A Judge Blocks the Sale of Infowars to a Bloomberg Front Group

Alex Jones says Federal Judge Christopher Lopez blocked the sale of Infowars to a Bloomberg front group, The Onion. Judge Lopez said the sale lacked clarity. Jones said it was blocked because of bid rigging, collusion, and price fixing.

CNN Report

A bankruptcy judge has blocked The Onion’s winning bid for Alex Jones’ Infowars conspiracy platform, citing concerns with the auction process which he says left money on the table.

“I’m going to not approve the sale to the purchaser. I think there’s a great lack of clarity here,” Judge Christopher Lopez, a bankruptcy judge for the Southern District of Texas, said during the ruling on Tuesday.

Lopez said the process “while well intended, simply did not maximize value in any way based upon the record before me.”

Background

The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of eight victims of the school shooting and one first responder. According to court documents, The Onion, via its parent company Global Tetrahedron, offered $1.75 million in cash along with a “credit” from the Connecticut families, who offered to forgo 100% of their portion of the winning bid to support the effort, valuing the bid at $7 million.

The one other competing bid, at $3.5 million in cash, came from First United American Companies, which is affiliated with Jones and operates his lucrative online nutritional supplements store.

The NY Times Report

Mr. Jones spent years claiming that the 2012 school shooting was a hoax and that victims’ family members were actors complicit in the plot. The Onion has said that it wants to turn Infowars into a satirical site mocking the kind of conspiracy theories that Mr. Jones spreads.

Judge Lopez’s ruling put the fate of Infowars in limbo. He instructed a court-appointed trustee, Christopher Murray, to come up with an alternative resolution, though it was not immediately clear what approach Mr. Murray would take. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The children would have been 18 years old, graduating from high school. The killer was a deranged young man with several mental illnesses. He was in the care of a mentally inadequate and troubled mother. She made guns available to him and took him to shooting ranges.

We have to be careful when we generally label someone a conspiracy theorist. Sandy Hook was a false conspiracy theory. However, Jones typically reports accurately.

The Times adds that parents want Infowars shut down and Alex Jones silenced “for the harm he has caused.”

Alex Jones’s Report:

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