#641: Formulaic Objections Part 4
Today, Dan and Jordan break down the recent depositions that were done with Infowars corporate representative Daria and Alex Jones himself. Also, Mark Bankston drops by to provide some surprising context.
Jan. 26, 2022 - Knowledge Fight
04:08:23
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and Jordan, knowledge fight. | |
| I need, I need money. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| You're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first time caller. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
| I love your room. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| Knowledgefight.com. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love you. | |
| Hey, everybody! | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Emmerich Jones and the ongoing adventures of... | ||
| Drain swirling. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That's what came to mind. | ||
| That wasn't great. | ||
| I can do better. | ||
| We'll get there. | ||
| It's 2022. | ||
| We'll get something for it later. | ||
| We'll figure it out. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan! | ||
| What's up? | ||
| What's your bright spot today? | ||
| My bright spot today is... | ||
| It's actually a bright spot of anger. | ||
| It's a bright spot of anger! | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And the anger is that no one told me about a thing existing before. | ||
| And I stumbled across it, and now it's all I want to do. | ||
| I've found that on YouTube, there are a bunch of channels that are just like... | ||
| They set up a camera, and animals show up. | ||
| You didn't know that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| It's taken the internet by storm since Fat Bear Week like 10 years ago. | ||
| I knew about Fat Bear Week, but I thought that was a special event. | ||
| No, man. | ||
| I didn't realize that there were these cameras that you could just watch live all the time. | ||
| 24-7. | ||
| I found one that was in the Namibian desert, and it's a watering hole. | ||
| And so for about five minutes, I'm watching this Ibix, or Ibix, or however you pronounce that. | ||
| Drink from this watering hole. | ||
| Like, this is fascinating. | ||
| Then, a second Ibix showed up, and I cheered. | ||
| Sitting alone in the apartment, I cheered for the appearance of another animal. | ||
| I'm telling you right now, you can get so many cameras that are just 24-7 on a nest with eggs in there, and it is your entire life. | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| That's too much, like, tension. | ||
| Entire life just sitting there being like, who is this? | ||
| I don't want to be, like, waiting for the egg to hatch or something. | ||
| That's too high stakes. | ||
| But watching just a watering hole is pretty great. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I'm going to be lost to the world now. | ||
| This is where I'm heading. | ||
| I like that you are, in some sense, digitally retreating to the wilderness, you know? | ||
| Like, you can't go and move into the middle of the woods, but you can through the vision of a camera. | ||
| The desire has been there. | ||
| Maybe this is the only way that I can manifest it. | ||
| Also, one of the imbexes walked past the camera. | ||
| I'm like, ooh, look at that guy. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Look at you! | ||
| So what about you? | ||
| What's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is... | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| My partner is a teacher, and that means that right around this time of year... | ||
| All of the Girl Scouts circle like vultures on weak teachers. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Ready to pounce. | ||
| You gotta do your part. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So despite the fact that I'm sure it's in some way some sort of evil cartel, the Girl Scouts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| I would assume so. | ||
| I haven't read anything about it, but you're sure it is. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So now we have a shit ton of boxes. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Are orders still open? | ||
| I'm pretty sure, yeah. | ||
| I might need you to put in an order for me. | ||
| I've got... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got some. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Listen. | ||
| You can buy these secondhand? | ||
| At this point, if the cops came, I would be busted for intent to distribute. | ||
| That's how many fucking boxes we have here. | ||
| I'm looking for some Samoas. | ||
| I've got some. | ||
| I'm looking for some Tagalongs. | ||
| You can't have any of my fucking Tagalongs. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| You don't get a single cookie! | ||
| I don't want Thin Mints. | ||
| I've had my fill of those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I got some S'mores ones for you. | ||
| What? | ||
| They have s'mores ones now? | ||
| When did they start this? | ||
| You don't want to know. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Anyways, that's my bright spot. | ||
| That is a pretty bright spot. | ||
| Look, I like sweets. | ||
| We've got some negotiations after the show. | ||
| I will say that I like sweets when times are tough. | ||
| When things are good, I have much less of a sweet tooth. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Hey, it looks like times have been tough. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an episode to go over that has been long in the works, and we've teased this a little bit, but not very specifically. | ||
| Things like I've mentioned that I have some side things I'm working on. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And things like when, beginning of December, we had two past episodes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We had a little break, and nobody knew why. | |
| Yes, and... | ||
| That all will become clear on today's episode. | ||
| But before we get down to business on that, let's take a little moment to say thank you and hello to some new wonks. | ||
| So first, the Rev's Lang. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I think that's the Reverend's Lang. | ||
| The Reverend's Lang? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The Rev's Lang? | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Next, Mother Gerald. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Next, we have a technocrat in the mix, Jordan. | ||
| Thank you so much, you are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Ha ha, I thought you could trip me up. | ||
| Ha ha, damn it! | ||
| But we also do have a couple technocrats in the mix. | ||
| Okay, god damn it. | ||
| So first, Jared and Alex's secret assistant, Taylor, and then in parentheses, inside joke. | ||
| Thank you so much, you are now a technocrat. | ||
| And, sorry Adam, Gigi made me give more money to Dan and Jordan because Bear won't stop howling about globalists. | ||
| Thank you so much, you are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| I have risen above my enemies. | ||
| I might quit tomorrow, actually. | ||
| I'm just going to take a little breaky now. | ||
| A little breaky for me. | ||
| And then we're going to come back. | ||
| And I'm going to start the show over. | ||
| But I'm the devil! | ||
| I've got to be taken over here! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| I got plenty of words for you, but at the end of the day, fuck you and your New World Order and fuck the horse you rode in on and all your shit. | ||
| Maybe today should be my last broadcast. | ||
| Maybe I'll just be gone a month, maybe five years. | ||
| Maybe I'll walk out of here tomorrow and you never see me again. | ||
| That's really what I want to do. | ||
| I never want to come back here again. | ||
| I apologize to the crew and the listeners yesterday that I was legitimately having breakdowns on air. | ||
| I'll be better tomorrow. | ||
| He may be. | ||
| So, thank you all. | ||
| Thank you very, very much. | ||
| So, Jordan, we have some breaking news in the world of Alex as we're recording this here on Tuesday. | ||
| For instance, we have learned that Alex did go for the January 6th committee. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| And these are pressing issues that we'll talk about on Friday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| We have for you today... | ||
| An episode where we will be discussing some depositions from Alex's Sandy Hook case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, shit! | |
| And I felt like, you know, if we're going to be talking about this, we should probably check in and discuss how all this came about, what the circumstances are. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| With the plaintiff's attorney. | ||
| An eyewitness on the scene, the plaintiff's attorney. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| So, let's throw it to a conversation we pre-recorded with Mark Bankston. | ||
| Well, joining us here in the virtual podcast studio over Zoom. | ||
| Do we have a name for our lair? | ||
| I don't think we do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We should. | |
| We should come up with one. | ||
| Should we? | ||
| Like the Honeycomb Hideout. | ||
| I think that's a great name for it. | ||
| The Bishop Dawn Magic Wand. | ||
| We're off track. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Already. | ||
| It's quick. | ||
| Joining us here in the Honeycomb Hideout, which I'm insisting is the name. | ||
| The lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Sandy Hook lawsuits against Alex Jones, Mark Bankston. | ||
| Yes, hello. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| I'm not using the name, by the way. | ||
| I'm not saying Honeycomb Hideout. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Well, you're not here. | ||
| So, frankly, there's a no boys allowed policy. | ||
| I can respect the rules. | ||
| So, welcome. | ||
| We wanted to do a little preface to this episode because it's... | ||
| I think a monumentous occasion. | ||
| It's auspicious is how I would describe it. | ||
| Yeah, some would say a narrative twist in things. | ||
| And so why don't you take it away and give us the lowdown of what's up here. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Regular listeners know that I've been following the podcast for a little while now. | ||
| And they've been doing some analysis of our lawsuits and such. | ||
| And so I actually came on the podcast. | ||
| And talk to these wacky gentlemen. | ||
| And I had become sort of, I guess you could say, over the course of lawsuits, sort of peripherally aware of the work y 'all are doing. | ||
| People snitch sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| You know, mainstream media is even, I've seen profiles in fairly prestigious publications describing the unparalleled knowledge. | ||
| You talking about the gray lady? | ||
| Yeah, the gray lady. | ||
| We'll talk a little bit about you. | ||
| And, you know, you can't really, you know, you've got to take that with a grain of salt because they're the same newspaper that took us to Iraq based on the things of the lie. | ||
| But I went ahead and checked it out. | ||
| And it turns out, wow, God darn, this guy really does know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I was in the position of, look, I had to make myself an expert on Jones. | ||
| Me and my partner, Bill, actually had to do that. | ||
| And so we watched... | ||
| Oh, gosh, I want to say nearly like 100 hours right off the bat within the span of a couple weeks. | ||
| It probably flew by. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Time flies when your brain is melting, I'll tell you that. | |
| And I knew, you're right, I knew it had a not trivial effect on my brain and perception of the world. | ||
| So I was so excited to meet you who's been living in this. | ||
| And it turned out... | ||
| Dan knew a hell of a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| As some of y 'all know, we recently had a default judgment in our cases, but we're entering sort of the final phase of discovery, which is about the plaintiff's damages, the ways they were harmed by some of this conduct. | ||
| And that's required to take us, we had to take a corporate deposition, deposition of Alex Jones. | ||
| And in doing so, I knew that I could use Dan's knowledge in this process. | ||
| So that's why I reached out to Dan and asked, hey, Dan, would you consult on this case for me? | ||
| And Dan said, you know what, I'd be happy to do that, and I'd be happy to do it free of charge, completely pro bono to the fans. | ||
| In my defense, I said no. | ||
| And also, I think you're making, you know, the way you're saying this is like, you asked and I said yes, and I don't think that's exactly accurate. | ||
| I struggled with the decision because of the... | ||
| The potential ethical implications of doing this podcast and inserting myself in some way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Which is why I would never want to put somebody in your position who's a commentator and a person who has collected knowledge on Jones in this way in the position of testifying at trial or being a witness the jury would ever hear from or having any stake in the outcome. | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| You could testify from here just screaming. | ||
| I knew I'd never do anything like that. | ||
| And I think, you know, certainly experts who consult on cases like this and provide consultation, some of them do charge for their services. | ||
| And that would have been totally above board to do. | ||
| But I really, you know, it's been a lot of people. | ||
| I mean, I'm not going to, it was definitely really appreciated. | ||
| And I love the gesture of you saying that you'll do this for pro bono. | ||
| But I don't want to put you on a pedestal because so many people have. | ||
| I've had the kind of support on this case that's unrivaled in my career where people will step out of the woodwork and say, I'm happy to do whatever I can to assist you here. | ||
| And so, yeah, Dan's come aboard and has been helping me quite a bit in terms of doing this case. | ||
| And one of the big surprises for the listeners out there is that Dan personally accompanied me as my consultant to the depositions of the Free Speech Corporate Representative. | ||
| And of Mr. Alex Jones. | ||
| So, your humble narrator for all these years was sitting in the room not more than four feet across the table from Mr. Jones himself and from his corporate representative, Ms. Karpova. | ||
| And I want to be clear, just in case anybody has any kind of misgivings, I did not interact with them in any way. | ||
| Yeah, he didn't say a word in the entire room. | ||
| I was a silent... | ||
| Person in the room and I had no contact with them outside of the room. | ||
| So it's not like I shook Alex's hand or like... | ||
| Part of the reason I said no initially because I was slightly worried for your physical safety to be in the same room with Alex Jones. | ||
| No, he's a teddy bear. | ||
| I mean, in real life, he's a teddy bear. | ||
| Yeah, he's just a teddy bear. | ||
| A very violent teddy bear. | ||
| Stomps people's guts in like a good old teddy bear. | ||
| Well, we'll get to that later. | ||
| It's during that deposition when we take breaks and we're, you know, already Dan had assisted me in kind of helping me formulate a lot of the questions that I was going to be asking in that deposition. | ||
| But as we're getting answers... | ||
| Dan's the kind of person who can put his finger on the spot of a fact and say, no, I know that that isn't true. | ||
| You need to ask about X or Y. So your service is really, I mean, I really want to emphasize, just invaluable. | ||
| There aren't... | ||
| Alex Jones, for as much of a phenomenon as he is, and for as culturally influential as he has become, he remains relatively understudied, both in academic and in pop culture settings. | ||
| Like, it's actually... | ||
| Strange how much of his mythos is very shallow. | ||
| People don't really dig down into what Infowars is and how it operates and what it does. | ||
| And so that was really, really valuable for me. | ||
| So first of all, thank you for that. | ||
| That's overwhelming. | ||
| And thank you for... | ||
| For the kind words. | ||
| Jordan, yell something. | ||
| You know, Dan, I'm surprised that when you came back, you didn't report to me how invaluable your work was. | ||
| You kind of downplayed it, which is not like you at all. | ||
| Usually you come back boastful, like, if it weren't for me, this whole thing would have fallen apart. | ||
| That's you, right? | ||
| Well, I got the flashiness out of my system before I went, because I bought a new suit. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That was kind of my way of, like... | ||
| This is a little walk around with some swagger. | ||
