The Department of Justice and the families of victims of the Sandy Hook school massacre have asked a federal bankruptcy court to delay the start of bankruptcy proceedings for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s business entities because they believe he’s trying to hide assets from court judgements, Politico reports.
Just as the National Rifle Association unsuccessfully tried to go into bankruptcy to protect its tens of millions in assets in a New York case probing illegal spending and self-dealing of its executives including Wayne LaPierre, Jones filed to drop his enterprises into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to protect their assets from adverse court judgements.
“Why didn’t Alex Jones or FSS file for bankruptcy relief when Debtors did? They are both defendants in the same litigation as Debtors, and all of them have been found liable in those cases,” attorneys Jayson Ruff and Ha Nguyen wrote for the Justice Department unit. “It appears that Jones intends to leverage the bankruptcy filings of his holding companies to extend the automatic stays of pending litigation against Debtors to him and FSS, while he maintains full control of FSS and its assets going forward. Thus, this Motion … seems to be just the first step for Debtors to carry out Jones’s and FSS’s scheme of avoiding the burdens of bankruptcy while reaping its benefits.”
Jones has claimed that his Inforwars conspiracy broadcasting network has just $50,000 in assets and debts between $1 million and $10 million. After losing a defamation case to the Sandy Hook families–which found Jones had slandered the plaintiffs by claiming the Sandy Hook massacre was faked by Deep State operatives and crisis actors to pretend a bunch of first graders and teachers were killed to justify snatching guns from citizens. (No guns were seized.)
In the immediate aftermath of the jury finding in favor of the plaintiffs in the defamation case, Jones offered $120,000 to each of the eight parties that were part of that lawsuit. The plaintiffs refused and demanded Jones release his financial records. Jones has been held in contempt by the courts for his failure to cooperate with the post-trial asset assessment, fining Jones $25,000 per day for his stubbornness.