Company affiliated with Alex Jones seeks to disqualify The Onion’s auction bid on Infowars

A company affiliated with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Monday asked a federal judge to disqualify a bid from satirical news channel The Onion to buy Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, for fraud and conspiracy.

The company, First United American Companies, which is affiliated with a Jones website that sells nutritional supplements, was the only other bidder at the recent auction, bidding $3.5 million. In a filing in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, an attorney for the company asked the judge to declare the company the winning bidder instead of The Onion.

The attorney, Walter Cicack, alleged that the trustee overseeing the auction unlawfully conspired with The Onion and the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in naming The Onion the winning bidder. Cicack also alleged that the trustee violated court-set rules for the sale, saying the company’s cash offer was twice as high as The Onion’s.

The bankruptcy auction was held last week as part of the liquidation of Jones’ assets, including Infowars. Proceeds from the sale will go to the Sandy Hook families and other creditors. Jones has filed for bankruptcy in 2022 thereafter he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in defamation lawsuits filed by the families over the calls the 2012 shooting killing twenty children and six teachers, a hoax staged by actors to increase gun control.

Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion’s parent company, Chicago-based Global Tetrahedron, issued a statement through a spokesperson on Monday.

“We are obviously disappointed that he is lashing out by creating conspiracies, but we are also not surprised,” he said, referring to Jones.

The trustee appointed to oversee the sale, Christopher Murray, declined to comment Monday. An attorney for the Sandy Hook families, Christopher Mattei, also declined to comment.

In a response filed with the court later Monday, Murray called the allegations “baseless.” He said First United American’s motion to disqualify The Onion was “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process.”

Murray also wrote: “Having failed in its previous attempts to bully the Trustee and its advisors into accepting its inferior offer, the FUAC now alleges, without evidence, conspiracy and bad faith in an attempt to mislead the Court and disqualify any competition from the auction. .”

Murray filed separate court papers on Monday asking the judge to approve the sale of Infowars to The Onion.

Monday’s filing by First United American Companies included The Onion’s formal offer, which showed it was offering $1.75 million for Infowars, along with certain incentives from Sandy Hook families who won their defamation case against Jones. The families agreed to relinquish up to 100% of their share of Infowars’ sale proceeds and give it to other creditors of Jones.

The families’ offer would give other creditors of Jones a total of $100,000 more than they would get if First United American Companies bought Infowars, according to the offer document obtained by The Onion.

Murray told the bankruptcy judge during a hearing Thursday that the families’ incentives made it a better offer than that of the Jones-affiliated company.

“The creditors were ultimately significantly better off,” Murray told the judge, adding that one of his responsibilities was to maximize value for the creditors.

Judge Christopher Lopez, who said he had questions about the sale process and concerns about transparency, ordered a hearing to see what exactly happened with the auction and how the trustee chose The Onion. The date of the hearing has not yet been set.

Jones has criticized the sales process on his show and social media sites, calling it “rigged” and “fraud.”

Over the weekend, Collins posted a series of comments about the auction on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Long said: we won the bid and – you won’t believe it – the previous InfoWars people didn’t take it well,” he wrote.

Collins said last week that The Onion planned to convert the Infowars website into a parody sitetargeting conspiracy theorists and other social media personalities while promoting gun violence prevention efforts.

Cicack also said in the lawsuit Monday that the trustee improperly changed the auction process “from a live auction to a secret process.” Cicack said that after the sealed bids were submitted on November 8, a round of live bidding was expected to take place on November 13.

But instead, he said, Murray decided to ask the two bidders to submit another bid as their final and best proposal, which they did. Murray then chose from those final bids without holding a round of live bidding. He claimed Murray had broken auction rules.

Lopez’s 20-page order on sales procedures, issued in September, made such a live bidding round optional. And it gave Murray broad authority to carry out the sale, including the power to reject any offer, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.

Cicack called the Sandy Hook family’s share of The Onion’s bid “Monopoly” money without value.

“It is also the product of an impermissible conspiracy with the Onion in an attempt to ‘rig’ the auction to achieve a specific outcome desired by the Connecticut Families,” he wrote.