| Yes, when we got you a suit, it was an adventure for the both of us. | ||
| Let me tell you listeners, this gentleman cleans up well. | ||
| Not great, and I get dirty real fast, but I clean up okay. | ||
| You know, one of the things we had talked about... | ||
| Before you had decided to help me and consult with me on this, is that if you were going to be offering me advice on this and seeing some of the proceedings, you know, part of your insistence was, look, I'm a commentator on Jones. | ||
| I critically analyze what he's doing. | ||
| I need to be able to continue to do that about this lawsuit. | ||
| And if you were an expert witness who was going to be testifying to a jury, you probably shouldn't be doing that, right? | ||
| Because eventually your testimony is going to have to be considered. | ||
| But if you're just an outside consultant... | ||
| And when it comes to things that are in the public record now, I couldn't stop you if I wanted to. | ||
| Like, legally, you have a First Amendment right that trumps anything that's going on. | ||
| Alex loves the First Amendment. | ||
| I know, he loves it, so, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Take that, Mark! | ||
| You can't stop us even if you fucking wanted to! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I can get creative, right, you know? | |
| We'll never know what I come up with. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, no, it's... | |
| I knew coming into this that you were still going to be talking about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I knew, for instance, that these depositions, if they did become public record, would be part of that. | ||
| And what happened, so that your listeners understand, is that there's a protective order of confidentiality in the case, and it provides a process by which if a party gives testimony or documents that it believes it wants to maintain confidentiality, not have them be public, it provides them an avenue for them to do that. | ||
| And in this particular situation... | ||
| Much as they have in the past, Infowars chose not to do that. | ||
| So very recently, the deposition of Alex Jones and the deposition of Ms. Karpova, the corporate representative, passed into the public domain when they became unchallenged public filings in these cases. | ||
| And so there's been some news reporting on them and some of the documents contained within those depositions already. | ||
| And so all that's now out in the public record. | ||
| So now, listeners, you get to hear a little bit about it, and Dan's going to be able to talk to you about it. | ||
| And I want to stress, too, that, like, it's... | ||
| I can't... | ||
| One of the downsides of me being in the position of doing this episode and being there is that, you know, obviously I experience things, and some of those things I can't talk about because they aren't... | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And so there will, you know, there will be a lot of things that are not really material to the analysis of the depositions themselves, but I, you know, I have, you know, some thoughts that I just can't share. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you wanted to, you couldn't even talk about the mutated second human being coming out of his chest, Kawato. | ||
| I believe was his name. | ||
| I told you that in confidence. | ||
| No, no, I'm saying you can't talk about Kawato, okay? | ||
| Jordan, you're going to get us sued. | ||
| Good reference. | ||
| It's a deep, deep pull there, Jordan. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Yeah, no, and in fact, I think that's one of the reasons I want to come on is to kind of, not for you, because you know them, but so that the audience understands how you're talking about these. | ||
| There are some ground rules. | ||
| That Dan has to observe when talking about these things. | ||
| And one of that is that because his consulting position gives him access to things that do not become public record, as he was saying. | ||
| There are some things you can't talk about. | ||
| Like conversations we had in between breaks and stuff like that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Any of that kind of stuff. | ||
| Anybody's actual... | ||
| The thing is, you go into a deposition room, and 90% of what you do is what they call on the record. | ||
| There's a videotape roll, and there's a transcript roll, and there's somebody typing it all down. | ||
| 10% of that downtime is off the record, and there are things that happen there, too, off the record. | ||
| Obviously, anything off the record is not something Dan can talk about. | ||
| But now we're in a position where... | ||
| And I'm glad Free Speech made... | ||
| I'm sorry, InfoWars. | ||
| Call them by their corporate name, sometimes free speech systems, which is just the irony of ironies that they name themselves on. | ||
| But the fact that InfoWars made the choice, or however they came to the conclusion, to not make these depositions confidential, I am very glad they did. | ||
| Because I believe that for those people who are following this case, who understand the public importance of it, there is a lot of enlightening information that came before. | ||
| Yeah, these are going to be an interesting discussion. | ||
| And so I'm glad Dan can do that. | ||
| And it's part of the wonderful parts of our process, is that when things do get into the public record this way, that court proceedings can be critically discussed. | ||
| And that's something I'm glad Dan can do. | ||
| But yeah, there are certain things. | ||
| There may be gaps. | ||
| I'm sure Jordan will sometimes ask a question that Dan would have to be no comment to. | ||
| I'll probably edit that out. | ||
| If that comes up, I'll probably edit it out for simplicity. | ||
| You'll never know! | ||
| Like if you ask me what Alex smelled like, I'll have to cut that out. | ||
| Like a gentle lavender wind. | ||
| Like the freshly done laundry in the spring of Normandy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, none of that kind of, you know, and that's the thing is Dan got to see sort of an inside baseball process of a legal proceeding that a lot of people don't normally get to see, which is how a deposition is done. | ||
| Because that's like testimony, but it's not in a courtroom. | ||
| You know, we were in a friend of mine's law office in Austin. | ||
| And, you know, you're in this very tight quarters where you have a videographer in the room, a court reporter's Taking everything down. | ||
| You've got all your pairs of lawyers in the room, and you've got the witness, and you're all in this room together. | ||
| And, you know, for one of these depositions, I think, went as long as like five, six hours. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The corporate representative one with Daria was most of a day. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It was very interesting. | ||
| But I'm actually, you know, the thing is, we've talked about these depositions in the course of us talking for consulting purposes. | ||
| And I was... | ||
| That's all from our legal perspective of what we're doing in the case. | ||
| And I'm actually interested, as these become a little more public, to hear what people's reaction to them in a broader sense is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because unlike, I think, Jones's first deposition and the first corporate representatives and all of that, which was very shallow and very guarded and very mockery. | ||
| I mean, it was just a kind of a farce of a thing. | ||
| This is a farce in its own way, too. | ||
| A slightly different farce. | ||
| Yeah, a slightly different farce is how I would describe it. | ||
| Comedy of errors. | ||
| I'll let your audience know that we recently had brought a motion for sanctions based on this corporate deposition. | ||
| One with Daria. | ||
| With Daria, correct. | ||
| And that was because they had been ordered four times to give a corporate deposition in the course of these cases. | ||
| The first two times, they just didn't show up. | ||
| And then the second two times, they sent Rob Du both times, and Rob Du seemed to be oblivious to the fact that the law required him to prepare in any way for this deposition. | ||
| I think what you meant to say was a fucking legend that's gonna go down in history as making one of the greatest episodes of all time, I would assume. | ||
| They call Rob the sharpshooter. | ||
| Doesn't miss. | ||
| I'll say, like, this was, for those, because some people I know who watch the show, they also tuned in to the hearings that we have. | ||
| We just had a hearing on a Friday. | ||
| And our judge just straight out said it was a mockery. | ||
| It was an offensive deposition. | ||
| The Daria one. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| In the wake of an already offensive depositions from Rob Duke. | ||
| And so it's like, to get your act together for this, they still haven't done it. | ||
| I think you'll see that. | ||
| But we recently brought that motion. | ||
| We had a hearing on Friday. | ||
| They were sanctioned yet again. | ||
| And I want to say that this is now, gosh, maybe the seventh or eighth time they've been fined before ever actually having the trial happen. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty wild. | ||
| And so we're still trying to see what the full fallout of all of that is going to be. | ||
| But yeah, this did not go well for them. | ||
| I was disappointed when I showed up in Austin because you'd only told me there was a corporate representative. | ||
| I didn't know who it was going to be. | ||
| I was really excited for the possibility that we'd get another round with Due. | ||
| I thought that would be a lot of fun. | ||
| And then learning that it was going to be Daria, I was like, man, she might be competent at this. | ||
| And then it was so interesting. | ||
| And we'll get into this in more minute detail in the course of the episode. | ||
| It's Rob Dewish, but in a very different way. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, it's very different. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| Yeah, it's really interesting. | ||
| Like I say, that's why I'm glad it's public. | ||
| I think that this was, I want to say this for the audience's benefit, I think this was one of the more difficult things that I've had to do. | ||
| First of all, to not talk about this. | ||
| We did this at the beginning of December. | ||
| Was when I came down to Austin. | ||
| And not being able to mention it or not being able to be like... | ||
| You know, all the information that I had that was in those depositions, I had to not know. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| That was hard for you, but that's easy for you. | ||
| I didn't say anything, which is the real fucking accomplishment. | ||
| That's what I want to get across here. | ||
| Somehow I didn't break... | ||
| Who are you going to tell? | ||
|
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your dog but like it was roasted It was really challenging and I'm glad that we're on the other side of it now because it is a bit of a relief. | |
| And then the second challenge was really questioning prior to agreeing to come down whether or not this was an instance of sort of affecting the content of the thing we're covering. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I really wrestled with that, and I struggled with that question, because it's been something that we've, a policy that we've tried to maintain as it relates to Alex's show. | ||
| We don't want people to call in to his show to fuck with him in order for us to cover it on the show. | ||
| And I felt like this was important enough of a thing to do, and it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Anything I can do to help the families is something that is... | ||
| More important than our show, per se. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to say no to fighting evil. | ||
| So, there is that. | ||
| And also, it wouldn't have the same actual presentation as someone prank calling him or something. | ||
| It wasn't a prank. | ||
| No. | ||
| This was assisting in these are questions that may be fruitful to ask. | ||
| These are ideas to, you know... | ||
| To check in on. | ||
| And I think that is materially different than the way that we've had a non-engagement in the past. | ||
| I think it's close, but I think it's on the right side of it. | ||
| This case is so different than most forms of litigation because of its subject matter that when you need, for instance, an expert on pipe metallurgy and a plant explosion, there's no chance that that same person is going to be critically covering. | ||
| In the media, that's not a thing. | ||
| But what's interesting about this case is when you're in this kind of media litigation, the only people in this country who are genuine bona fide experts on Jones are those who have followed his media career and engaged in the criticism to fight back against it. | ||
| And in our first depositions, one of our consultants had been Brooke Binkowski, who was the managing editor of Snopes, now at truthorfiction.com. | ||
| And she had been one of, I mean, I feel like she's sort of a modern day Cassandra of, she was saying in 2015, 14, here's what fake news and what InfoWars is doing is about to do to our country, right? | ||
| And so she, I knew from the get-go, and she had sat in on some of our depositions too, and we had the same sort of discussion of, there is this scientist view that says the subject of your inquiry should be kept in isolation, and you shouldn't let your interactions with it affect your observations of it, right? | ||
| And then there's the idea that Brooke had, which is, no, the entire point. | ||
| Of critically covering him and learning more information about him is because of the danger of harm that he presents to people like my clients. | ||
| And therefore, to offer that expertise to people who are trying to vindicate that in the court of law is a noble column, is how she felt about it. | ||
| And that's why I felt that this is such a different type of litigation. | ||
| It's so strange that way. | ||
| And I think it makes it very difficult for people in your position to ever testify at trial because of that. | ||
| I could be impeached as a witness so easily based on a hundred things I've said on my podcast. | ||
| I mean, like, why should we believe anything you said? | ||
| I mean, I'll stand by everything I've ever said. | ||
| I think I screamed at you about alien phones getting pregnant. | ||
| Yes, we have been there. | ||
| That will end up playing on the stand. | ||
| It's no good. | ||
| I'm thinking about Jordan on the witness stand and I'm just thinking bad law and order episodes. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| You can't handle the truth. | ||
| You just do that. | ||
| No, that's not nice. | ||
| I would be far more clever. | ||
| You would do the scene from The Critic. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Mustard gives me gas as does taffy. | ||
| Very obscure reference. | ||
| We got people to testify as experts. | ||
| We had to go to academia. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like the people who are far out of it, right? | ||
| Who kind of view it from a distance. | ||
| And as much as they study his effects, it's legit true. | ||
| Nobody in this country has studied the internal mechanics of how InfoWars works, how its stories works, how its editorial process works. | ||
| Nobody's done it like you guys. | ||
| I mean, it's just, there's nobody who's, and it's weird that there was this vacuum that when people saw what you were doing, the reason it was so well received is because there is such a need for that. | ||
| Nobody has gone into that kind of depth. | ||
| So that's how you became what you are. | ||
| So I'm glad you're going to be able to do this today. | ||
| And I'm going to jump out the window. | ||
| See, I thought the way it worked was if you're fighting against Godzilla, you don't go to like a regular old army or whatever. | ||
| You have to get Mothra, right? | ||
| So if you're going to depose Alex Jones, you can't just go with some expert somewhere at a goddamn university. | ||
|
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You need Dan Mothra. | |
| I'd rather be King Ghidorah. | ||
| You can be King Ghidorah. | ||
| This might surprise you, Jordan, but my litigation strategy has not been mostly informed by 1960s RKO Tokyo Pictures with monster movies. | ||
| We've had some different choices in there, and Godzilla did not immediately spring to mind when I thought of Dan. | ||
| I guess we have some differences of opinion that cannot be resolved at this time. | ||
| I think Mark's strategy probably speaks for itself of not approaching this like a Godzilla movie. | ||
| Well, I want to say thanks for inviting me to do this, and also thanks for coming to do this little intro piece. | ||
| I think it's important to recognize some of the can'ts of what's going to come up. | ||
| And laying the ground rules is important. | ||
| And I don't think I could have explained how this was made public record. | ||
| I don't know if I fully understood it. | ||
| Here's the best part. | ||
| I don't think Infowars fully understood it. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| That's the hilarious part. | ||
|
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It was the one they proposed and I don't think they understood it. | |
| It keeps happening. | ||
| It's the same one for every deposition. | ||
| If that's where they stand, they want to let it all be public. | ||
| They've said that from the beginning. | ||
| We've had documentary crews covering every court proceeding. | ||
| We have HBO's filming everything. | ||
| They've been... | ||
| Receptive to that. | ||
| And nobody has even asked for a gag order because, gosh, look at what Jones is saying. | ||
| I mean, if you just turn on his show any day when he talks about this, wow, it's out the window. | ||
| So it's nice to counterbalance that with a good, thorough, and non-shallow look at what actually happened in those rooms on those transcripts that day. | ||
| I'm glad you're going to do it. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| I think on that note, unless you have anything else to add, we should get to that thorough look at these depositions. | ||
| Get it rolling, guys. | ||
| Thank you so much, Mark. | ||
| Thank you forever. | ||
| So that's the setup for this. | ||
| Yep, that is the rundown. | ||
| Yep, so I was there. | ||
| Yep, you were there. | ||
| I knew about it. | ||
| Can't hide that or mask that. | ||
| I considered the idea of just going over these... | ||
| And not mentioning that I was there. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But I felt like that was very dishonest. | ||
| Yeah, that'd be a little disingenuous there. | ||
| And the transcripts of these depositions are, my name is in them. | ||
| So if someone were to stumble across that, it would have the real air of impropriety that I would have covered them and not brought that up. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it would almost necessitate a show about us with a host so dedicated as to find the transcripts from this deposition and to discover that. | ||
| Probably Harrison Smith. | ||
| Pretty sure. | ||
| So today what we're going to be doing is we're going to be going over two depositions. | ||
| One is the corporate representative, Daria Karpova. | ||
| The Russian Daria. | ||
| Alex's assistant. | ||
| Mysterious. | ||
| Great cake song. | ||
| Very mysterious person in the world of InfoWars. | ||
| And now we get to... | ||
| See what she has to say. | ||
| For about six hours. | ||
| It's a long deposition. | ||
| It's a day. | ||
| And then the other deposition is of Alex himself. | ||
| And we're going to be going over Alex's first and then Daria's for sort of structural reasons. | ||
| And here, Jordan, is an out-of-context drop from Alex's deposition. | ||
| Roger Banks. | ||
| You know who that is? | ||
| No. | ||
|
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|
Ah, liar. | |
| We know that to be a lie. | ||
| Alex saying under oath that he doesn't know who Jar Jar Binks is. | ||
| How dare he? | ||
| Alex knows that he has a Caribbean black accent. | ||
| Alex knows damn well who Jar Jar Binks is. | ||
| So, we start off the deposition, Mark, is bringing up some of the talking about Sandy Hook stuff. | ||
| And Alex gave us his response to this general question. | ||
| One of the things you just talked about is that you have, since this lawsuit has started, you've said some things about Sandy Hook, correct? | ||
| I've said things about... | ||
| Organizations and groups that want to get rid of the First Amendment trying to use me as a case to do it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, what I'm really talking about is you've said things about Sandy Hook itself, correct? | ||
| I have talked about the coverage surrounding it and the lawsuits and that ongoing process, yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I actually want to ask you about a little something else. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Back up for a second. | ||
| One thing that you have said a few times is that in terms of when you did... | ||
| Say that Sandy Hook was completely fake, synthetic, there were actors, etc. | ||
|
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You've said that you've apologized for that, correct? | |
| Well, first off, I said I could see how people see that. | ||
| And I also, when people said, please apologize to us, and I'd seen some of the anomalies that I think were wrong. | ||
| That weren't what people were questioning online. | ||
| Then I'm like, yeah, of course. | ||
| I'm sorry for questioning Sandy Hook, but it wasn't intended in a false way. | ||
| I mean, I really thought maybe it didn't happen. | ||
| And then the attacks intensified and people began falsely saying that I was currently saying those things and then exaggerating what I'd said as a way, as a political weapon that Hillary Clinton was using to beat me over the head with it in 2016 on record and run national political ads. | ||
| Against me, playing edited tapes of me, talking about Sandy Hook. | ||
| Okay, first of all, objection non-responsive. | ||
| There are a couple moments, and this is something that happens a bit, where there's an objection of non-responsive because you're just rambling about something. | ||
| First of all. | ||
| First of all. | ||
| The question is, you've talked about Sandy Hook itself. | ||
| Well, well, well, well, well. | ||
| Now, look. | ||
| Hillary Clinton wanted to use me as a pillory. | ||
| Now, what you think is a yes or no question actually involves Hillary Clinton, and here's where we begin. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And there are a couple times where it's just, like, it's outrageous. | ||
| Mark will have to ask, between Alex and Darius, sometimes, like, do you know what question you're answering? | ||
| And there's... | ||
| Slight confusion. | ||
| Repeat words back to me! | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, you know, the question then comes up of, like, you're saying this is your understanding of how you covered Sandy Hook, and then we're going to be able to play for the jury the opposite. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know that this is... | ||
| Why should they not see you as a liar? | ||
| Good question! | ||
| Yeah, so here's where Alex goes with that. | ||
| Okay, first of all, objection non-responsive. | ||
| Second of all... | ||
| You, Mr. Jones, you understand this jury is going to watch the videos of you saying unequivocally, not I see how people could think this, but unequivocally saying Sandy Hook is completely, oh no, Mr. Jones, you don't get to interrupt me. | ||
| You understand that, sir? | ||
| You're here to answer questions for this jury. | ||
| And I want you to listen to the questions. | ||
| You know this jury's going to watch videos of you saying multiple times, over and over again, Sandy Hook is completely fake, completely synthetic. | ||
| It is not real, right? | ||
| And you're going to sit here in this chair and say, oh, actually what I said, actually what I said is I could see how some other people could think it was fake. | ||
| You know the jury's going to see those videos. | ||
| And you know they're going to hear your words. | ||
| Do you think that they should take you seriously whatsoever when they can see you saying the things you said you didn't say? | ||
| I know. | ||
|
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Objection form. | |
| Go ahead and answer the question. | ||
| I know that the jury's going to say, I always heard that people are innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven how guilty they choose. | ||
| And that the system's actually scared for me to put on evidence. | ||
| The truth is, deep down... | ||
| I still have real questions about Sandy Hook and a lot of the anomalies. | ||
| Yeah, now's the time to bring that up. | ||
| And the CIA visiting Adam Lanza before it happened, and the FBI, that was in mainstream news, and just all the bizarreness that went on. | ||
| The public still has real questions, just like they do about Jussie Smollett or the Roe v. | ||
| Wade baby that never actually died or WMDs in Iraq or just the Gulf of Tonkin or Operation Northwoods or Bubba Wallace or so many of these things that have happened. | ||
| Most of these hate crimes and type things end up being false flags. | ||
| So I still, when I look at events, question it and say, could this be staged? | ||
| And we look for telltale signs. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Here's what it means. | ||
| It means that he is going... | ||
| We're going to take some lettuce and cheese and put it between two big slices of chicken. | ||
| Call that a sandwich. | ||
| Because he's doubling down. | ||
| This is such a bizarre response to this question. | ||
| I understand that what he's trying to say is that, hey, events sometimes are suspicious and people should ask questions about them. | ||
| But then his list, like the Roe v. | ||
| Wade baby, that's just a situation where he doesn't understand the conversation. | ||
| People didn't think that the Roe v. | ||
| Wade baby was dead. | ||
| That's the whole point of the case. | ||
| We've been over this. | ||
| And this was one of the storylines that was kind of a big talking point for Alex in the beginning of December, which is why it's appearing in this deposition. | ||
| He's been talking about it on air recently a bit. | ||
| Yeah, we have. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he still thinks the Roe v. | ||
| Wade baby was D.B. Cooper, though. | ||
| So I think he does believe that that is a false flag. | ||
| Everything's connected, man. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| So you've got that. | ||
| That's just him misunderstanding things. | ||
| And then you have the Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| The WMDs in Iraq. | ||
| Why wouldn't you? | ||
| And that is in the same conversation as Jussie Smollett and Bubba Wallace. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Two examples of racially based antagonistic narratives. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| I don't know if Bubba Wallace's situation with the NASCAR garage is on the scale of lying about weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| I would say it's different. | ||
| I would also say that Now, in the deposition for damages for the case you've already lost, not the best time to say I still have questions about whether or not it happened. | ||
| It's a strange move. | ||
| But more to the point, what I'm trying to say is he's giving these examples and he's like, all of these hate crimes end up being staged or whatever. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Is Sandy Hook a hate crime? | ||
| To you, is this the connective tissue? | ||
| It makes no sense. | ||
| I mean, all crimes involve hate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So aren't all hate crimes crimes and crimes hate crimes? | |
| Let me hit that blunt. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a strange tactic that's being deployed, and I would have advised against it. | ||
| No, I think it's great. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm loving it so far. | ||
| We're two clips in. | ||
| I think he's going to win this thing. | ||
| There does seem to be a trend of, like, you're describing it as doubling down. | ||
| It's like, why don't we just reopen this wound? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| It's really, I mean, we've already lost. | ||
| So Mark kind of pushes on that angle. | ||
|
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|
All right, Mr. Johnson, here's a video of you. | |
| It's like the New York Times lying about WMDs on purpose and all other evil things. | ||
| Oh, but I questioned one of the big events they hyped up because of a lot of the anomalies, and I have a right to question that. | ||
| In fact, I for a while thought it didn't happen, then I thought it probably did, and now, seeing how synthetic everything is and my original instinct, maybe Alex Jones is always. | ||
| I'm pretty much right 99% of the time, folks. | ||
| So are you. | ||
| I mean, we all know this is easy to look at and see what's happening. | ||
| So now you're back to feeding your audience this lie about Sandy Hook, right? | ||
|
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|
Correct? | |
| No, that's an... | ||
| I'm proud of the video, and I'm proud of my statement, and it's full context. | ||
| We'll be able to show the jury when we have time to. | ||
| They will see what I had to say and see that I'm... | ||
| Speaking of the American tradition of being able to challenge authority, official stories that almost always turn out to be at least partially wrong. | ||
| Please keep that promise and play the whole October 1st video. | ||
| Please keep that promise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I will be vindicated. | ||
| I'm liking Mark's... | ||
| You can hear Mark smiling. | ||
| You can hear the smile. | ||
| If you pay close attention, you can hear a laugh a couple times, too. | ||
| There is a jocular nature going on here. | ||
| And so this seems to be a good line of questioning. | ||
| And so this gets pursued. | ||
| You lost this case by default, and so now you're back to suggesting that Sandy Hook was fake. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Because there's probably no consequences for it. | ||
| You're going to double lose. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| And so this is pushed on a little. | ||
| Please keep that promise in play, that whole October 1st video. | ||
| Please keep that promise. | ||
| But second, what has happened here is now that you got beat in court, Now that a default's been granted. | ||
| No, I didn't get beat in court. | ||
| I got beat by an organized crime syndicate. | ||
| Now that a default has been granted, you don't have to pretend anymore, do you? | ||
| That's what's going on, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| No, that's not what's happened. | ||
| A death penalty sanction. | ||
| With all the stuff we produced, I believe, is a fraud. | ||
| And it's because they're scared of the real evidence coming out and want to be able to tell a jury that this man is guilty. | ||
| Now you decide how guilty. | ||
| No, juries are supposed to decide if someone is guilty or not, period. | ||
| Not how guilty they are. | ||
| So you guys can try to do all your anti-free speech stuff. | ||
| All you're doing is waking up the American people. | ||
| So there's a real trend here at the beginning of the deposition of allowing a bit of going back and forth. | ||
| Let's have a little bit of getting this out of the system. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| There are more... | ||
| Actual solid questions and pieces of evidence on the back end of this. | ||
| But it almost feels like let's warm up a little with some sparring. | ||
| Because obviously Alex will want to do that. | ||
| Oh, the whole time. | ||
| Because he kind of bait him a little bit and he gets to throwing out stuff like... | ||
| Hey, people do have questions. | ||
| I'm proud of this statement that maybe I actually was right. | ||
| It's like when I used to host shows. | ||
| It's like, get all your heckling down out of the way. | ||
| I'm up top. | ||
| Get it all out of your system. | ||
| It's basically Mark asking Alex if he has a birthday coming up. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Anybody celebrating anything? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, so this line of questioning does even continue. | ||
| All you're doing is waking up the American people. | ||
| Alright, so let's just be honest about what this is. | ||
| You got mad after you got defaulted and you lashed out by saying that Sandy Hook was fake again. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| No, I have privately, I mean, I've told my crew, and I've always said I really have real questions about this, but I can't 100% prove it was totally staged. | ||
| But the CIA was definitely involved. | ||
| And that came out. | ||
| And then I was told, again, by high-level folks in the CIA that it was staged back at the time. | ||
| And so I went with them, and also what Wolfgang Halbig said, and others. | ||
| So I really believe that it should be looked at. | ||
| I'm going to guess the CIA person Alex is referring to might be Steve Pachanek. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I don't think it's an actual real source. | ||
| No. | ||
| But Alex has brought up that CIA involvement thing a couple times, so I want to just touch on that really quickly, because I don't think, I'm not even sure if that came up. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| This was a friend of Lanza's mother, Nancy, who had her over to the house periodically. | ||
| Quote, Nancy believed that the authorities that showed up at her door were either the FBI or CIA Nancy had to convince the authorities that her son was just very intelligent and was challenging himself to see if he could hack into a government system If you consider this | ||
| in the larger picture of that full interview, it's fairly clear that this was not a reliable assessment that Nancy was making. | ||
| Then that's where the CIA comes from. | ||
| It's Nancy saying that these people were CIA that showed up. | ||
| One event that's described in this interview involves that friend leaving invitations to a dinner party in all the neighbors' mailboxes. | ||
| Nancy never RSVP'd, so this person asked why. | ||
| And Nancy said it was, quote, because there was no return address on the envelope. | ||
| she had thought there was anthrax in it. | ||
| This is what Alex is using as the foundation of his assertion that the CIA was involved in the Sandy Hook shooting. | ||
| He's spinning conspiracy theories about the shooting while under oath in the deposition where he's being sued for things related to his spinning of conspiracy theories about the shooting. | ||
| It just seems like he can't stop. | ||
| Like, I don't even know why you would do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It works in an argument setting. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, if you're arguing with somebody on a podcast or, like, Piers Morgan... | |
| This is a great strategy to use. | ||
| I don't know about in court. | ||
| Yeah, I'm already through the deposition so far. | ||
| I'm like, okay, he has clearly established that learning is not a possibility. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's not going to stop. | ||
| I think probably learning is counter to his business model. | ||
| It probably would have been a maladaptive strategy early on. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And so why change now? | ||
| Which to me says that if I'm like... | ||
| Hey, here's how we punish this guy. | ||
| If you want it to stop, you have to bankrupt him. | ||
| That's the reality of it, because he's not going to stop. | ||
| And if he does stop, for the Sandy Hook families... | ||
| It's just going to go somewhere else, and he's not going to learn from the behavior, because in the depositions for the behavior, he's already lost! | ||
| He's doing the behavior! | ||
| Yeah, it does feel a bit like the dead end in terms of trying to learn a lesson. | ||
| You've got to bankrupt him, otherwise there's no lesson to be learned. | ||
| That's your perspective? | ||
| That's my perspective! | ||
| So, Alex is pretty mad, because he has been defaulted, and he's lost these cases by default. | ||
| And he believes that... | ||
| He's complied with everything that's been requested of him. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So this turns a little bit embarrassing. | ||
| You've repeatedly said that this, this court process, this lawsuit, what just happened, is all a sham because you turned everything over and that court still defaulted you anyway, right? | ||
| Yes, Owen Troyer, you never sent him one deposition, one document request, one thing, and he was defaulted along with me. | ||
| And if that isn't fraud, then nothing is. | ||
|
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|
Okay, hold on. | |
| I may have to pull this order for you because I need you to understand this. | ||
| Do you understand that in Mr. Neal Hessen's case, there was a court order requiring Owen Troyer to appear for deposition? | ||
| Do you know that? | ||
| I know he appeared for a deposition. | ||
| Yesterday? | ||
| You asked for it after the default. | ||
| No, sir, Mr. Johns, do you understand that there was an order in August 31st, 2018, requiring Owen Shroyer to appear for deposition? | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, you didn't know that. | ||
| So you got on your show without even knowing what the discovery was. | ||
| Yeah, so the claims that Alex is making of, like, complying with all this stuff, when confronted with, like, this is something from three and a half, four years ago that you just ignored. | ||
| Do you know that? | ||
| Nope, don't know that. | ||
| I mean, I was waiting for him to say what I would have said, which was just like, really? | ||
| It's been going on that long, huh? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How the time flies. | ||
| What a strange trip we've been on, guys. | ||
| Am I right? | ||
| You know, like, let's just stop and take a moment to appreciate where we've all... | ||
| Gotten to. | ||
| Look, let's just forget about this case. | ||
| Isn't it great that you and me have become friends? | ||
| We've been doing this for so long! | ||
| Let's just go get a drink! | ||
| Think about how many lawyers I've got to meet over the course of this thing. | ||
| So many new friends. | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| The real default judgment was the friends we made along the way. | ||
| Yeah, and actually, I was thinking about this. | ||
| I want to make one really important clarification. | ||
| In terms of the preparation of these clips, I have done a little editing, but the only things that I've cut out are when there will be a call for an exhibit, and then there is a long stretch while the exhibit is being... | ||
| Is being procured. | ||
| Yeah, out of a binder. | ||
| And so there are long stretches of like... | ||
| Just finding shit. | ||
| Basically. | ||
| So I've cut those down for the sake of listening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But not taking out things that would provide greater context or lead to a misrepresentation. | ||
| They're available if you want to go check Dan's work. | ||
| But I did do that, whereas I usually don't. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| So I just wanted to be totally clear. | ||
| Understood. | ||
| So Alex has been confronted with the fact that Owen Troyer did, in fact, get called for a deposition in 2018. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they just ignored it, and it turns out they ignored a whole bunch more stuff. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| So you got on your show without even knowing what the discovery was. | ||
| Did you know in Mr. Posner's case and Mrs. De La Rosa's case, you understand they're suing you, right? | ||
| I've never said her name. | ||
| I'm never going to say it. | ||
| I'm not asking you about what you said. | ||
| I know they're suing you, don't you? | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Let's just start there. | ||
| You know there's a lawsuit. | ||
| I know I didn't get a jury trial. | ||
| I know a judge said I was guilty. | ||
| I don't believe that I live in the Soviet Union. | ||
| Mr. Jones, you're not answering the questions. | ||
| Let's just admit it right now. | ||
| You're not answering questions. | ||
| I'm asking you, do you know that Leonard Posner and Veronique De La Rosa sued you? | ||
| Do you know that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Do you know they served you discovery? | ||
| I believe so, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know you didn't answer it? | ||
| Ever? | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It is true, Mr. Jones, and I bet you when you go back and you talk to your lawyers, you're going to find out a lot of things you don't know. | ||
| I'm not going to tell you, Mr. Jones, not like you got a bad grade on your homework, like you didn't turn it in. | ||
| You didn't know that? | ||
| What were the depositions we had in all the 81,000 documents? | ||
| That's in Mrs. Lewis' case. | ||
| That's when Mr. Barnes came in. | ||
| And we'll get to that. | ||
| Let's talk about that in a minute. | ||
| But first, let's take on Mr. Posner and Mrs. De La Rosa's case. | ||
| You don't know that you never answered discovery, do you? | ||
| You don't even know that. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Again, I don't have that stuff in front of me. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| Ah! | ||
| A little bit of less... | ||
| Gusto and bravado once the actual factual information is... | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| No, that's gonna break your heart. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and I see Mark broke out his tap-dancing shoes upon which to dance on Alex's grave, I believe. | ||
| I think you can tell there's a tone of, this is after the case has already decided. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And this isn't the first time that Mark's been... | ||
| Like, he's deposed Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so there is kind of a familiarity that maybe wouldn't be there in the first time that they interacted. | ||
| And so the list just goes on of stuff in Discovery that Alex claims he did everything for but did not. | ||
| You've got Mr. Posner and Mrs. De La Rosa's case where you didn't even answer Discovery. | ||
| You've got Mr. Heston's defamation case, where you didn't show up for defamation, answer any discovery, or show up for deposition. | ||
| Neither did Mr. Schroyer, neither did the company. | ||
| You've got Mrs. Lewis' case, where you wrote an affidavit saying your lawyer screwed it up. | ||
| And you've got Mr. Heston's IED case, which you just got sanctioned because you sent Rob Due to the deposition and he couldn't answer any questions. | ||
| And if all of those things are true, when you get onto your show and you tell your show that this is all just a kangaroo court and you completely complied but got railroaded, that's not true. | ||
| None of that's true. | ||
| No, it is true. | ||
| I mean, I remember giving you guys all sorts of stuff and you would say you hadn't been given it or you wasn't given the way you wanted it. | ||
| I mean, look, it should be on the issues of what did I say on air? | ||
| It should be maybe... | ||
| You don't want it to be on that either! | ||
| And that's not fair, is it? | ||
| Mr. De La Rosa and Mr. Posner have the right to ask you questions, right? | ||
| Do you agree with that or not? | ||
| I mean, I've sat for these depositions. | ||
| You have not sat for a deposition for Mrs. Delaros and Mr. Posner. | ||
| And they have that right, don't they? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You really don't, do you? | ||
| That is probably a difficult question for Alex to answer, either in the affirmative or the negative. | ||
| Because I think either introduces more questions that he probably doesn't want to answer. | ||
| What a bad day. | ||
| Especially in your deposition where you're fucked up, to have the lawyer remind you you're not even a third of the way through the number of cases that you've ignored. | ||
| That you have ignored. | ||
| Yeah, it would be challenging. | ||
| Listen, not only have you been getting an F in my class, I'm here to talk to you about your other classes as well. | ||
| And now we should also talk about a class that you took previously, which is, in this metaphor, the last deposition. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because we went over that, and if you'll recall, there were a number of times where citation and sourcing was discussed. | ||
| And Alex would make a claim in a video or on his show, and Mark would ask... | ||
| Where did you get that from? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Alex, he responded on a number of these cases with, I don't know, but I could get it for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| If you give me time, I could get it for you. | ||
| How did we do? | ||
| Well, we get the circles back. | ||
| Do you remember we talked in that last deposition about the Bloomberg email, where Bloomberg sent an email out to his people, said, get ready in the next 24 hours, there's going to be a big event. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| That was a new story, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and then we talked about it for a while, because you had brought that up to me. | ||
| You were like, look, I don't have the email itself. | ||
| That was something I was reporting on. | ||
| There was a story about it, and I was reporting on it. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| I do. | ||
| And then you remember you told me you could find it for me, right? | ||
| Yeah, I believe I said that. | ||
| And then you never gave it to me, did you? | ||
| I'll be honest with you, Bankson. | ||
| You don't really inhabit much of my mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| You don't have much respect for any of this process, do you? | ||
| None of it. | ||
| I don't think you have respect for America or anything. | ||
| Oh my god, what a whitey baby. | ||
| But nailed it. | ||
| Oh, he did. | ||
| He did. | ||
| That was well delivered. | ||
| I'm going to give him that. | ||
| You don't have respect for the proceedings that are going on here. | ||
| You don't have respect for America. | ||
| That was his you can't handle the truth moment. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| He earned it. | ||
| But it was also delivered like that line. | ||
| You couldn't handle the truth or whatever. | ||
| If it was delivered like that, it would not be a classic movie moment. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| If it was sort of muttered. | ||
| If it was a whiny baby doing it. | ||
| You can't handle the truth. | ||
| You can't handle the truth. | ||
| Yeah, not as electric. | ||
| No, your truth is dumb. | ||
| Yeah, that was pretty interesting. | ||
| The response, I think, was shocking. | ||
| It's just outright combativeness. | ||
| It's fun for the sake of a podcast or maybe a show. | ||
| For the sake of a functioning legal system. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| I don't think it impresses anybody. | ||
| Really bad. | ||
| Really, really bad. | ||
| So now we get to a discussion about Alex's audience size. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This might have been a mistake on Alex's part. | ||
| I want to play you a piece of audio from your radio show. | ||
| So there's not going to be any video to show you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But this is going to be Exhibit 3. It was 3% that volunteered for the Revolutionary War back in 1776. | |
| But if you look at the InfoWars audience, it's maybe 10% of the United States. | ||
| Another. | ||
| 10% or so worldwide. | ||
| That's a conservative estimate. | ||
| That's true? | ||
| That's a guesstimation. | ||
| It's probably a lot higher than that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I need to find an audience. | ||
| Is somebody tuning in once a month, once a year, once a day? | ||
| You're the one who said it, Mr. Jones. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| It's a very short clip. | ||
| I need to know the context. | ||
| There's nothing else said about audience in that entire clip. | ||
| Okay, well, I haven't heard the whole clip. | ||
| It's an advertisement for some sort of pill or something. | ||
| I'm asking you right now, is 10% of America an accurate representation of Infowars listenership? | ||
| That's true, right? | ||
| They're a major media organization. | ||
| I mean, I would say a larger percentage than that agree with my worldview, but I mean, I would say 10% of the countries watch something I've done and agree with me. | ||
| And then globally, another 10%, right? | ||
| Let me put it this way. | ||
| InfoWars programming is not bound by U.S. borders. | ||
| The Internet's everywhere, right? | ||
| And so globally, InfoWars also has a very large audience, right? | ||
| Maybe 10% of the globe is listening into InfoWars, right? | ||
| I would imagine 10% of the people. | ||
| That's more hyperbole. | ||
| But the English-speaking world, yeah, I would say so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So this is a bit of a misstep, I believe, on Alex's part, because he's in a deposition where the goal is determining the damages he's going to be facing in this case. | ||
| One of the relevant questions when it comes to defamation, particularly in a case like this where the defamation was broadcast, is how many people were exposed to the defamatory material. | ||
| And the interest of his case should make Alex downplay the size of his audience, but his ego won't allow it. | ||
| So he says under oath that 10% of the English-speaking world, or about 135 million people, are in his audience. | ||
| That's a wide audience that he's essentially admitting would have been exposed to the things that he's being sued for, which is unclear if he even understood that in this question. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| Mark is clearly asking these, like, you got a big show, big audience. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not like he's writing a puff piece about him. | ||
| No, it's so funny to me because from... | ||
| I mean, I can see this perfectly just from Alex's tone of voice. | ||
| It's just like, this is a man who knows something's up. | ||
| You're saying all the right things to make me say the things that I want to say. | ||
| So these questions of like, you've got a big audience, don't you, Mr. Jones? | ||
| Even the way that Mark has phrased it is, of course Alex is going to say, well, yes, my audience is huge! | ||
| You should smell a trap. | ||
| And he does! | ||
| He does smell a trap. | ||
| I can hear it. | ||
| Not well enough. | ||
| But he doesn't know what it is! | ||
| It's so funny to me! | ||
| It's so funny to me. | ||
| He thinks the trap is coming, but the trap was already sprung, my friend! | ||
| Do you think that this lawyer is asking you this question? | ||
| So, in front of the jury, we can say, hey, this guy's really successful. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This guy's so good. | |
| We should be proud of what he's created. | ||
| I mean, hey, I think he's a monster, but he's got 135 million regular listeners. | ||
| What are you supposed to say? | ||
| It's not like you take the time to ask this if it wasn't part of a point you were trying to build. | ||
| And Alex has just helped that point get built in a way that you couldn't possibly build through just looking at web traffic or whatever. | ||
| Alex has done a great favor. | ||
| I would say, in terms of establishing a self-reported audience size. | ||
| God, you can just feel how stupid he is. | ||
| That's brutal. | ||
| So this is a particular highlight for me. | ||
| Mic down for this, because now that we've established that there's this really large audience, Mark wants to talk about, you know, you have a responsibility to not lie to your audience. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| Hyperbole is something you're very familiar with. | ||
| Yes, talk radio is a big part of that, yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| When addressing that audience, your United States and global audience, would you ever intentionally lie to them? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, let me play you another clip. | ||
| I don't want to ever see Will Blitzer hurt because Will Blitzer is a human maggot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, like, do you really want to start a fight with us? | |
| You just can't help it. | ||
| Yeah, you do, don't you? | ||
| You're begging for it. | ||
| You're begging. | ||
| You're begging to get your guts stomped out hard. | ||
| And I don't know if you've ever had your guts stomped out, but you don't live after that happens. | ||
| Not that I've ever stomped anybody's guts out. | ||
| Actually, I have a couple times. | ||
| It's not too nice. | ||
| It takes people a long time to die if you've stomped their guts out. | ||
| But that's no threat to Wolf Blitzer. | ||
| How many people have you physically killed? | ||
| None. | ||
| Well, I guess we could officially put it to bed. | ||
| Alex has not technically probably killed a guy. | ||
| Well, Alex will say under oath that he has not killed anybody. | ||
| That's such a great, like, little ping-pong exchange of, like, you know, you got this large audience, it's important to, you can use hyperbole, but it's important not to directly lie to them, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Here's you lying. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Every time, every single time I answered a question and Mark said, let me play a clip for you, I'd throw the desk away. | ||
| I'd be like, fuck! | ||
| You win! | ||
| If you've got a clip, you win! | ||
| You get what you want! | ||
| Well, I think another response would be like, just sitting there like, how am I going to say this is out of context? | ||
| How am I going to... | ||
| Can my lawyer yell something? | ||
| I stepped on a nail! | ||
| And then run. | ||
| So this is the point here in the deposition where we start to get around to some documents and some exhibits being introduced. | ||
| And this one was a bit of a curveball. | ||
| This was a surprise. | ||
| It's fair to say that Leonard Posner and free speech systems have had an unfriendly relationship over the years. | ||
| No, I don't really follow what he does. | ||
| You've done shows about him. | ||
| So you do follow him, correct? | ||
| I mean, you have to refresh my memory. | ||
| So, I will refresh your memory about what you know about Mr. Posner. | ||
| I'm going to show you what Mark's is doing at 5. Have you ever seen that before? | ||
| No, not that I remember. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| That's the sole document you produced to me just a couple, I guess, a month or two ago in regard to discovery requests for any documents you had regarding Mr. Posner. | ||
| That's the sole document that was in that folder labeled Posner. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And that, you will agree with me, appears to be a very large, looks to be about a 187-page comprehensive background report on Mr. Posner. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Oh, I never ran a background report on Posner. | ||
| I've never even seen this. | ||
| I understand that you probably never even saw that. | ||
| Did someone email us this and then we opened it? | ||
| I don't know, Mr. Jones. | ||
| You gave it to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What am I supposed to tell you about it? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| You tell me. | ||
| That's why I got you. | ||
| I did not. | ||
| I mean, we just go through the email, most of it even unopened, and just send you guys everything. | ||
| This isn't an email, is it? | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| Well, I've never run a background thing on Posner. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Well, one thing we can agree on, because if you look at the bottom of that document, it says FSSTX.085544, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the Bates numbers you all use when you give me documents, right? | ||
| So this document right here came from InfoWars corporate files. | ||
| I thought you said we haven't given you any documents. | ||
| Ooh! | ||
| Earlier you said we were defaulted. | ||
| We gave you nothing. | ||
| We didn't even respond. | ||
| You gave me documents in the Lewis case in response to documents. | ||
| Okay, well, I mean, listen, I'm just telling you, I've never looked at this. | ||
| That's not what I'm asking you, Mr. Jones. | ||
| But I remember hearing in the news about somebody in Florida doing a background thing on him, and so I figure... | ||
| Somebody might have sent us this. | ||
| I'm just guessing. | ||
| I shouldn't guess. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Yeah, do you think you should be guessing in this deposition? | ||
| No, I just said, you're right. | ||
| I don't know what this is. | ||
| So let's not do that anymore. | ||
| I think that the attempt there on Alex's part to try and evade with the I thought we didn't give you any documents is met with a laugh. | ||
| Clearly, this isn't going to be a road that Alex is going to be able to go down. | ||
| And so instead, he's like, well, I heard there's a guy in Florida. | ||
| That's obviously a reference to Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| But he didn't want to say his name and evocate. | ||
| I'm going to say his name. | ||
| Maybe I'm going to get through this deposition without Halbig coming up. | ||
| I bet nobody says Halbig's name. | ||
| I bet they don't even remember this whole thing. | ||
| Remember we got served in 2018? | ||
| I don't even remember this guy. | ||
| Yeah, that's a strange sort of vibe. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| So this is a particularly interesting point in this exchange because Alex seems actually confused by the presentation of this document. | ||
| And it's a gigantic and extensive background check on Leonard Posner, one of the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook. | ||
| The fact that Free Speech Systems turned that over in the case is bizarre. | ||
| The fact that that was in their files to begin with is bizarre. | ||
| All of it does not add up. | ||
| I suspect, based on Alex's attempts to workshop an explanation, that one of two things is going on here. | ||
| Either he knew about this document and is surprised to see it, so he's trying to come up with the cover story, or he had no idea about its existence, but he realizes how fucked up it is that that was in their files. | ||
| So he's trying to come up with the cover story for that. | ||
| Either way, the result is an unconvincing mess, and this question is just left open for a jury to hear without any explanation or exculpatory context on Alex's part. | ||
| And I don't think the existence of this document looks good. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, I believe... | ||
| I believe that Alex has never read it. | ||
| Sure, it's very long. | ||
| It's 187 pages. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But, I mean, of all... | |
| They were going through the things they want to give. | ||
| Which, obviously, we know excludes so many things. | ||
| And they were looking at the one file in letter positor's name. | ||
| And they were like, let's put this super suspicious, massive background report that we totally didn't have ordered or asked for. | ||
| With no explanation. | ||
| No context. | ||
| Everybody seems confused by its existence. | ||
| What are you doing here? | ||
| Yeah, it's so bizarre. | ||
| Especially considering one of the things that's discussed about Alex and Infowars' behavior is the publishing of... | ||
| Posner's address, where he got his mail and stuff. | ||
| And so the existence of this kind of extremely thorough background report is not great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| One that has a lot of personal information about it. | ||
| You bet. | ||
| You know, if I were somebody who had already had a default judgment against me in one case, and then specifically releasing a private... | ||
| Person's information was at fault in another case. | ||
| I would not want to have a big stack of that person's private information in my corporate files. | ||
| It does seem to, at least it provides opportunity. | ||
| You know, like, how would you have information? | ||
| Well, here's how you would... | ||
| Possibly have that information. | ||
| Where did this come from? | ||
| Listen, we walk down the streets and shit falls from the sky. | ||
| I don't know what to tell you. | ||
| It's very strange, and this will be revisited in the Daria deposition, so we'll get back to this. | ||
| But this is a nice little semantic game Alex tries to play about this. | ||
| One thing we can agree on is that in the files of Free Speech Systems is a 187-page investigator's comprehensive report on Leonard Posner. | ||
| According to you? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| According to you, I want your testimony. | ||
| I told you I've never seen this before. | ||
| I don't care if you've seen it before. | ||
| I'm saying you put this is your Bates number on the bottom, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, this came from Infowars Corporate. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think that there is a good dynamic going on where Alex keeps trying to get around things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that Mark's strategy is flexible enough that he can allow for Alex to say some bullshit and then run into a wall with some of these deflection tactics. | ||
| I think it's very good. | ||
| I think it's a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah, you really have to establish for a while in advance that no, Alex... | ||
| You sent this to us. | ||
| This is yours, not mine. | ||
| I'm not making claims about it. | ||
| This is what you sent to us. | ||
| And when these sort of linguistic and rhetorical dodges that he uses that are just almost second nature... | ||
| Couldn't stop himself if he wanted to. | ||
| I would imagine not. | ||
| But you do have to sort of put a pin in them. | ||
| Because you do it enough, it does send the message that I'm not going to put up with this. | ||
| No, nip it in the bud. | ||
| It's going to be an ineffective and unsuccessful strategy. | ||
| And I think that may be how you have to talk to him. | ||
| Come down fast and hard, I guess. | ||
| A little parental, but... | ||
| Well, if he didn't sound like he had failed a book report every time he answered a question, maybe you wouldn't have to talk to him like a fucking child! | ||
| Perhaps. | ||
| So, they get into talking about the chain of events where Leonard Posner contacted Infowars with a polite complaint, and then it went from there. | ||
| Now, Mr. Posner started in all of this privately complaining to Infowars. | ||
| You agree with that? | ||
| He made a private complaint to you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he was very polite about it, wasn't he? | ||
| It's been a long time since I saw the email, but I think so. | ||
| And when that didn't work, he complained again, but this time to YouTube. | ||
| You know about that, right? | ||
| I really don't remember. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know Mr. Posner complained to YouTube, right? | |
| No. | ||
| I mean, I remember people said he was going around getting a lot of stuff taken down all over the place. | ||
| And... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It made you mad, didn't it? | |
| No. | ||
| No, actually, I told my crew members, Sandy Hook's a tar baby, stop covering it. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Let's keep that one in. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Okay, I want that in the legal record for the rest of my life. | ||
| I want the legal system to know what I said. | ||
| That is a little disappointing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But the way Alex answered that question is really puzzling to me. | ||
| Like, listening to it, I was very confused. | ||
| First, he's aware that Mr. Posner politely complained to Infowars and was ignored. | ||
| Then, Alex is unaware that Posner went on to complain to YouTube, but when confronted with how absurd that statement is considering things he said publicly, Alex tries to explain how he could be mad at Posner about free speech issues, but somehow not aware that he'd complained to YouTube about Alex and gotten a strike on his channel. | ||
| You can basically hear the gears moving here. | ||
| Alex is trying to come up with a just plausible enough explanation for all the details he thinks he has to account for. | ||
| Like, oh, no, the reason I did those shows was because I heard that he was getting things taken down all over the place and was against free speech. | ||
| Had nothing to do with any personal interaction I had. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| My revenue stream being shut down eventually due to the germination of effort from this one particular man. | ||
| I wouldn't pay attention to that at all. | ||
| Please! | ||
| What was I getting from YouTube? | ||
| Millions? | ||
| So, this is just confusing. | ||
| This answer is bizarre. | ||
| Long before you guys ever sued me, I would scream at people if they even talked about it, because it's Tar Baby. | ||
| And that's why I've told you I've just had to compartmentalize Adam because it's just like constant. | ||
| I'm the Sandy Hook man. | ||
| I killed the kids. | ||
| I had people in Florida just a few months ago come up and go, you killed those kids. | ||
| And I went, no I didn't. | ||
| Just whatever. | ||
| People don't know who Adam Lanza is. | ||
| They think I killed the kids. | ||
| So whatever. | ||
| I mean, I just, you know, you guys use it to platform me. | ||
| People think I killed the kids. | ||
| All this stuff. | ||
| Just do your worst. | ||
| What was my question? | ||
| I've answered your question. | ||
| You don't know what it was. | ||
| You were just talking. | ||
| You were just... | ||
| Right? | ||
| No, I didn't know what your question was. | ||
| Right, and so you just started talking. | ||
| Because you didn't even know what it was. | ||
| Because it wasn't a clear question. | ||
| Because you don't care, correct? | ||
| Because it wasn't a clear question. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta talk to him like a child. | ||
| You just gotta. | ||
| What was the question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What question, Art, do you think you're answering? | |
| You know, I answered your question. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| No, I did. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Yeah, I said words. | ||
| You said words, I said words. | ||
| That's how words work. | ||
| The question was regarding awareness of the YouTube complaint that Posner had made. | ||
| Yeah, didn't you see... | ||
| He answered that question. | ||
