Judge Questions Transparency of Onion Bid for Infowars

A frustrated bankruptcy judge said he has concerns over the process in which satirical news site The Onion won an auction for right-wing provocateur Alex Jones’ Infowars website.

Saying he was dissatisfied with the transparency of the sale process, Judge Christopher M. Lopez said Thursday that he would hold a hearing next week to hear concerns and possibly approve the sale of the Infowars assets to the satirical news website owners.

“I personally don’t care who wins the auction,” Lopez said during a status conference in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. “I care about process and transparency.”

Lopez said the upcoming hearing will determine whether advisers running the Infowars auction ran “a full and fair process.”

Bidders were required to submit their highest and best offer for Infowars, but the value of the offers weren’t shared with rivals. Lopez said that meant other potential buyers didn’t know what they were bidding against.

The emergency hearing was held after The Onion, along with families of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, announced on Thursday morning that they had won the right to buy right-wing provocateur Alex Jones’ Infowars website.

Trustee Christopher Murray is tasked with liquidating Jones’ estate in bankruptcy to help him pay down approximately $1.5 billion in defamation judgments related to false statements he made calling the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting a hoax.

‘Nobody Should Feel Comfortable’

The designated backup bidder for the assets, First United American Companies LLC, asked the court for the status conference Thursday to address what it called “apparent defects in the sale process.” First United operates the website for online supplement store ShopAlexJones.com.

First United attorney Walter Cicack of Hawash Cicack & Gaston LLP told Lopez that there was a change in the format of the sale procedures on Monday, and that he was concerned about the lack of details of the final bid.

“Nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction,” Lopez said.

The Infowars assets on sale included production rights and materials, more than 400 domain names, social media accounts, podcast sites, newsletter subscribers, archival library, the e-commerce nutritional supplement business, product trademarks, and production equipment.

If The Onion’s parent, Global Tetrahedron LLC, successfully acquires the assets, the Sandy Hook families that backed the deal have agreed to waive their potential recovery and give it to all other unsecured creditors, Murray said.

“I’ve never seen this before in any other case, and we did a lot of research, and we’ve never found it,” Murray said. “But I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors, and under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.”

Murray also assured Lopez that the winning bid was more than the $3.5 million offered by First United.

The Onion has said it plans to start its transition of the website immediately and wants to launch the new platform in January 2025. Its CEO, Ben Collins, was a disinformation reporter at NBC’s news division before being tapped to lead the satirical website.

In a live online broadcast Thursday morning, Jones said people were at the Infowars studio attempting to shut it down. Murray said that he went to the Austin-based studio Thursday morning to secure the assets for the winning bidder, but hasn’t laid off any of its roughly 30 employees. He confirmed, however, that the plan has always been to shut the show down.

Jones’ lawyer Vickie Driver of Elliott, Thomason & Gibson LLP said she was concerned that people who worked at the site would lose their jobs, saying the business was “making an extraordinary amount of money.”

The Chapter 7 trustee is represented by Jones Murray LLP and Porter Hedges LLP.

The case Alexander E. Jones, Bankr. S.D. Tex., No. 22-33553, hearing 11/14/24.

Photo: Alex Jones Photographer: Joe Buglewicz/Getty Images