A US bankruptcy court trustee is planning to shut down conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' Infowars media platform and liquidate its assets to help pay the $1.5 billion in lawsuit judgments Jones owes for repeatedly calling the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a hoax, the AP reports. In an "emergency" motion filed Sunday in Houston, trustee Christopher Murray indicated publicly for the first time that he intends to "conduct an orderly wind-down" of the operations of Infowars' parent company and "liquidate its inventory." Murray, who was appointed by a federal judge to oversee the assets in Jones' personal bankruptcy case, did not give a timetable for the liquidation.
Murray also asked US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez to put an immediate hold on the Sandy Hook families' efforts to collect the massive amount Jones owes them. Murray said those efforts would interfere with his plans to close the parent company, Free Speech Systems in Austin, Texas, and sell off its assets—with much of the proceeds going to the families. On Friday, lawyers for the parents of one of the 20 children killed in the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, asked a state judge in Texas to order Free Speech Systems, or FSS, to turn over to the families certain assets, including money in bank accounts, and garnish its accounts. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble approved the request, court records show, prompting Murray's emergency motion.
Referring to the families' collection efforts, Murray said in the Sunday court filing that "the specter of a pell-mell seizure of FSS's assets, including its cash, threatens to throw the business into chaos, potentially stopping it in its tracks, to the detriment" of his duties in Jones' personal bankruptcy case. "The Trustee seeks this Court's intervention to prevent a value-destructive money grab and allow an orderly process to take its course," Murray said. (Jones has been warning that Infowars is a "sinking ship," but says he himself isn't shutting up any time soon.)
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