| I went to Florida and someone said, I killed the kids. | ||
| Yes, he answered the question. | ||
| People don't even know who Adam Lanza is. | ||
| I killed the kids. | ||
| Just do your worst to me. | ||
| That's the answer to that question, Dan. | ||
| So, this transitions from being some questions about Mr. Posner to being questions about another parent, Neil Heslin, who was featured in the Megyn Kelly piece that Alex got so mad about. | ||
| And we get a good establishing question here. | ||
| When Neil Heslin... | ||
| Okay, first of all, you know who Neil Heslin is, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So when Neil Husslet appeared on Megyn Kelly's show in 2017, do you remember that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| When he went on there and said he was upset by the things you were saying about Sandy Hook, did you believe him? | ||
| I thought it was all done very theatrically in a very canned way, but I do think parents have pain over their children, but it was all done. | ||
| It had an infomercial feel to it, and that's my view of it. | ||
| Look, I don't care really what you think about Megyn Kelly or NBC News run by the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. | ||
| You know, like, I don't care. | ||
| Yes, they make incredibly edited videos. | ||
| It's a complete... | ||
| I mean, I'm sure if you've ever seen an NBC production, there's lights and cameras and staging that. | ||
| They set up scenes. | ||
| They do all their stuff. | ||
| I know that. | ||
| I know it looks like a video. | ||
| I'm not asking about NBC or Megyn Kelly. | ||
| I just want to know about Neil Heslin. | ||
| Did you believe him? | ||
| Objection four. | ||
| Believe him about what? | ||
| When he said he was upset about the things you said about Sandy Hook, did you believe him? | ||
| Yes, I believe him. | ||
| So this is, I think, a really good approach that Mark is taking with the questioning, where he's getting out in front of Alex's criticism of the media. | ||
| This is one of the ways that Alex can best deflect from taking responsibility for his actions is to point to other media entities and yell about the mistakes they've made or how they're corrupt. | ||
| By introducing that on his own, Mark is essentially taking that tool away, or at least weakening its impact, because... | ||
| If Alex tries to employ that dodge, the response he can clearly expect isn't a distracting argument, but something like, we're in agreement that the media isn't great, but that's not relevant to the discussion we're having. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| He just cut off Alex's feet. | ||
| Essentially, yeah. | ||
| This is something that I think is a really good tactic you can use when you're talking to hyper-evasive people who are also full of shit. | ||
| If there's something that's a standard rhetorical refuge that they tend to take, staking out your own claim in that space makes it so they're less comfortable retreating to it. | ||
| And that's a good ploy. | ||
| And at the same time, you've re-centered this to being like, did you believe Neil Heslin when he said this? | ||
| I want to take you back to the night that you first saw that Megyn Kelly interview, which probably was a surprise for you considering that it was not what she represented it to you to be, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And on that night when you saw that video... | ||
| And you saw Mr. Heslin saying those things. | ||
| I want to take you back to that date, okay? | ||
| And at that date, you understood that if Infowars were to make a video saying Mr. Heslin could not have held his son, that would be very upsetting to Mr. Heslin. | ||
| You understood that. | ||
| No, I did not understand that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is bizarre. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| Because he has said... | ||
| Already, that he understood and believed Neil Heslin on Megyn Kelly's show, that he was upset by the things that InfoWars has said. | ||
| He said a parent has to be a pain. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But somehow now he's saying that he doesn't understand that saying more stuff... | ||
| What are human emotions? | ||
| Yeah, that's an inherent contradiction that he's making. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that is kind of bizarre. | ||
| Alex, excuse me. | ||
| Do you understand basic human empathy? | ||
| Just on a... | ||
| A little. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| After the Megyn Kelly piece, Owen Schroyer did a story where he said that Neil Esselin couldn't have held his son. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes, I recall. | ||
| Which is part of the lawsuit. | ||
| And so, you know, we want to know, why did he do that? | ||
| Who gave him the idea to do that? | ||
| How do you feel about it now? | ||
| Who do you know sitting here today? | ||
| Who made the choice for Owen Troyer to put those claims by Jim Fetzer on the air about Neil Huston after the Megyn Kelly interview? | ||
| Do you know who did that? | ||
| It was a live show. | ||
| See, it's not a video we made. | ||
| It was a live show, and I believe he read a Zero Hedge article. | ||
| He just read an article. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, about Jim Fetzer stuff, right? | |
| You remember that? | ||
| I believe he was in the article. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And you understand that a video was made for that and uploaded to YouTube on June 26, 2017? | ||
| Would you have any reason to dispute that? | ||
| I'm not sure we even had our YouTube channel then. | ||
| But you did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You did. | |
| You lost it. | ||
| You also know that a month after Mr. Sawyer made that video, you then took that five-minute video from the live show and played it on your show again. | ||
| You understand that? | ||
| You're being sued for that. | ||
| Yes, I guess. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So... | ||
| Whose decision was it, if you know, for him to basically give more air to Mr. Fetzer's claims? | ||
| Whose decision was that? | ||
| It was Owen's decision. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh! | |
| Ouch! | ||
| Hey, Owen, meet my friend Bus over here. | ||
| You're gonna go under it. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Yeah, that was all Owen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, that still doesn't excuse Alex's re-airing of the video on his show. | ||
| That was your choice. | ||
| Based on what Alex has just said, which is that Owen obviously has control over his own show. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's a live show. | ||
| He chose to do that. | ||
| That means that Alex, having the same control over his show, you would assume, chose to air the exact same information on his show. | ||
| Ah, look, I don't have time for those kinds of little decisions. | ||
| Okay, that's a good point. | ||
| But, uh, wait! | ||
| So, there's a rebuttal to this and a follow-up question that Mark may have some information that runs counter to this thing that Alex is saying. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| See, the thing is, I talked to him a couple days ago. | ||
| And he said, no, he didn't read it at all or research it. | ||
| Somebody put it in front of him and told him to do it. | ||
| He doesn't remember who. | ||
| But he doesn't do that. | ||
| I mean, he doesn't research stuff himself. | ||
| Somebody puts it in front of him. | ||
| So let's try to go at it this way. | ||
| If Owen's going to be doing that video that day... | ||
| I don't agree with that statement. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I mean, again, talk to Owen, because he testified a couple days ago, right? | ||
| So this question Mark poses brings up a point that puts Alex in a really uncomfortable position. | ||
| He needs the impression to be that Infowars reporters are all in-depth researchers who bring their own work to the show and deliver hard news. | ||
| This is an important image for Alex to maintain, since it looks like what journalists do, kind of. | ||
| The problem, however, is that Owen has told Mark that when he said that Neil Heslin couldn't have held his son after the shooting, that he was just reading an article someone put in front of him with no awareness of what the article was or what the sources were. | ||
| So Alex is now in the position of having to claim that Owen lied. | ||
| This is likely because the alternative opens a can of worms that Alex does not want to have opened to the public, and that's asking the question... | ||
| Who put the article in front of Owen? | ||
| If Owen isn't lying, then someone in that studio has a shocking level of editorial control over what goes on on the show, and we have no idea who that person might be. | ||
| You can see how this question alone could lead to some discomfort, because if such a person exists, you have to ask yourself, how did they get this editorial authority? | ||
| Is that part of their job description? | ||
| And what kind of digging do they do into the sources that they're providing for the anchors to just say on air? | ||
| On the flip side of this, it also opens up a question about who can and can't just tell Owen what to say on air. | ||
| If a person who fed him the story was someone like a boom mic operator, then that raises the question, can anyone just put something in front of Owen and he'll read it on air as the news? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's troubling. | ||
| Yeah, we're into Anchorman Ron Burgundy territory. | ||
| Yeah, so Alex is in the position now where one option he has is throwing Owen under the bus. | ||
| The other option involves the possibility of some undisclosed editorial manager giving Owen the story to report, or the possibility of complete negligence and lack of oversight about everything they put on the air to the point where... | ||
| Any person who's there... | ||
| Oh my god, I just heard a bus's brake screech so loud. | ||
| I had to stop for some reason. | ||
| I don't know what could have... | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| I understand the instinct that Alex has. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, this point that Mark brings up of a conversation he's had with Owen... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's very counter. | ||
| These are, to go to the bus metaphor, it's two buses heading for an intersection. | ||
| Both trying to push one another under it. | ||
| And both are being driven by Keanu Reeves in speed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What I find interesting about this so far, and really what is going to do Alex in more than anything else, is that... | ||
| Alex's ability to understand questions is so shallow that he doesn't realize that by answering one of Mark's questions, he is then raising the possibility that more questions will be asked. | ||
| Like, he doesn't get that. | ||
| He believes that the answer is the end of the question. | ||
| I think that's probably because he's used to monologuing. | ||
| That's what I'm saying! | ||
| And then also having interviews with guests on his show who are essentially... | ||
| Conspirators. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Co-collaborators with him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So this is a completely new concept to him that the answer is also a consequence that leads to more questions. | ||
| John Rappaport would never ask a follow-up. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| This is fucking with his brain. | ||
| Why can't I have a deposition with John Rappaport? | ||
| I answered one question. | ||
| Why are you asking more questions about that question? | ||
| When I have conversations with Steve Bachenicki, he usually tells me I'm a genius. | ||
| He says I look pretty in the mornings. | ||
| So, Alex, Alex has to really put his foot down and make clear that, like, no, Owen runs his own show. | ||
| He is in charge. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| So the only two people in the room who are probably going to have any influence on what goes in front of the anchor to say are the producer and the person who's researching and checking clips and that sort of thing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| The way it works is the host is telling people what to play and what articles. | ||
| The host run the shows. | ||
| So Owen should have been the one who found the Zero Hedge article. | ||
| That's what you're thinking? | ||
| That's how it would normally work? | ||
| He would have found that article? | ||
| Hundreds of articles. | ||
| This is the way I do it. | ||
| Other people don't do it this way. | ||
| I have my own, basically, producer, booker, everything. | ||
| So the way I sit there and I print hundreds of articles, or I direct people to, and I just say, go to these ten sites and print everything on it. | ||
| Because I like to have a physical copy. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Other people there have chosen to do it the same way. | ||
| And then just constantly more information is coming out as the day goes on. | ||
| It's kind of like a parrot's eating. | ||
| It might throw away 90% of the stuff it's put in front of it and then it sits there and just decides what it wants to eat. | ||
| But the radio hosts run the show. | ||
| It's a radio show on TV. | ||
| It's a radio show. | ||
| It's not journalism. | ||
| It's not in the main. | ||
| It's just like Howard Stern or it's just like Rush Limbaugh. | ||
| And you're playing clips, you're covering articles, you're giving your opinion on things. | ||
| Oh, so it's not journalism? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not even a little bit. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, I agree. | ||
| It's a radio show on TV. | ||
| Ironically, it is neither of those things. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's just a thing where we riff around about extremist topics. | ||
| Mark wants to establish that this information that Alex was using in the 2017 videos that he put out, it traces back to people like Jim Fetzer. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And whether or not, at that time, he had reason to believe that Jim Fetzer was not a good source. | ||
| Back in 2017, you had information. | ||
| You had seen information that caused you to doubt. | ||
| Yes, I did see an article questioning it. | ||
| Yeah, and that information was raised by Mr. Fetzer, correct? | ||
| I don't have the article in front of me. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In 2017, Infowars, the company itself had an understanding... | |
| That there was issues with Mr. Fetzer's credibility. | ||
| Correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection 4. I mean, I can't really speak to Mr. Fetzer's credibility. | |
| So this is a trap. | ||
| I can! | ||
| This is obviously the question being asked. | ||
| The answer is in the question. | ||
| The stuff you said traces back to Jim Fetzer. | ||
| The article was... | ||
| Just Jim Fetzer information. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the second question is also more or less a statement that like, hey, do you have any reasons to doubt his credibility? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And of course, there's an email. | ||
| I mean, I can't really speak to Mr. Fetzer's credibility. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, other people in your company have spoken to Mr. Fetzer's credibility to you, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| I don't recall. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You don't recall Paul Watson talking to you about Jim Fetzer? | |
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If somebody, Paul Watson in 2015, is he your chief reporter by then? | ||
| Is he an editor? | ||
| What is he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you remember? | |
| Yeah, he was the head editor of InfoWars, the articles, the site itself. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he also did some hosting duties too, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| If Mr. Watson, let's just say again that Mr. Watson, somebody whose opinion you respect, I would assume, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Somebody you will, if he brings you something, you'll listen to it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You may not always agree with Mr. Watson, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But you'll listen to him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If Mr. Watson had come to you in 2015 and told you, Alex, Jim Fetzer's batshit crazy, would you have listened to him? | ||
| Would you have taken that into consideration? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is, I think this could not be more like a fork in chess. | ||
| You know, like when you've got your knight in the right spot and you're, listen, I'm getting your queen or I'm getting your rook. | ||
| So how do you want this to go? | ||
| And Alex does not understand what's about to happen to him. | ||
| Yeah, it's like there's the email of Paul saying, we can't trust these fucking people. | ||
| And it's like, it's an email that Buckley is on talking about like, oh no, talk to Alex. | ||
| I can't believe Alex is hearing this. | ||
| And not realizing that what's about to happen is exactly the thing that, I mean, this is amazing. | ||
| Well, the water's getting hot. | ||
| I want the hammer to drop, my friend. | ||
| This frog is boiling. | ||
| If you have received information that called into doubt Mr. Fetzer's credibility, you would check in and verify that before ever relying on him again, correct? | ||
| I can't talk about the hypotheticals that you're discussing. | ||
| I already told you that. | ||
| Ninety-eight percent of what we do is cover news in the public domain and give our opinion and commentary. | ||
| And so I'm not a journalist at the Wall Street Journal that writes one year long investigative journalist reports. | ||
| And so I'm a radio. | ||
| Talk show host that puts the show on TV. | ||
| This whole thing that he's doing with I'm just a talk show host kind of thing, it feels like you wouldn't hit a guy with glasses. | ||
| Hey, come on! | ||
| Come on! | ||
| I'm just a talk show host. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who am I? | |
| I'm just a little talk show host over here. | ||
| I'm not causing no problems. | ||
| It's such nonsense. | ||
| I mean, he's also trying to present this idea of everything we cover is just mainstream media stuff. | ||
| He pretends that he has high-level secret sources. | ||
| He's constantly taking primary source documents and coming up with fantasy interpretations of them. | ||
| He's regularly conducting the most softball interviews with dangerous lunatics. | ||
| And a lot of the time, he's even reporting stuff based on fake stories from his past or esoteric dreams that he came up with that he had that he thinks are prophetic. | ||
| But we can't blame him for that until we know he's not a psychic, okay? | ||
| And we can't prove that yet. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and err on the side of where I'm at. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| So the hammer doesn't necessarily come down about this email from Paul, but we know that it exists. | ||
| And so you don't really need to bring it up because you have Alex already saying these things. | ||
| And so instead, let's talk a little bit about old grump David Knight. | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Who's David Knight? | ||
| David Knight is a... | ||
| Talk show host. | ||
| Does he work for you right now? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He did work for you recently? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When did he leave the company? | ||
| I remember correctly about a year ago. | ||
| And then he's not come back in any way? | ||
| Are y 'all still doing videos with David Knight? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| David Knight did not... | ||
| There was some... | ||
| There was some tension. | ||
| Between David Knight and Dr. Steve Pacinic, you'd agree with that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| I mean, I remember some. | ||
| David Knight and Steve Pacinic did not get along, right? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| David Knight was incredibly critical of the thing Steve Pacinic was saying about Sandy Hook, correct? | ||
| No, I don't remember that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Can you tell me why David Knight isn't with the company anymore? | ||
| David was saying that he was being censored, and no one was censoring him, and he was just unhappy. | ||
| And so I fired him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| So I've made some comments about tactics and strategies Mark's using that I think are positive. | ||
| In the interest of total fairness, I do have to clarify that Mark has a slightly incorrect piece of information that he's putting out here. | ||
| David Knight was totally into what Steve was saying about Sandy Hook and actually was still promoting that Sandy Hook was fake on his show until at least 2017. | ||
| David got sick of Steve when he said that the Las Vegas shooting was fake and that led to the deterioration of their working relationship and then David got really mad when Steve started coming back on the show around the lead up to the 2020 election. | ||
| David was insistent that Steve was a con man and the stuff about all the balance being watermarked with blockchain was stupid and that Steve was just lying to Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is what led to him getting fired and replaced by Harrison Smith hosting the American Journal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there is a definite truth to the tension between the two of them, but David Knight actually was totally fine with the Sandy Hook stuff. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Which, yes, this is only more damning for David Knight. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And Alex is like, oh, he's being censored. | ||
| It's like, is he being censored about Steve? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You were censoring him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He wanted to go and say that Steve Pchenik was a lying piece of shit, and you were like, no. | ||
| So I fired him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now we learn a little bit about some of David Knight's actions back in the Sandy Hook time. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| Let's hear about it. | ||
| I'm going to put in front of you what I marked as Exit 7. Now, one of the things you'll notice about this document is you look down in the bottom corners, there's no numbers, are there? | ||
| Bottom corners of the document. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Blank page? | ||
| All right. | ||
| So this is, I'm going to represent to you, this is a document that was produced to me by your former lawyers that has no base number on it. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So I don't have an identification number for you. | ||
| But looking at this email with David Knight's name to and from, that's one of your employees at that time? | ||
| 2017? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And I'm going to go ahead and read this for you here. | ||
| This is the date. | ||
| Is June 19th, 2017? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Okay. | ||
| You remember that the Megyn Kelly interview was in the summer of 2017, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And in fact, one of the videos that your company is being sued for is a June 26th video from 2017 that Ellen Schroyer did, we've just been talking about, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then in July, you also did a video about Mr. Hassan as well, correct? | ||
| That you're being sued for. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you do know you did make that July 20th video about Mr. Hassan. | ||
| You know that sitting here today. | ||
| You mean I did a live radio show, yes. | ||
| Did a show. | ||
| Did a show. | ||
| I didn't make a video. | ||
| Well, I guess you didn't make the video, but somebody did. | ||
| Somebody made a video of that and uploaded it to the YouTube channel. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So what I'm trying to get, because you've brought this distinction up a couple times, that no, we're just a live radio show. | ||
| It's not a video. | ||
| But there are videos, and they are uploaded to YouTube, correct? | ||
| They were, yes. | ||
| And in fact, the listenership for the radio show could be totally different than who's watching the YouTube video, correct? | ||
| They are, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So now we have this video, we have this email from David Knight, and it's from David Knight to David Knight, right? | ||
| So he's sending himself something, correct? | ||
| I would guess. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The subject line is it says, Connecticut Cary releases the troubled past of Neil Hesslin. | ||
| And then do you see that there is a link there from ammoland.com, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then it says sent for my iPad, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then this email here was sent to himself at 6.12 p.m. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Everything I've said about this email is accurate? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you have any reason to think that this is not a true and accurate email from InfoWars as far as? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| You gave it to me and it doesn't even... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's why I'm asking you. | |
| Do you have any reason to dispute this as a real... | ||
| No, I don't have any reason to dispute it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we've got this established that David Knight, around the time of the Megan Kelly interview... | ||
| At 6 p.m. was emailing himself an article with dirt on Neil Heslund. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When did the interview air? | |
| But there's more. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me show you this, too. | ||
| It's a similar email, which I've marked as Exhibit 8. You see this is 6-18-2017? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Just a couple days before Owen Troyer did his video? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And do you remember that Megyn Kelly's interview with your profile came out in June 19th, 2017? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't remember. | |
| I don't remember the date. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So here we have, again, David Knight sending an email to himself, David Knight. | ||
| Seekthetruth80 at Yahoo. | ||
| Is that another one of David Knight's email address? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| You don't know who that is. | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It says, subject, Neil Hesslin, father of Sandy Hook victim, faces criminal charges, newscountrytimes.com, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then there's a Country Times article link? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then Mr. Knight sent himself this email at 2.56 in the morning? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You have any reason to think that this isn't correct? | ||
| I think this is a good strategy that's being employed here because there's no question for Alex to answer other than just like, do you have reason to believe this is inauthentic? | ||
| It essentially gives Alex no room to move or to spin anything. | ||
| There's almost... | ||
| Definitely no information that Alex could give about these emails that would be useful. | ||
| But letting them just sit there, there's clear indications that senior employees at Infowars were doing research into things that they could use to smear Hesslin at 2 a.m. or 2.50-something a.m. and 6 p.m. that day. | ||
| There's a stretch of time where he had... | ||
| Almost like it was his job for the day. | ||
| It's such a bad look. | ||
| Almost as if somebody had directed him to find information on Neil Hesslin. | ||
| And he had been up all night. | ||
| And he had been working so hard on it, and then later, people used that information. | ||
| Burning the midnight oil looking for Smear. | ||
| I think it was probably just because he was, you know, he was just doing it on his own. | ||
| It gives an indication of the kind of vibe maybe that was going on around Infowars. | ||
| Hey, I want this information. | ||
| So, because there's, I don't know, maybe the appearance of, like, looking for ways to attack this person who was in the Megyn Kelly interview. | ||
| What? | ||
| Maybe threatening to Alex. | ||
| Ah, come on! | ||
| This is an important question, which is, like, do you have any reason to believe that these people were faking their grief? | ||
| Does the company have any reason to contend... | ||
| Well, first, let me ask you it this way. | ||
| Do you have any reason to contend that any of these parents have been faking their distress over Infowars actions as it regards Sandy Hook? | ||
| I did not kill their children, and... | ||
| I didn't visit Adam Lanza's house, the CIA did, and all the rest of that, and no one sued me back at the time when I was actually talking about it. | ||
| It was once I became extremely famous, and Hillary Clinton made an issue about it in campaign ads, and then Trump won the election, and then I became this big supercharged political target as low-hanging fruit, and then they go, oh, he's the Sandy Hook man, and then the anti-gun control groups. | ||
| The Democratic Party basically attached themselves to me so that every time I was in the news, they could then bring back up Sandy Hook for the gun control advocacy that they have. | ||
| And that's what this long process has been. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| First of all, objection non-responsive. | ||
| Was any of that meant to be a reason that you contend that the Sandy Hook families are faking, or my clients are faking their distress? | ||
| I do not think they're faking their distress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So their distress over what you said is genuine. | ||
| You admit that. | ||
| I mean, I would call it more hatred than distress. | ||
| I think that, yeah, I think there's some feelings of hatred. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I think when, for instance, you can understand how when Neil Heslin has spent the last moments with his little heroic child who saved some lives that day, looking him in the face with a bullet hole in his head. | ||
| I didn't kill him. | ||
| I know you didn't kill him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please let him just ask you. | |
| Yeah, let's not interrupt me, Mr. Jones. | ||
| I know you're going to kill him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm handling it with my client. | |
| You're not, but... | ||
| I'm asking you, Mr. Jones, I'm not saying you killed these kids. | ||
| Nobody's saying that you caused that grief. | ||
| Let's make that really clear. | ||
| Nobody's saying that. | ||
| These parents, though, were grieving over the deaths of their children. | ||
| That's a thing that they went through. | ||
| It has nothing to do with you. | ||
| You get that? | ||
| Their grief over the death of their children has nothing to do with you. | ||
| You get that? | ||
| Except then through the gun control movement, it was projected on gun owners blaming us for their deaths, and we don't accept that. | ||
| I don't even know what that means. | ||
| You know what it means. | ||
| Gun owners have all been blamed. | ||
| You asked me to answer your question. | ||
| We get blamed every time some crazy person on Prozac goes and kills people that the CIA went and visited on record. | ||
| And then we get blamed, and we're tired of being blamed. | ||
| You can almost hear Alex starting to turn into show mode here. | ||
| You can almost hear that switch get flipped because there's just like, I guess I'm going to yell now, or I guess I'm going to get really combative and do a performance. | ||
| Well, it was in reaction to him being forced to say, yes, that is, you know, once he got that negative... | ||
| That terrible headspace of just having to say, yes, I know what you're saying. | ||
| He couldn't deflect on anything. | ||
| So then it just turned into him being like, there's only one way for me to take control of this again, and that's to do my show. | ||
| And I think it's in response to the objection non-responsive. | ||
| It's like, I'm not even going to engage with this thread you're going down. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That means nothing. | ||
| God, that moment of... | ||
| Listen, I'll take care of my client. | ||
| The fuck you are! | ||
| Yeah, this is not Barnes. | ||
| So in this next clip, Alex continues down this line, and it's unfortunate what happens when he gets into show mode in the wrong settings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-oh. | |
| So here's the deal. | ||
| Here's the deal. | ||
| The court of public opinion... | ||
| I know that people have a right to ask questions. | ||
| Now, in hindsight, I saw the families. | ||
| It looked pretty legitimate. | ||
| Some of the anomalies turned out to not be true. | ||
| And then I said I was sorry. | ||
| And then I got sued. | ||
| And so let's just not sit here and pretend that Alex Jones is in red pajamas like the devil running around attacking all these people. | ||
| And that's not the case. | ||
| Let's see if you can... | ||
