Mark Bankston, lead counsel for Sandy Hook families, details how Alex Jones’s refusal to comply with discovery—ignoring requests for videos, Google Ads data, and even basic evidence—led to default judgments in three Texas lawsuits (Posner/De La Rosa, Scarlett Lewis, Neil Heslin). Despite claims of political persecution, Bankston dismisses Jones’s conspiracy theories as self-serving, comparing his tactics to Tucker Carlson’s normalization of misinformation. Jones’s evasive arguments, like framing the legal system as "tyrannical," expose his pattern of exploiting perceived errors while avoiding accountability, with potential $250M judgments risking financial ruin. The episode underscores how Infowars’ defiance and "magical narratives" prioritize spectacle over truth, eroding credibility even among its own audience. [Automatically generated summary]
I opened the gate with trying out the magic arena online.
It was fun.
I like the art style of a lot of these cards.
I like the gameplay.
I enjoy that.
But it wasn't really exactly what I was looking for.
And so I got on eBay and just got a big box of random cards.
And that was what I was looking for.
Yes.
There's a tactile sensation to it and a looking at there's an there's there's a as I was telling you before we started recording there's almost like an implied story in all of it that yeah that's just it's gripping and and atmospheric and calming I really really really enjoy it and I wish that I had been able to mess around with these things when I was 13.
It's that same feeling that like you would never go to a bookstore that's just filled with e-books.
You know, like you go to a used bookstore with stacks of books that are unorganized and you can smell the paper and you can touch it with your fingers.
News came out at the end of last week that Alex had lost two Sandy Hook trials in Texas court with the judge in the case giving the parents a default judgment.
These two cases initially were the ones brought by Leonard Posner and Veronique De La Rosa, and the one that was brought by Scarlett Lewis.
It took a little bit longer for the news to break on it, but there's also a third case that Alex lost that day, which was brought by Neil Heslin.
I wanted to get deeply into the weeds on this development, but you know how I am with these technical issues.
I sometimes drop the ball, so I just kind of embarrass myself sometimes.
I get emails from people who are like, you don't know this term.
I believe in our first deposition episode, I called the guy a prosecutor.
The reason I mentioned that is my partner, Kyle Farrow, was on Anderson Cooper Friday night talking about the disappearing nose and that whole insane proposition that for those who aren't regular followers of this case, Mr. Jones contends that one of my clients, Veronique De La Rosa, performed a fake interview on a blue screen in a CNN soundstage rather than actually being at Sandy Hook.
So, and before I say anything, let me also just say this.
There's some ground rules that we're going to be expected to follow today.
Sure.
The ethical rules regarding pre-trial publicity make me not be able to say a couple of things.
For instance, I can't talk to you about things like the credibility of certain witnesses or my belief on the guilt or innocence of certain people, all these kinds of things.
Um, well, let me just say, uh, in relation to that, if there's any point where anything feels uncomfortable or like past what you can talk about, just let me know.
So not only is he not producing the documents he's supposed to produce, not answering the questions.
And I mean, when we're talking about questions, there's stuff like name all the employees who worked on these videos and name the videos themselves, right?
Yeah, they are not answering in any way, shape, or form.
And then you have the documents they won't produce.
And then you have the documents they do produce.
And when they end up giving us a bunch of documents and turnover them in electronic format, one of the consultants up in Connecticut found that they had given us child pornography in those documents.
Well, it's again, it's one of those situations where it just nobody has ever seen anything like it.
So, you know, we had a, we had, and I think a credit to our judge in Texas, who just recently retired.
We had Judge Scott Jenkins presiding over this, and he's an old scholarly judge who does things right by the book.
And he was giving Infowars and Jones every chance they had to get in compliance, to treat this correctly.
I mean, a lot of other parties, they would have been done well before Jones, but you don't want to give Jones the ability to say, oh, I'm being railroad, folks, this is a railroad job.
They got me all set up.
That's not what you want to do.
And so we gave him every chance that he had, but after three years, now we show up into our last hearing and they basically just pretend like we have no idea what we're supposed to do.
You notice that there has been a cavalcade of lawyers who have seen Jones as an opportunity to get themselves a niche carved out in the right-wing media.
Maybe it was exactly the career opportunity he was hoping for.
But I'll tell you this: when you're representing these cases, you never think you're going to get so lucky as to have your opposing counsel be an actual Infowars commentator.
Well, you got to, I, you know, I told people when I first got on this case, I had to watch about 150 hours of InfoWars programming.
And, and as you guys know, that messes with your brain.
It doesn't do good things to you.
Yeah.
And so after a while, though, you, you kind of have to take a perspective on it that you embrace the absurdity of it all.
And it's, I'll tell you this: it's, you know, it's particularly easy to find a good sense of humor about it all when at the same time these things are happening, you are also just beating them up and down the courtroom.
And in this case, when I'm sitting in that Jones deposition and he is saying the most absurd stuff, yeah, on some level, it's infuriating to watch him not take that process seriously.
On the other hand, it's intensely rewarding when he says stuff like, oh, we ourselves, we never even investigated Sandy Hook.
But to circle back, because I haven't really answered your question, is they're done now.
So this is over for all intents and purposes.
The judge has said these people have disobeyed the rules with such intensity and with such consistency that there's no way that my judicial rulings are ever going to have any impact on them.
So what she's done then is just declared judgment, which basically says I'm going to instruct the jury that what he did was illegal, unlawful, and caused damage to these plaintiffs.
And their only job is to figure out how much money that's worth.
Well, one of the things that I know from Alex's response to the news of these default judgments was that he said he produced all of his bank records from like his entire life.
It was not a broad spanning financial inquiry into Alex Jones's life.
There were certain records produced from free speech systems.
Mainly, because what you have to understand, and there's, you know, different lawyers have different ways they approach cases, obviously.
And in Connecticut, one of the big things that they're talking about, it's an interesting idea, is that part of why Jones did this so often and so much is because he ultimately found it profitable.
Is that if you can look at the records and see that sales for brain force and male vitality were higher on the days that Sandy Hook was being discussed, then you can show a motive that he had to do it.
But personally, I also believe you can look at this and see that his motive is genuinely that he started to hate these parents, that these parents became genuine financial threats to him.
Because if they got strikes with YouTube every time he put up a picture of their kids saying that they were fake, then pretty soon, just as we saw, he'd lose his livelihood in terms of YouTube.
And he started to hate these parents.
And for us, that really was his motive is that, is I think there's a part of Alex Jones that knew it was trouble to keep talking about Sandy Hook this way.
And he just couldn't help himself because he hated these people so much.
I mean, look, the guy's never been in a situation where the answers to the questions that people are asking him have any consequence or that he would be held to account for any of the answers.
And for him, being in a deposition was a completely new experience, one he did not like at all.
It's very interesting because, like you pointed out, Watson is very aware of how bad this is and he doesn't want to be connected to it.
And so in a lot of ways, it's strange.
You would have never thought Paul Joseph Watson comes out being the good guy.
I mean, though it's interesting, was he really worried about it because he was worried about the morality or because he was worried about the money of it, right?
I felt like he came off like Stringer Bell, you know, like he was above this fray and he saw his friend going to jail for, you know, eight years and he's like, I had nothing to do with this.
But I remember in that podcast, Jordan had said in that podcast, when you're done with Watson, you're sort of tempted to just go lightning round with him and just, you know, climate change and let's talk about every, and believe me, I had a list of every story of Paul Watson's that I wanted to talk to him about.
But you get to that point towards the end of that deposition, you realize this guy's my star witness.
It's a really interesting thing that so many of the people inside Infowars, clearly the public record shows of these depositions that they don't know what's going on.
They don't understand the hot water they're in.
Paul Watson did.
Yeah.
And as opposed to Rob Dew and Alex Jones, it's a very, very different situation.
That was, and again, for your viewers who haven't, who aren't asked what happened in Rob Dew's deposition, Rob Dew, unlike the other witnesses, wasn't there testifying as himself.
He was there testifying as Free Speech Systems, which is Jones' subsidiary company that runs all this stuff.
When you get that, when you're assigned that, you're given homework.
You're given a list of topics and you have the corporation has a reasonable duty to prepare you to testify about those topics and speak with the corporation's voice, give the answers for the corporation.
Actually, so I have to give a shout out on this one because that was my other partner, Bill Ogden, did that deposition.
And that one was in the midst of it, one of the most offensive.
And the amount of disrespect being shown for the process was infuriating.
But the moment you get the transcript and listen to it, it becomes the most hilarious thing you've ever seen because you don't, you simply are uncapable of understanding how a party could disrespect the process this much.
You know, the one thing I don't think that comes across in your podcast about it, because you did excerpt a lot of answers, in order to get the full spirit of it, you would have to include about 20 to 30 minutes of total silence during that deposition.
It was real.
There were periods where you ask a question and you're staring at him for a solid two minutes and he hasn't opened his mouth.
And in front of a jury, that stuff doesn't look good.
And so it was, it was so offensive that the judge at the next hearing is just scratching their heads of, like, I wrote an order saying that this was really, really bad.
And then you just did it again.
And at that point, even at that point, where we had gone through three cases with no discovery, child pornography had been produced.
They had shown up to deposition twice and just totally ignored it.
They could have completely won the case and dismissed all of these cases and still won on a legal argument, which they didn't.
But they got to do an entire another appeal, come back, and then get another chance to answer discovery.
And it was only after they didn't do that that they were, they were defaulted.
So when I see Jones, for instance, getting on his show recently after this happened and saying about how unfairly he's been treated or what a travesty it is, I've got to impress upon people, this does not happen and judges don't want to do it.
And it took three years of this for it to happen in this case.
You have been given literally every available benefit of the doubt to the point now where the judgment used to be 100 pages long and this is just one page of an ASCII middle finger just saying you owe money.
I mean, like, I think anybody who listens to our show probably is aware of how like very clear from an outsider's perspective it is that his strategy has been kick the can down the road.
Yeah.
Basically to make sure this doesn't go to trial or like, and partially, you know, so one of his legal strategies we've seen in the past has been, you know, if we protract this case, it'll cost the other people too much money and they'll want to settle.
Because I think there was at a time, and maybe he's still convinced of it, that he, no matter what happens, he's going to be a Larry Flint hero who goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court and everybody, you know, it's all going to be saved and they're going to make a movie about what a hero he is.
Like I think he might genuinely on some level have thought that.
The problem now, though, is that in order to appeal and vote to the U.S. Supreme Court and vindicate yourself on the First Amendment rights, you have actually had to have made a First Amendment argument and had a lawsuit with trial that actually happened.
Here, you've had, no, you screwed around with Discovery.
You're done.
So you don't get to appeal saying that your rights weren't.
No, we never had an exhibition of your rights.
We don't even know what the hell they are right now.
So right now, all we have is you have massively disobeyed a court and that's the only thing you'll ever be able to appeal.
This is what happens when you have seven lawyers, right?
Like a series of seven lawyers is you don't have a coherent legal strategy.
You never had a coherent legal strategy.
It was, it was always about delay.
It was always about just not facing this.
And at some point, you have to face it.
And that's what we're looking at now.
We're set now for March 28th for us to go pull some jurors and, I mean, basically put on psychological evidence of what happened to our plaintiffs, put on evidence of how far this spread.
You know, we're going to have to go up to a jury of 12 people who, unlike us, don't have a real firm understanding of what InfoWars cultural footprint is.
Don't understand exactly how big this was.
So we got to talk to a jury about that.
But in terms of them being able to say what we did, we were justified in doing it.
Because, I mean, and that's the whole problem is so many times in this case, you want to try to predict what's about to happen or by using a rational actor sort of scheme and it never works, never once works.
What you think is going to happen is not whatever happens.
And so we basically, the easiest way to have some predictive control over this case is to at any juncture say, all right, if I'm Jones and I'm his attorneys, what would I do rationally?
And then you can go ahead and cross at least that one off the list because that's not going to happen.
And then now you have chaos.
Yeah.
Now you just gotta, now you're throwing darts at your chaos board and figuring out which one it hits because this is really how it's been: there's no control or rhyme or reason over any of this.
So, again, that's how you get to the point where you go stir crazy like me and you just laugh at everything.
If there's a time to take a break and reflect and look at this and go, wow, hasn't this been absurd?
It's right now.
There's next few months we're going to be gearing up to do the very serious lifting of telling the jury a very serious story about some people whose lives you just can't understand how they are.
And that, that, honestly, there's where the anger comes for me a little bit: is that in the middle of this absolute circus of absurdity that Jones needs to be put through, that tends to distract in some way from the real gravity of what happened to these parents.
And so, when it comes time to put this on for a trial, and this is obviously, you know, they're going to be media is going to be recording this trial, people are going to be talking about it.
This trial is going to be deadly serious about something that has been distracted for way too long.
Until then, what we always knew, too, it would be a spectacle without any content, of course.
It was going to be something that was just, I mean, because it brings me back actually something to Dan, you said about these depositions and why they're kind of surprising.
Is that if Infowars is what it is and it is what they claim to be, then these depositions should have been the most exciting moment for them because it was their chance to put up what they had to, you know, they're saying they're right.
It's fine, like, put up or shut up.
Here's the time.
You really get to throw down with, you know, some commie attorney like me who you get to like tell him in his place, yeah, you're just wrong.
Look at all this stuff we have.
And instead, Jones and Dew even were like, I don't remember any of that.
I don't know what you're talking about.
We're not ready.
We did no.
I remember the time Jones said in that deposition, I did no preparation for this.
I'm sure you'll realize as I got ready for these depositions, I became an expert such that it is in the Sandy Hook Hopes mythology.
And I can go toe to toe with anybody who believes this bullshit, like a Wolfgang Hauber or a Jim Fetzer.
And I was actually looking forward to going toe-to-toe with somebody who thought that they were confident about this stuff and destroying them.
And it didn't happen.
I mean, instead, what we got from Jones was, you know, Jones, you've said this before, didn't you?
No, I never said that.
Here's a video clip of you saying that.
That's edited.
I didn't say that's just an editor.
Of context media, media matters, edited clips.
So we're gonna say to that you know, and like you can't get anywhere, like there was this idea too I think that was really observant of you both that there's some things you can accomplish basically in that situation in terms of testimony, there are some admissions you can get very quickly, but but that's done in 15, 20 minutes.
Really like there's not a lot of legal significance that can come out of that deposition, that that that it happens very quick, but culturally I think there is a lot of significance to that deposition And I think you're going to see that at this trial too.
So we'll get, we'll get some, in other words, I don't want to say that the show is over.
You know what I mean?
Like there is reckoning for Jones that's going to happen.
And it's going to be personal.
It's not just going to be totally focused on my clients.
And I think that it's such a testament to the families that they've been able to have the wherewithal to continue in the face of the difficulty of living through, I mean, the last three years of this case, even.
I wouldn't fault somebody for saying, this is enough.
Well, you know, I'll tell you, there are definitely families out there who are involved in all of this who don't want anything to do with this, you know, who aren't in lawsuit and all of that.
And I completely respect that decision because, gosh, why would you want to get into any of this in a lot of ways?
But it's really interesting that my clients down in Texas, you know, where you have Lenny and Veronique and Neil and Scarlett, those are those are two families who were really heavily focused on, right?
Like they put up the Posner's address to where they go pick up their mail.
They said they were starting an anti-First Amendment terrorist organization that was coming after Infowars viewers.
They said that Neil Hesson was lying about holding his son with a bullet hole in the head.
It's this really personal crap.
And so these clients have really stood up with their person, like, because they were these personal targets to be able to make this fight on behalf of everybody.
And it's really been a brave struggle, particularly, you know, if Lenny has been in this since the beginning.
Within within a couple of weeks of this, of the shooting, he wrote to Infowars and said, knock this off.
Why are you doing this?
You know, this is Lenny is upfront about the fact that, you know, probably driving once he dropped Noah off that morning, he was driving away.
He might have been listening to Infowars.
He was actually kind of into that stuff just because it was interesting to him.
And to have these people stick, because people don't, what they sometimes don't realize is that we're talking about five years of straight harassment, followed by three years of them making a mockery of their lawsuits.
So it's been almost a decade they've been having to deal with this crap.
Yeah, I think, you know, some people who aren't really up to speed like we are on Jones understand that he said things about Sandy Hook, but probably think it was, it was a handful of occasions over a couple of years, that kind of thing.
So that's the other big one I have to address as well.
But you'll notice that if you watched his statement about in reaction to these default judgments, one of the things he said is, you know, I only mentioned this a couple of times, only a few times that I ever talk about Sandy Hook.
And we don't, because of your audience may not realize, but because of we bringing the suit and then there shortly thereafter, YouTube and Facebook deleting all their profiles, Infowars has lost irreparably a lot of its videos and content.
It can't tell us everything.
So, we've kind of had to play Sherlock Holmes using the public record to try to figure out what videos were made and when.
And right now, our best estimate is that they made 100 episodes about Sandy Hook.
That and somewhere discussing the thing.
We know that they made about 350 pages of InfoWars articles about Sandy Hook.
And so, this is we're averaging about two shows a month over the entire span.
Now, there are some times when he hits it like 2015 and 2017, he is really hitting it hard.
So, those have more times, but generally, five years of this straight harassment that people just don't know unless you're a real, I mean, everybody's seen the Media Matters clips, right?
But, but God, when you really dig in there, I'm telling you, you have to sit there and you have to watch an hour and a half of an unscripted conversation between Jones and Wolfgang Halbig.
Man and on CNN all the time, school safety experts.
Yeah, they talk to you about Colin Bond.
Yeah, all of that.
And you hear it.
One of the things that I mentioned to Jones, because Jones was telling me about how credible he initially thought Halbig was.
And I was like, sir, you've done Skype calls with Halbig.
You've seen Halbig's home.
You've seen how he lives.
You've seen who he is.
You know who this man is, right?
At one point, I even used, I mean, look, I would never normally say in a deposition, look, you got 4,000 emails from him and reading them, you would agree with me.
This man is a raving lunatic.
I normally wouldn't use that kind of language, but Wolfgang Halbig.
And, you know, look, I don't, I don't think that I think that that statement is a matter of my opinion.
It's not a statement of fact.
But if Wolfgang Halbig is upset about that, please, please sue me, Wolfgang, because you are a raving lunatic and you have caused enormous pain to these families.
And Jones knew that.
Like, because that's my other problem: people, the number one question I get on these cases is, does Jones believe the things that he said?
And all I can do is point you to the public record.
That's all I can do is point you to the public record and to the deposition transcripts.
And I think it becomes very clear that no, he never for a second thought these things were fake.
You know, Jones talks a lot about one of the observations you made that was very, very observant was the idea of the media jumping on with both feet of this idea that he said it was a psychosis that caused Sandy.
And that's not, it's not really what he said.
He was making a metaphor and it kind of was still pretty crazy and it was a dumb thing to say.
But there are people out there.
There are people out there who popular institutions and the powers that be and just the shitty deal you get in life in America has made them distrust basically all official sources of authority.
There's no question that that's a real thing that happens to people.
I think that, you know, when he could still be a slight victim of that, like that mentality, in as much as he was getting caught up in it as he was producing that content and it was becoming more successful.
Like if he just wasn't aware of what was going on and he wasn't aware, he's not in touch with himself.
Yeah, you can easily find yourself snowballing a little bit.
There's some moments where Jones is he's he's he he detaches from reality and just sort of free spins.
And in that way, he may be sort of just theorizing in ways that aren't totally grounded, like when he'll talk about an interdimensional shadow government or some shit, you know, like that.
That's out there.
And then there are other times where I think he has somewhat convinced himself of his own BS.
You know, some very basic world events.
Oh, the Syrian chemical attack was faked or something like that, right?
No, convince him of that.
But when it comes to something like Sandy Hook was not an operating school, I don't believe Jones ever believed that, or that there were kids who were recruited to play the parts of different dead children and they were shot.
Well, you know, that's that's something our expert has really harped on: is that you can look at every single mass tragedy and it follows the same script.
You can't really pick one.
You know, it's interesting when Watson was in deposition, I asked him, Can you name me a mass casualty event he didn't say was a false flag?
And he goes, well, I think maybe more of the recent ones, like the El Paso shooting, and then on the podcast, I hear Jordan go, nope.
And it is, it's in the law views it as when you have a person who is engaging in a course of conduct that shows a consistent form of behavior to advance their business, you can assume that they made the same justifications for this latest thing is consistent with everything else they've ever done.
So the fact that he is within hours is going to call one of these events a mass tragedy shows you that it's a reckless disregard for the truth.
When you say there were men arrested in SWAT year, that's an assertion of fact.
If that didn't happen, you're a liar.
Like, it's not just you have a bad opinion, right?
Or another one that he'll try to do a trick on you is he will put it in a question, but it will be a, but it'll be a why do you still beat your wife question?
And there's that classic clip of him saying that he had didn't believe it was fake at first, but then he looked into it deeply and it was all fake, all actors.
But now I know it's completely staged and this is all totally synthetic and fake and a hoax.
And then they'll tell me in deposition.
Yeah, I mean, I question some things, but I never questioned it in totality of saying whether it was staged or and you could just play the clip right afterwards.
He is a very large man and he takes a lot of supplements, which could make him strong and fearsome in a fight.
But the thing that really scares me about him is that I think that he deduced perhaps correctly that there are things more potent, more powerful, more useful in our current political dialogue than truth or verified facts.
That there are magical narratives that can represent what we want and what we hope to achieve in our political agendas that are way more effective or useful than anything we could ever report truthfully.
Anyway, but that is the scary part to me is that, you know, look, I think you could probably imagine you get involved in these cases as an attorney a couple years ago, and I started to get really enthusiastic about maybe some of the changes that could result from here.
Like, not only am I going to do something for these families, but maybe there is a cultural change into how we talk about information.
And then, over the past three years, what have I seen?
You know, I've seen a man who has been able to use his own frivolous disrespect to delay this process for three years.
So there's no accountability.
And over that same course of time, all of his more industry-established contemporaries begin copying his formula.
Well, somebody used to tell me there was one of my colleagues, Genevieve Zimmerman, was involved with the lawsuits against Jim Fetzer in Michigan, where Lenny Posner was able to win a defamation suit against Jim Fetzer.
Interestingly enough, by result of default judgment, when Jim Fetzer refused to participate with court proceedings, so sort of birds of a feather flock together situation there.
But Jin, when she was helping out with closing arguments, had come up with the line for Jake Zimmerman to use, which was calling what Jones did an alt-right opium.
Ultimately, we have the same problem that you had in the depositions, which is this.
They know you know they're lying.
You know, they know they're lying.
So all there is, the only question is, are you going to tell me that you were lying or not?
So Alex is going to not say that he's lying and he'll accept any default judgment, anything, because then he doesn't have to say what everyone knows and why he's in the courtroom.
So, one thing we touched on that we haven't gotten to yet that I was really hoping to get your perspective on was how you felt the coverage of the case was.
Do you feel like the media at large focused on the right points?
Do you feel like I think that one of the things that's definitely become very interesting to me over the course of the time that we've done this podcast is seeing how people cover Alex and seeing the ways in which, you know, there's sometimes unforced errors, and then sometimes people, you know, are like, this is they got the right point there.
To answer the first part, do I think the media has typically gotten this right?
No, no, I do not.
And that's that's a shame.
A lot of the media that's involved around Alex Jones is very clickbait media editors know that if they have a story about Alex Jones and the Sandy Hook lawsuit, it's going to get clicks.
And the big problem for mine, look, I'm not, a lot of people would say, all right, well, if you're getting my coverage wrong, you're usually almost always getting it wrong in a way that's critical to Alex Jones.
So maybe that'd be good.
But no, no, it's not.
And the problem is, is that Jones knows very acutely that his ability to identify mistakes made by the mainstream media is one of his best defenses.
Is that if you overshoot the target on Jones, he uses it as a way to martyr himself.
There was, in fact, so I was just talking about the Jim Fetzer verdict up in Michigan, where there was, you know, one of his sources was helped by that.
A lot of newspapers ran a story that that was Alex Jones who got that.
And Jones got on his show and made mainstream media look stupid.
You know, that's, there's been a lot of threats of lawsuits all over the place that never materialized, but it always gives him a good sounding board to say, you got to come after me for not being accurate when these people aren't being accurate about me.
And that's, that's, that's a good point.
But what Jones never understood about me personally is that I'm not, those media, that's not, I'm not aligned with them.
You give me a CNN story defaming one of my clients, I'm suing CNN in a heartbeat because I guarantee it's way easier than suing this guy.
That they want to say that journalism should be protected to the extent that if I see Jane for a good time call Jane Smith on a bathroom wall, I can go in the paper and report Jane Smith as a prostitute.
So it was, it was, it's funny that in Neil Hesslin's case, um, they were relying off of or relying, they had cited a blog post from a blog called Zero Hedge.
I'm not sure if we know an anonymously run libertarian financial freak out blog.
So had a blog post saying that Neil Huston didn't hold his kid.
And they, and that blog post itself cited Jim Fetzer.
So it's just garbage in garbage to garbage, right?
But but that was their blog post.
And then Owen Schroyer gets on and puts that on air and says, hey, I'm just reporting on what Zero Hedge is saying.
When he puts up the Zero Hedge blog post, you can see the page.
It has three shares at that moment, right?
Like, nobody in the world has seen this.
This is obviously Infowars and Zero Hedge are hand in glove and like doing this sort of thing.
But to say that you're just reporting on what other people are saying.
So I'm just going to bring on old Dr. Steve P and just let him go nuts.
Just wind him up.
Just let him go.
And you know what you're doing.
You knew we have the emails that are in this case that have been filed with the court that show that before they put Dr. Steve P on, they knew exactly what he was going to say and encouraged him to say it.
And look, here's the other thing you have to remember: is that like when I deposed Paul Joseph Lawson, you'll saw that I had emails, right?
Like I had internal documents, I had some things to talk to him about.
When I deposed Jones, I did not.
At that point in the proceedings, they had not yet produced anything.
I was flying completely blind in that Jones deposition.
It was based on my own research, nothing that came from the company.
Now we're in a very different situation.
Now we have things.
We, so you know, a lot of the song and dance that a lot of people saw was Jones's hemming and hawing about who Dan Bedondi was and whether that whether he sent the Kraken to go harass the people of New York.
So, and that's why, you know, one of the things that we brought up at our last hearing is we were granted in 2018, we were granted an order saying that we were supposed to have Owen's deposition along with several other people, and we never got them.
They refused to produce them.
And now I'm in a position of who I really want Owen Schroyer's deposition.
And I'm not sure I'm going to get it because there's a very good chance he could be in federal custody by the time I want it.
And because right now he's in a situation where he's facing these charges for breach of basically federal trespassing.
And it wouldn't normally be that serious, except he did it a year ago and didn't show up for community service.
And that's what we really, we told the judge, too, look, we're concerned not only about that deposition, but that's why we want this deposition of Jones in October is because we're a little worried.
If you look in Schroyer's arrest affidavit with all the pictures of Owen Schroyer being places he's not supposed to be, Jones is standing right next to him.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't expect anything from Alex because the reason that Owen got in trouble was because he had a restraining order that because he didn't do the community service, he was barred from being like in all of those places.
Alex being there with him, I don't think it matters as much because he didn't have that like sort of yeah, yeah, so that's he wasn't trespassing.
I mean, look, people say a lot of stuff and I don't know what's happening in the federal investigation, but people say whatever they could get Jones off off of those pictures is such a minor crime as to not even be worth the trouble.
Really pessimistic, not about our case, because I knew I would pursue Jones to the end of the earth and grind him into dust.
That was never a question to me.
But was it actually going to make a difference to anybody anywhere?
I mean, first, could I make a difference for my own clients?
Could we even collect from him?
All those sorts of things.
But then I started seeing, gosh, when I started seeing coronavirus hit and I started seeing just the absolute insanity of the false facts being put out there.
When I saw January 6th go down, the big lie around the election, I'm like, are we too far gone?
Did these lawsuits need to be brought several years ago or is this too late?
What's going on?
But I'll tell you, the last couple of weeks, I'm feeling a little more optimistic.
When we go back to the 2003 episodes, there is a certain feel of like you're looking at the man who is inexorably going to wind up where we are right now.
You know, like his behavior then will eventually lead to where we are now.
I'm just going to have to keep doing some of that.
I saw that y'all were looking at some of those earlier episodes, and I haven't, I mean, that takes me back to my college days, you know, like when I was in UT around like 99, 2000, that's when Jones started to become kind of huge, like moving from public access to what he is today.
And I really want to now go back and listen to some of those episodes from 2003 because to see the sort of embryonic chaos agent start to take form.
Okay, so there's a transition, though, that occurs with Jones.
That I know that y'all are seeing it through the history.
I mean, look, one of the things that becomes obvious to me when I'm watching these videos is you watch a video in 2013 versus 2015 versus 2017, the sets are different.
And you see the evolution of the show through its sets.
And now it's this big, gaudy, CNN-looking set.
And it's funny to me how there are so many things that I know from what I think of Jones from when I came up with him in the 2000s is not who he is today.
Because to me, Jones is the guy who's about to be in tears over the alien fish hybrids.
They're in the tanks and they're moving their flippers.
In other words, the discovery requests that were at issue in Texas that made him default the case.
None of this has anything to do with that.
So just to make that clear right off the bat.
But in Connecticut, they had asked him, it wasn't really Sandy Hook marketing materials.
Basically, what it was is they wanted any, for any episode that Sandy Hook was discussed about, they wanted Infowars internal analytics, right?
They wanted to know what did they get off of Google Ads?
What did they get?
How many hits did they get?
These sorts of things.
And then Infowars also uses things like an internal Google Analytics program.
It has some other metrics that it uses there.
And they wanted to request all of that, which I think makes sense.
Pretty fair request.
You got to know, particularly the amount of views, right?
Because if you want to establish how these people were damaged, you have to know how many people saw it.
So ultimately, the total audience of Infowars is important.
They asked for also, I think, if they had, if there were any emails that referred to special marketing initiatives for Sandy Hook.
And by that, I mean, like, we're going to make a special promotional page or we're going to promote, hey, can you make sure on this video, can you promote some Sandy Hook videos?
Because they've been really popular.
If there's an email like that, obviously we'll want to see it.
But in terms of like, like, you have to remember that despite despite InfoWars revenue and its sets and everything, ultimately at core, it's not a very sophisticated business.
Because the way Alex makes it seem is like they're demanding that I bring like to them like these flyers that we printed up with Sandy Hook sale going on.
No, I mean, there is, there's obviously a lot of when you're a digital web business who publishes on the web, you're going to have some statistics about what happened to your videos.
And those are things they won.
But what's what's mind-blowing about it is that, is that in my case, we aren't even there yet.
Like we have, we have just recently got started to broach some of those issues.
But in my case, it's like, okay, here would be a sample request that they're not answering is identify every video in which InfoWars discussed the Sandy Hook tragedy.
That has never been answered, right?
Like these are very, very simple things.
And that was what I think was most shocking to our judge is that you have these requests that were supposed to be answered in 2018, like at the very beginning of the case.
So you can even start feeling your way around in the dark, right?
Like, like, this is so basic.
And so for Jones to go on there and pretend like he has been unjustly had his right to a jury taken away, this is flatly absurd.
Now it makes me think that there's something out there that he doesn't want to give us in terms of that because he really is focused on this whole Sandy Hook marketing thing.
It's half of we've been so insanely negligent ever since being sued that we have caused massive amounts of evidence to be destroyed and can never produce it to you.
And if they ever have to really fully just be upfront and admit that, that also has some pretty severe consequences.
At this point, you know, that's honestly the challenge is going to be, as for those of people who I know your audience is, for those who watch these proceedings, the challenge going forward is if there's any more shenanigans, how exactly do you punish them?
Right.
Like there's not much more you can do at this point.
You got to remember, my plaintiffs are going to be asked to give testimony soon.
And some of the things are going to be testifying about are confidential private health information, that sort of stuff.
And they've already made a mockery of that stuff up in Connecticut.
You know, they don't know if y'all followed this one.
This one was fascinating to me of just how detached from reality their strategy has become is they were in the middle of deposing a plaintiff, Sandy Hook parent, right?
And the deposition itself is designated confidential, attorney's eyes only, at the start of the deposition, which means this doesn't get released to the public.
And in the middle of that deposition, Norm Pattis, their lawyer, started.
What he did was he started writing down the things that the plaintiff was saying, the confidential testimony, inserted that into a motion, and then filed that motion publicly with the court on the court's docket where everybody can get a copy of it.
And okay, so now the part of this that's going to make you just your jaw drop at this is not only is that insane, the motion that he was filing was a motion to request that the court compel the deposition of Hillary Clinton.
Yes, because apparently, according to Jones, these lawsuits, the only reason they happened is because Hillary Clinton was mad.
And then for some reason, like about two years after she lost the election, she decided to go recruit some attorneys and the Sandy Hook families to pursue a vendetta against Alex Jones.
And that apparently I'm under Clinton payroll and all this kind of stuff.
Well, you know, in Jones' own feverish sort of construction of all of this, Hillary Clinton is a big reason why he said some of the things he said about Sandy Hook, particularly after 2016.
It's because when she used him as a prop to attack Trump and to say Trump's associated with this guy and this guy's a mess, right?
And this guy said Sandy Hook didn't happen.
And everything she said about him was 100% true, but she was using him very clearly as a campaign prop to try to score some points.
And I got no problem with that, whatever.
But once he did that, that enraged Jones.
That was it.
Because Jones at that point was on this trajectory to become very mainstream.
He had got Trump on his show.
He was being credited at that time with Trump's victory.
And so that's why just after the election, in November, right after the election, he did a broadcast called Alex Jones' final statement about Sandy Hook.
And basically, he couldn't stop talking about it because Hillary talked about him.
So he had to respond back.
So his genius idea was to get on there and go, well, look, here's all the reasons I thought it was fake.
And honestly, if it hadn't been for that, like some of this case would have never happened, right?
If the parents, they were of the position that if Jones had stopped after 2016, they probably wouldn't have pursued this, right?
But it was this vendetta that kept up is that not only did he do it then, but then just a couple months later in the new year in 2017, he did a video called Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed.
I'm really surprised that nobody in the media reported that in his 20, his, his November 27, I'm sorry, his November 2019 deposition, his second deposition, that he ended that deposition by saying Epstein didn't kill himself.
And that to me is hilarious.
It's like you, you have made this, you understand what a mockery you've made of this, that you're willing to do that at the end of that deposition.
And I'll tell you, there were several points in there where his eyes glaze over because he doesn't know what's happening because he's like, oh my God, I'm agreeing with a lot of this thing this guy's saying right now.
I don't know what to do.
Because I'm sitting there telling him, like, I think you and I agree that most of the people who run this world, who are in the ruling class of this country and the world, are mainly psychopaths and criminals.
