August 21, 2021

Capitol Riot Charges Against an “Infowars” Host Could Spell Trouble for Alex Jones

Owen Shroyer is charged with entering a restricted area on January 6. He was with Jones at the time.

Alex Jones is pictured in court documents charging Infowars host Owen Shroyer with entering a restricted area of the Capitol grounds.Jon Elswick/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Watch out, Alex Jones. The Justice Department on Friday evening charged Owen Shroyer, who hosts a show on Infowars, the conspiracy theory fueled website run by Jones, with disorderly conduct and entering a restricted area of Capitol grounds on January 6.

On the air Friday evening, Shoryer said he will turn himself in Monday. “I plan on declaring innocence of these charges because I am,” he said.

More than 600 people have been charged with taking part in the January 6 attack. Shroyer is now one of just a few who did not enter the Capitol building itself. (The charges against Shoryer are misdemeanors.)

A federal complaint against Shroyer says that he entered restricted areas outside—and it notes he was with Jones at the time. The complaint includes images of Shroyer in restricted areas, along with Jones. The images include one picture of Shroyer, near Jones, at the top of the stairs on the east side of the Capitol. This came after the crowd had pushed past police officers guarding the area.

 

Jones, a conspiracy theorist once fined for claiming the 2012 Newtown attack was a hoax, echoed Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud prior to January. Jones also helped pay for the rally immediately preceding the riot, pledging $50,000 of his own money and arranging for an heiress to the Publix Super Markets Inc. chain, Julie Jenkins Fancelli, to provide $300,000, the Wall Street Journal reported in February.

The charges against Shroyer do not mean that Jones will necessarily face charges. The complaint against Shroyer notes that he entered a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department after he was arrested for disrupting a House Judiciary Committee hearing December 2019. Shroyer’s violation of that agreement probably made feds more likely to charge him with his actions on January 6.

Still, the complaint indicates that Jones broke a law that Shroyer is now charged with breaking.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate