Alex Jones Hires New Counsel For Screaming Tantrum Phase Of Bankruptcy

As opposed to the previous two years, where he conducted himself like a normal person.

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Yesterday, Alex Jones’s longtime bankruptcy lawyer Vickie Driver noped out of his Chapter 7 case. Jones’s effort to fend off the sale of his company to The Onion, will now be helmed by Shelby Jordan, a bankruptcy lawyer from Corpus Christi who has been practicing law since the Nixon administration. And it’s going AMAZING!

After entering his appearance, Jordan immediately filed suit against the Sandy Hook parents, whom Jones defamed and called “crisis actors” after their children were murdered in their classroom. The complaint also named Global Tetrahedron, the parent company of The Onion, and the Chapter 7 Trustee, Christopher Murray, alleging that the parties colluded to steal Jones’s IP and thwart the bid of Jones’s buddies at First United American Companies LLC (FUAC). Jordan, who is, again, not new here, seems blissfully unaware of the Barton doctrine, which bars suits against a bankruptcy trustee without leave of the court.

Jones demanded a TRO, claiming that Murray and The Onion had fired all the employees, looted the business, and directed the company’s website to The Onion’s servers. He followed that up with a promise to challenge the non-dischargeability ruling from October of 2023, in which the court found that most of the debts would survive bankruptcy because they were incurred as the result of defamation, a willful tort.

FUAC filed its own motion to disqualify the Onion bid, alleging gross misconduct by Murray, prompting a furious response from Murray threatening to move for Rule 11 sanctions.

At a hearing on November 14, Judge Christopher Lopez appeared alarmed at the structure of the auction, in which one group of creditors disclaimed enough of its share to make the others materially better off, even under The Onion’s lower cash bid. But at yesterday’s hearing on the TRO, after having digested the pleadings, the judge was back to status quo ante — audibly exhausted by Jones’s shenanigans and his lawyers’ bad faith histrionics.

Jordan spent several minutes attacking the underlying state judgments, droning on about the NYT v. Sullivan standard and the First Amendment, apparently under the impression that bankruptcy judges give a shit about that. He also made bizarre claims that the Sandy Hook parents should be disqualified as bidders because their motives were to shut Jones and up and make their own debt uncollectible.

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“We will not be inquiring into the motives of bidders,” Judge Lopez sighed.

But Jordan was still going! He still had to get through his allegations about Murray and The Onion cahootsing to knock Infowars offline.

Reading the rancid goat entrails, it would appear that Jones’s legal defense fund on GiveSendGo got DDOS-ed or … something?

Jordan did finally concede that the Infowars site had been operational all week with Jones at its helm spewing his regularly scheduled bile.

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“Mr. Jordan, I’m not sure what I’m being asked to restrain,” Judge Lopez broke in eventually.

“At this point, I’m not sure anything,” Jordan conceded, while mumbling that, absent injunctive relief, there was nothing to stop Murray and the evil allium from taking Infowars offline again.

At the end of the hearing, Judge Lopez denied the TRO. He seemed wholly disinclined to engage with Jones and FUAC’s demands to preemptively halt the sale, and ordered an evidentiary hearing in the first week of December to determine whether the bid should be ratified. He also pointed out at length that motions for reconsideration filed upwards of a year after ruling face an exceedingly high barrier that cannot by overcome by hinting darkly at the “motives” of the creditor. Toward that end, he greenlit a deposition of Murray, but not of The Onion or the Sandy Hook families to delve into their sinister motives.

And, to top it all off, Jones’s screeching that Elon Musk was riding to his rescue took yet another hit as X Corp. stated once again for the record that it “does not object to the proposed sale as a general matter” and its only interest here is whether Ex-Twitter handles can be sold.

All in all, it was a total loss for Jones and FUAC — not that you’d know it from listening to his show.

Alexander E. Jones and Official Committee Of Unsecured Creditors [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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