And he was like, yeah, I do.
Yeah, it's very strange.
Because of course, he still wants to cast me as something that I'm not.
He's really, really interested in making it seem that I'm a democratic operative or something like that.
We were talking a little bit about his motion to depose Hillary Clinton and his sort of obsession with this idea that these lawsuits were entirely motivated by Hillary Clinton's vendetta against him.
It's funny because, okay, so just some insight baseball on this is that as a plaintiff's lawyer, what I do is when people come to me for help, they don't pay me any money, right?
Like I'm, I'm sort of, think of it like a pirate, right?
Like somebody comes to a pirate and says, these Spaniards took all my gold and I want you to go get it back.
And I'm like, okay, I'll outfit a fast ship with a lot of guns.
I'll try to go get your gold.
I'm keeping a third of it and I'll front any expenses.
And if I don't get the gold, you don't owe me anything.
It's a terrifying combination of just like narcissism and black and white thinking, you know, like just absolutes and everyone is against me because I'm the greatest.
My other kind of final thoughts, and this is addressed to the state bar of Texas when they finally review this and listen to me talk on this is listen, guys.
I know we've been a little loose in the wild today and a little profane here.
I know that I did my imitations of Alex Jones.
I know I did a couple of those.
Just want it for the record, he imitated me first.
He got on his show and imitated me first.
So I think it's fair.
He compared me to Gollum and said that I was a gremlin.
He even said he was going to make a little goblin bankstendal.
And I just, that hasn't happened yet because I am number one who's going to buy one.
So I'm not worried about influencing the jury pool or anything.
But I did want to come talk about it with y'all because I feel like this suit has been really interesting to the wider culture and not enough really hard analysis is being done on it.
Not enough real attention is being paid to it.
And I know y'all guys come out and like to have fun with it, but y'all are doing a really big service.
A lot of people have learned a lot more about what this show really is from Knowledge Fight.
And just sheer, and just talking to him, you know, like he pulled it off like he hadn't spent the last four years in hell, you know?
Like he pulled it off like this wasn't a crushing, miserable thing to do on a daily basis filled with abuse, bullshit, and it looking like it might never end, you know?
The left in this country has completely weaponized the legal system and the judiciary.
There are so many examples of it.
But just in the last few days, a decorated lieutenant colonel who came out and criticized the hasty, horribly organized withdrawal of Afghanistan is sitting in a military stockade in a brig, in a prison, without even being charged with a crime yet.
This is about Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, who had criticized the Biden administration's handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan in a video that he posted on Facebook.
He was relieved of command and put in the brig at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina awaiting trial.
This is pretty messed up, and I can see how this would worry anybody, but it has nothing to do with the left or the judiciary.
This has to do with how there are different rules of conduct when you agree to enlist in the armed services.
There are military rules, and they apply to you and not to non-enlisted persons.
And when you break them, you get in a different sort of trouble.
Because he violated a gag order after being relieved of command by posting the videos he put on Facebook, Scheller is accused of, quote, showing contempt towards officials, willfully disobeying a superior officer, failing to obey lawful orders, and committing conduct unbecoming of an officer.
I can agree that it might be a productive conversation to discuss how weird it is that the military has these own rules that it has for its members to be subjected to.
But in terms of Alex's response to, you know, like he's getting on air to talk about losing these multiple Sandy Hook cases.
Listen, I know everybody's read the news, but what they are not talking about is that it is still Fat Bear Week and the week of Fat Bear should be held sacred.
I can speak as someone who listened back to the entire period after the shooting, and with absolute confidence, I can say that that's bullshit.
It's a good spin for Alex because most people won't actually go back and check.
And idiots like Joe Rogan fall for this kind of line, but that is definitely false.
But even leaving that aside, that clip makes no sense.
Alex is trying to make two claims simultaneously, and it's really hard for both of them to be true.
The first is that he barely ever talked about Sandy Hook, maybe just a few times, and he was just covering what the internet was saying.
And then the second thing he's trying to claim is that the coverage of Sandy Hook was so unpopular that some of Alex's family disagreed with him and staff almost quit because of it.
That seems convoluted.
I don't know how both of those can actually be his accurate retelling of events.
Well, I mean, he did it two or three times, and then there was such an uproar over it that he never talked about it again until several years later whenever he finally said that he believes it happened.
And then everybody was like, ha ha, now it's time to take you to the cleaners.
First of all, no one's claiming that Alex had a grand design to get rich and famous by way of lying about Sandy Hook, or at least that's not a matter for the courts immediately.
Second, the cases of Jesse Smollett and Bubba Wallace are the only two recent examples he comes up with, and those are both times that he just had a knee-jerk denial about allegations of racially motivated crimes.
If you listen to our show, you'll find way more examples of times when Alex was very wrong about denying racist violence.
But then there's another one, and that is that Alex is not questioning things.
He comes to conclusions.
It would be one thing if Alex's coverage was what he imagines it was.
It would still be dumb and dangerous, but if he was dryly reporting that online conspiracy communities had questions about alleged irregularities in the Sandy Hook case, that could be argued to just be questioning.
What Alex was doing was persuading, which is different than questioning.
Questioning seeks truth through asking sometimes unpopular questions.
Persuading has a conclusion that the audience is supposed to be drawn to.
And oftentimes, you can ask loaded questions as a tool that you could use in the path of your persuasion.
Sandy Hook is a blip on the radar screen in the different stories, the tens of thousands I've covered.
But it's not a blip on the radar screen for the lobbies that are anti-gun, the big corporate institutions that seek to disarm the American people.
The family has successfully been able to use those children to sue Remington into bankruptcy and to demonize the idea of self-defense itself and to try to basically destroy and steal the birthright of self-defense from all Americans.
Their concerns are being weaponized by the gun grabbers in a way that would lead one to believe, if you believe, Alex, that their concerns aren't real.
But I will give him the story that I'll show you in a moment.
