bizarrely compared the Jan. 6 committee to eating poisoned soup. “The whole thing is tainted. It’s like a big bowl of soup. You put one rat turd in it, it’s no good,” he said. “Well, this has got like hundreds of rat turds. And I ain’t eating the soup.”
During his broadcast, Jones mentioned former Trump adviser and key Jan. 6 organizer Caroline Wren—who was also subpoenaed by the committee last year—as his point of contact the day MAGA riots attempted to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory.
“And that’s what I called ‘White House contact,’” Jones said.
He further revealed that the committee asked him about his contacts with far-right militia members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys—groups that Jones insisted weren't part of his security detail that day. (He did, however, reveal that he once had a meal with several Proud Boys at a Hooters in Atlanta after a “Stop the Steal” event.)
Jones dismissed the notion that either group posed a real threat on Jan. 6, despite Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes being indicted on sedition charges. “I saw it all as LARPing,” Jones claimed, referring to the acronym for live action role-playing. He continued: “I saw a lot of it as playing soldier in the backyard.”
The far-right radio host further distanced himself from the militia organizations, claiming that while “I really agreed with” their missions, “if the indictment’s true that they thought that they could foment and kickstart and detonate a rebellion that would then lead to a larger war, that is not something I knew about or something I support or something I want.”
