An NRA employee corresponded with a prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist the day after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, speculating that the gunman had not acted alone.

“Just like [Sandy Hook], there is so much more to this story,” the NRA employee, Mark Richardson, told the conspiracy theorist, according to emails obtained by HuffPost. “He was not alone.”

“Thank you for all the information. And for what you do. STAY SAFE.”

Since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, conspiracy theorists who claim grieving family members of shooting victims are “crisis actors”, and that mass shootings are staged to advance gun control, have continued to harass victims’ families. This confrontation is sometimes very direct: a Florida woman was sentenced to five months in prison for sending threatening messages for one Sandy Hook father that death was coming for him “real soon”. New theories targeting family members of the most recent victims emerge immediately after each high-profile shooting, and generate online and in-person harassment.

The emails from Richardson, who was using his official NRA email address, emerged as part of a defamation lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents against the Infowars host Alex Jones, who used his show to air Sandy Hook conspiracy theories. Wolfgang Halbig, the conspiracy theorist Richardson emailed, has contributed to Infowars.

The same day Richardson emailed Halbig, the Infowars site published a post alleging that a second shooter had been reported in the Parkland attack, HuffPost found.

In one of several Sandy Hook parent lawsuits, in which Halbig is named as a defendant, a complaint alleges that Halbig has made at least 22 trips to Connecticut to “investigate” the shooting, that he deluged officials with public records requests and that when a father asked him to leave victims’ families alone, the man was informed: “Wolfgang does not want to speak with you unless you exhume [you son’s] body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

The NRA spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, did not respond to multiple requests for comment to clarify Richardson’s role within the organization, or whether the NRA has policies about employees promoting mass-shooting conspiracy theories. Richardson’s name is listed on an NRA website as a “training counselor program coordinator” in the organization’s education and training division.

A spokeswoman for the NRA’s political arm did not comment on the specifics of Richardson’s emails, but said that “any suggestion” that the Sandy Hook shooting was faked was “insane”.

“Sandy Hook was a horrific tragedy, and any suggestion that the unspeakable atrocities committed by an evil lunatic were faked as part of an elaborate hoax are insane,” Jennifer Baker, of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, wrote in an email on Thursday. “The men and women of the National Rifle Association grieve for the innocent people who were killed, the families ripped apart, and the entire Sandy Hook community.”

Halbig suggested in a separate email to friends in early 2018 that he had been trying to get in touch with the NRA for four years, and that Richardson’s email was the first contact he had had with the organization, HuffPost reported.

In a statement to HuffPost, Richardson defended his email as raising a “legitimate question”. He did not respond to a request for further comment via his official NRA email address, which was still active as of Thursday afternoon.