Even their top legal expert says that these death penalty sanctions are basically a myth because you're guaranteed to be able to try the facts of the case.
So this is a legal theory they're trying to get through to get rid of due process using the straw man of the demonized villain, Alex Jones.
This endangers everybody's due process, everybody's free speech.
And the system is hoping that they can have the Alex Jones law, that's what they call it, to get rid of people's free speech selectively while protecting the corporate media's free speech.
If anything, Alex has been given excessive due process and given every opportunity to cooperate with the case, and he's shown himself to be unwilling at every turn.
This isn't the court depriving Alex of his rights.
It's him shooting himself in the foot.
In the court order for default judgment, they specifically say that they have gotten no response in discovery requests since July 2nd, which was months ago.
This isn't the court failing.
It's Alex's sabotage.
And it's pretty funny, too.
Like, the order makes it clear that this is not a lawyer problem.
It's Alex.
Quote, it is clear to the court that discovery misconduct is properly attributable to the client and not the attorney, especially since defendants have been represented by seven attorneys over the course of the suit.
Regardless of the attorney, defendants' discovery abuse remained consistent.
Also, the Huffington Post article that Alex is talking about wasn't quoting their top legal expert.
They were quoting Bill Ogden, who's a lawyer at Farrar and Bell, which is the law firm that Mark Bankston works at.
Bill Ogden's the guy who he referenced was doing the Rob D deposition.
So their pictures are even right next to each other on the law firm's website.
This isn't a lawyer saying that this is just a legal theory.
He's saying that it's taught that way in law school because it almost never happens.
Quote, it's extremely rare that a party, in the parentheses, Alex Jones and Infowars, is ordered by the court to comply with discovery, is sanctioned for failing to obey with the court's multiple orders, and then continues to blatantly disregard the court's authority by continuing to refuse to comply.
Yeah, it's like if, let's say, okay, how about this?
Okay, so I murdered somebody, and then I took the knife home with me, and they arrested me, and they were like, okay, you just got to bring that knife, and then we'll get this all done with.
And every time I didn't bring the knife, and I was like, nah, I'm just not going to go.
And they were like, okay, well, we have to do something.
So I guess there's a fine or maybe just bring the fucking knife.
Bring the knife.
And then I was like, no, no, no, no.
How about instead I go stand outside your courthouse and waggle my dick in your face and then go, ah, while holding the knife above my head and then throwing it around and then spinning.
And then whenever you grab me and arrest me and put me in jail, you have denied my due process.
A judge issued default judgments, a rarity in the legal world against Jones and Infowars, after the conspiracy theorists failed to produce discovery records.
Ladies and gentlemen, first let me set the record straight.
My lawyers told me in Connecticut, they said, you shouldn't even produce what they're asking for.
No one's ever done this.
And I said, I'm going to do it.
They want to default me.
I released all of my company bank records going back to Sandy Hook and up until now.
Yeah, and I think that there's just a fundamental misunderstanding that he thinks that it's about the source of the funding as opposed to tracking whether or not your analytics show that you know that you benefit from.
And so this judge and the judge previous, because when I'm retired in Travis County, will never let me have the lawyers I want that are well-known, famous First Amendment lawyers like Mark Rondaza and others.
Something that I remember learning in some philosophy class in college was that the beginning of any kind of discussion that you can have with someone is like agreeing on the definitions of the different terms.
And you do really kind of have to establish first principles about reality.
The judge also, who is known as a bomb thrower, who's known by the Democrats that I've talked to as well, is just unbelievably ill-informed about the law.
They even quote it here in the Huffington Post of all places, who's attacking me that it's unheard of.
Lawyer Bill Ogden with Far Ball told Huffington Post that Gamble's default, that's the judgment ruling, is a bit of a myth in the legal world, but not if they can make it real with me, where a judge just decides, wow.
So the cases that were brought by Neil Heslin and Posner and De La Rosa, those are defamation cases because Infowars and Alex did say their names specifically on air.
Conversely, the case that's being brought by Charlotte Lewis isn't for defamation because her name was never said, but her child was invoked.
And thus she accused Alex of intentional infliction of emotional distress, which is a different charge because the defamation statute probably would not apply.
Alex is playing fast and loose with these details, knowing that his audience will never look into it or try to figure out the difference or why it's like, I never said her name.
In any situation like this, if you're a listener of Alex, just based on all we've had to do to like narrow down what's actually happening and how many different complicated things are happening simultaneously, Alex is giving you a very simple answer.
Also, it seems really weird that Alex seems to be brushing aside the problems he has with Republicans when those problems are, quote, warmongering surveillance police state stuff.
It is not an overstatement to say that the First Amendment was crucified today.
He fought King George Mexico.
Not over 76, and today we fight judicial tyranny.
There are still some good judges.
There's still some good FBI.
There's still some good Justice Department in this country.
And we're not going to fight these people with violence or with muskets like we saw 240-something years ago.
We're going to fight them with the truth and justice and educating the public and taking our country back through elections and through other legal and lawful processes.
I appreciate the listeners keeping us on air.
I haven't made a big deal about this the last few years.
We've been incredibly persecuted by these people.
I've hired some of the top lawyers in the country.
They've never seen anything like this in their lives.
So I just trust in God and I trust in you to support us.
The inner workings of how they made their news, let's say, could be a lot more damaging to him than any financial penalty.
So I do feel like there is that angle of this, but at the same time, that might be me being too pessimistic because he still has the Connecticut case that's still going.
It's too much happening all at the same time for them not to come back with something that is massively punitive because we're dealing with somebody who's everybody is saying that this has never fucking happened.
This is something taught in schools because it doesn't actually happen.
So you've got that already.
So your summary, your default judgment money should be upped double just for that.
Just for the extra three years it took or whatever, you know?
On top of that, you've got this guy who has essentially created the blueprint by which democracy has been demolished.
And I was going to get into his actual show from after the period, but because we had this conversation with Mark Bankston, I didn't want to overburden the episode and make it too long.