The sale of InfoWars, Alex Jones’ right-wing conspiracy site, to The Onion could be halted in court after a judge questioned the transparency of the auction process on Thursday.
The satirical news site placed the winning bid for the site in a bankruptcy auction in a bid backed by the families of the Sandy Hook shootings, who are owed more than $1 billion by Jones in defamation lawsuits.
But the judge in Jones’ bankruptcy case said he had doubts about how the auction was conducted at an emergency hearing in Houston later in the day and ordered an evidentiary hearing to determine whether the auction was fair sometime next week.
“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to find out exactly what happened,” Judge Christopher Lopez said. “No one should feel uncomfortable with the results of this auction.”
He did not immediately set a hearing date.
The only other bidder – First United American Companies, which runs ShopAlexJones.com – complained that the bidding method switched from an open process to a silent auction, in which rival bids were not revealed to other potential buyers until the minute last.
Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron has not disclosed what its winning bid was, but the trustee who ran the auction said the dollar figure it offered was less than First United American’s $3.5 million bid — but a deal the best.
Trustee Christopher Murray — who is tasked with overseeing the liquidation of Jones’ assets after he filed for bankruptcy — said the Sand Hook families’ offer to waive part of the sale process to pay Jones’ other creditors did not it was something he could put monetary value on but it was the best offer.
“I’ve never seen this before in any other case, and we did a lot of research and we never found it,” Murray said, according to Bloomberg.
“But I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize recovery for unsecured creditors, and in one offer, they’re clearly better off than they were in the other.”
Jones took to social media to criticize the sale in a video rant in which he said the auction was fake and “rigged” and claimed his company had been “hijacked”.
“This was an auction that didn’t happen, with a lower bid, with money that wasn’t real,” he insisted.
The judge said he didn’t have an opinion on who buys InfoWars, but his job was to make sure it was done fairly.
“Personally, I don’t care who wins the auction,” Lopez said, according to Bloomberg. “I care about process and transparency.”
If the sale is approved, The Onion said it plans to shut down current InfoWars, which has published misinformation and baseless conspiracies — including that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax designed to disarm America — that led to the families winning a defamation lawsuit against Jones that caused him to go bankrupt.
In its place, The Onion — best known for its oft-repeated article after mass shootings titled “‘There’s no way to prevent this, says only nation where it happens regularly'” would publish satirical articles and studies on prevention of gun violence in partnership with Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun safety group founded after the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 young children and six educators were massacred.
“We thought it would be a very funny joke if we bought this thing, probably one of the best jokes we’ve ever told,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins.
“The (Sandy Hook) families decided they were going to join our bid, support our bid, to try to get us across the finish line. Because at the end of the day, it was us or Alex Jones, we could either keep this website going unabated, basically unpunished for what he’s done to these families over the years, or we could make a dumb website , stupid and decided to do the second thing.”
For the families of the Sandy Hook victims, Jones’ megaphone blast of pernicious conspiracies was enough to get them to sign on.
“The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long waited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose 6-year-old daughter Emilie was killed in the mass shooting, said in a statement. . the lawyers.
By postal wire
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