| Okay, so if Neil Heslin spent these last moments with his son, has this cherished memory, putting his hand through his son's hair, and then he sees... | ||
| Mr. Sawyer, and then you. | ||
| Get on TV and draw serious doubt about whether he even held his son, whether he's telling the truth. | ||
| And he did that after he had asked you to stop. | ||
| You can understand why that man might have some negative feelings about you. | ||
| And you can understand how he's on TV on a national program attacking us. | ||
| Yeah, you know why he did that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me why. | ||
| Why did he do that? | ||
| Because Megyn Kelly went and organized the whole thing for publicity. | ||
| To go after the Second Amendment. | ||
| They stepped into this, used it for political purposes, went after the American people, and then get surprised when people think it might be staged, might be synthetic? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You think Neil Hustland went on national television to ask you to stop as part of a plot? | |
| To what? | ||
| Destroy the Second Amendment? | ||
| No, there are the interest behind it and the money and the financing. | ||
| I don't care about those people. | ||
| I don't represent any of those people. | ||
| I don't represent Megyn Kelly. | ||
| If I had Megyn Kelly in this chair right now, believe me, I'd be talking to her some things. | ||
| So now Alex has gotten himself into a strange position where... | ||
| He's trying to claim that these people were doing these sort of pageants to attack the Second Amendment. | ||
| And it's fun when you're on a radio show and you can just broadly say these things. | ||
| No one will push back. | ||
| But then when you're asked about specifics of like, we're talking about my client here. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I mean, well, okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Having to dance around all these things and ask to be specific is like... | ||
| It's kryptonite for Alex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And you can see that. | ||
| And he tries to continue to justify a lot of his behavior because of a notion that the Sandy Hook parents got political. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that made it so he had to fight them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you have any reason to dispute that these parents' grieving process over the past eight years has been impacted by Infowars actions as it regards Sandy Hook? | ||
| Objection form. | ||
| That's a hypothetical question. | ||
| I can't speak to their emotions. | ||
| There's nothing hypothetical about it, Mr. Jones. | ||
| I did not kill their children. | ||
| They became political and used that death to then for their advocacy against the right to keep and bear arms. | ||
| And so that directly put them in opposition politically with me. | ||
| And so they stepped into that political arena. | ||
| What did Leonard Posner do politically about guns? | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| Did he ever say anything about guns, publicly? | ||
| I'm talking about the whole Sandy Hook situation in general, and then some of the parents. | ||
| Okay, did Scarlett Lewis ever say anything about guns? | ||
| I don't have it all in front of me. | ||
| That's such an illustrative moment. | ||
| Alex is trying to come up with a justification for his actions because he's being confronted with the reality that he traumatized these parents with his shit, and the place he decides to land is that they used their children's deaths for political gain against the Second Amendment. | ||
| Mark's rebuttal is so revealing because Alex can't name a single thing that these two people who are suing Alex ever did in terms of gun advocacy. | ||
| He has no idea what these people did or didn't do. | ||
| His response was just the normal kind of dog He'll use when he's being questioned by some shithead like Rogan, who will just go along with whatever Alex says. | ||
| Here's why this is key to understand. | ||
| Alex didn't say or do the things he did about the particular parents who were suing him because they were in opposition to the Second Amendment. | ||
| What happened was that Alex saw the conversation surrounding Sandy Hook and the shooting there as being a threat to his guns, so he decided that the Sandy Hook parents were one uniform group, which he needed to attack to change the narrative. | ||
| Alex didn't really care about any of them or what they were doing or not doing individually. | ||
| He saw the collection of families as an entity he could attack and paint as coming after the Second Amendment, and portraying them as being actors is a really easy, convenient way to invalidate them to his audience. | ||
| Maybe some of the parents were involved in gun-related activism, so to Alex, that means they all were, and they were using the shooting to push their agenda. | ||
| To undermine what he perceived as them using the shooting for political gain, Alex attacked individual parents because he felt that by doing so, he was invalidating the group as a whole and protecting society. | ||
| And this is when I would go back to the earlier question about Neil Heslund. | ||
| When he was on Megyn Kelly and Mark really forced Alex to get to this place of like, yes, I get it. | ||
| I mean, he's a human being. | ||
| If your son has died and you hold him, I get that that would hurt. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| And then, even then, he can try and justify his behavior after that, but once you've established that he can look at another human being and say, yes, my actions hurt you, that is underlying all of these justifications. | ||
| You kind of have to go back to, like, just most elementary, let's get agreement about air. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| Do we breathe? | ||
| Right, but you know you hurt them. | ||
| You can understand that. | ||
| And so then, whatever justification you have, Is still undercut by the fact that you know that you hurt them. | ||
| Right, but I think even in that case, even with that established, Alex could still retreat to the idea that hurting them is an unfortunate byproduct of defending the Second Amendment. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| He could probably justify that in his own head. | ||
| It still doesn't sound good. | ||
| That's what I guess, exactly. | ||
| But I think we're well and far beyond anything sounding good. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I think that train has left the station. | ||
| So this seems to be a bit of a pattern. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| No, Mr. Jones, I don't understand this whole thing about questions. | ||
| I don't get this. | ||
| If you say Sandy Hook is fake, that's not a question, right? | ||
| That was years later. | ||
| I said Sandy Hook is fake? | ||
| I can see how people think it's absolutely fake. | ||
| There's no quote of you saying, I can see how people think. | ||
| That doesn't exist. | ||
| You keep repeating that, it doesn't exist. | ||
| Okay, well that's what I remember. | ||
| In our last deposition, I showed you clip after clip of you saying it's totally synthetic, completely made up, with actors. | ||
| At first, I thought they killed real kids, but nope, they didn't. | ||
| That was my top process. | ||
| That's something you said. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And you did that in 2014. | ||
| You did it in 2013. | ||
| You did it in 2014. | ||
| You did it in 2015. | ||
| You did it in 2016. | ||
| You did it in 2017. | ||
| Correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| I'd have to go back and look, but I definitely said that I had serious questions about it and could see how it was staged with all the bizarreness, man, I tell you. | ||
| No, Mr. Johnson, let me just make something really clear. | ||
| If you had gone on and said, man, Sandy Hook looks weird. | ||
| There's a bunch of weird stuff going on. | ||
| God, it's weird. | ||
| Look at this weird thing. | ||
| This thing's weird, and I don't know what's going on. | ||
| And somebody needs to answer these questions. | ||
| You wouldn't be here today. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The reason, the statements that I want to talk to you about is you admit that over those five years, you repeatedly, without equivocation, said it was fake, the children didn't die, there were actors playing the different parts of different people. | ||
| You said those things. | ||
| Can you now just admit that for the jury, that you said them? | ||
| They're going to see the videos. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| They should investigate Sandy Hook themselves. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Wild! | ||
| Fucking wild! | ||
| At the end there, I almost gasped when I heard that response. | ||
| Alex is getting so defensive, and he's having to try and pass off so many flimsy arguments that it seems like something just snapped. | ||
| Like, yeah, they should go investigate Sandy Hook. | ||
| I couldn't believe my ears, but then this goes on. | ||
| Can you now just admit that for the jury, that you said them? | ||
| They're going to see the videos. | ||
| Well, sure, they should investigate Sandy Hook themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| They should look into it themselves and see why people ask questions. | ||
| You hope they don't. | ||
| No, I really hope they do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I feel like Alex is really deeply implying that he was right about it being fake. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's saying that it's still fake. | ||
| I think he's absolutely contending that it is still fake. | ||
| It's such a bizarre thing, but you can tell if you're watching this, or listening to it even, you can tell that it is a sort of visceral response. | ||
| That's a lashing out. | ||
| There's a bit of anger behind, like, people should look into it. | ||
| And I think it's largely motivated by... | ||
| So many attempts at deflection and stuff just not really working out. | ||
| Still not hitting, yeah. | ||
| And I think that that's maybe the value in sort of cutting off exits and like, okay, now you have nowhere to go other than you now are going to... | ||
| I mean, you also have to cut off the physical exits as well as the financial exits as well as... | ||
| We've had to cut off a lot of exits to get to a place where Alex is here. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| So after that outburst, I do enjoy that. | ||
| That, like, you're afraid that they're going to look into this. | ||
| I mean, bananas, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
| So, we now get to some more emails. | ||
| And one of them... | ||
| But what about her emails? | ||
| Oh, hashtag, lock her up. | ||
| Hey, come on! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, come on! | |
| Remember that? | ||
| Let's play it back, everybody! | ||
| It's 2015 again! | ||
| No, turns out we're going to talk about some emails that have to do with Jim Fetzer. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Before we broke, we had talked about whether... | ||
| Infowars had ever promoted or directed people to Jim Fetzer's book, tried to get more viewership for Jim Fetzer's book, and you weren't aware of that, right? | ||
| Not in my memory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I'm going to show you what I've marked as Exhibit 9, and I'm going to go through this whole thing with you to see if it reflects your memory, okay? | ||
| Or if it refreshes your memory. | ||
| So he has no memory of promoting Fetzer's book? | ||
| Never heard of it. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| I want to start at the bottom. | ||
| With Alan Powell's email. | ||
| And he says, Rob, Jim Fetzer put together a book on Sandy Hook to which I contributed two chapters. | ||
| Amazon have decided they won't handle it. | ||
| I think Jim would agree to it being distributed by Infowars free as a PDF. | ||
| We were both just on the phone. | ||
| We were both just on the Jeff Rents show today. | ||
| And Jim gave that right of distribution to Jeff. | ||
| Would you see if Alex would have Jim and Jim Tracy on to promote the book and talk a bit about the still-running sore of Scandi Hook? | ||
| I spoke to Jim Fetzer about this today and said he will speak to you. | ||
| If you flip over onto the back on the page, you just say it says, Cheers, Alan Powell. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Did I read that email correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The next message is from Jim... | ||
| Okay, before we go on to Jim Fetzer's message, you know who Jeff Rince is? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you remember Paul Watson also telling you at the same time that he told you that Jim Fetzer was batshit crazy, that Jeff Rents was batshit crazy? | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Going up to Jim Fetzer's email, where he identifies himself as Jim and James, so it's going to be used both in this document. | ||
| But he says, Rob, we are making the book available to the public for free. | ||
| Here is the cover in PDF. | ||
| Several sites are now offering it. | ||
| I would be glad if Alex were to do the same. | ||
| I am sure James would be glad to come on with me if Alex wanted to interview us about this stunning event. | ||
| I think the latest case was the Pentagon. | ||
| Did I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Did I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's not great. | ||
| I think getting these emails that are asking for promotion, maybe you can dance around. | ||
| We get a lot of emails, but when Rob Adu is writing back, hey, I've sent this on to a Don Salazar who's writing about it. | ||
| Please let us know if our ad campaign for you is effective. | ||
| That's so bad. | ||
| The moment you said let us know if there's a bump in traffic, you are Rico'd. | ||
| You're in the fucking case, man. | ||
| If I said it to them, I would expect to be in the fucking case. | ||
| I mean, at the very least, you're admitting at least a curiosity-based interest in how things go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's a pretty bad look. | ||
| I mean, because you're not curious just like, ooh, I wouldn't be interesting. | ||
| You're curious to see if you should do it yourself or again. | ||
| Yeah, see if this is something that people are interested in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Please give me market research. | ||
| Does this attract our audience? | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| So Fetzer's information is largely what was behind the Zero Hedge article that Owen read in the video that ended up being part of this lawsuit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so Mark has a little point about this actual Zero Hedge article that seems to be missed. | ||
| I'm going to show you Mark's Exhibit 10. You recognize that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Can you tell us what this is? | ||
| Zero hedge article. | ||
| Do you know why it might be relevant to this lawsuit? | ||
| This is the article Owen was reading that he's been sued for and the coverage I gave of Owen was sued for. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Good boy. | ||
| Can you use it on the second page for me? | ||
| I want to give him a treat. | ||
| Do you see there's a big blank space in the middle of the page? | ||
| Seems to be the way it printed from the internet. | ||
| Below that big blank space, do you see where it says, except this does not comport with the official story? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then it says, Jim Fetzer, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, who wrote a book claiming Sandy Hook was staged, notes that based on the facts of the case, Heslin's statement that he held his son with a bullet hole through his head could not have happened. | ||
| I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Now I want you to flip to the third page. | ||
| You see that first sentence? | ||
| The first paragraph there? | ||
| It's just one long sentence? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And how that paragraph begins is by saying it's entirely possible that Mr. Heslin had access to his son after that. | ||
| Do you see where it says that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That wasn't said by InfoWars though, right? | ||
| I don't have the clip in front of me. | ||
| See, here's the problem with their shoddy strategy of never reading the things that they cover. | ||
| You should probably do that. | ||
| The actual article that they're getting sued over actually says in it that, hey, maybe he did. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they ignored that portion of the story and used it just to justify a position of, hey, he couldn't have. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, one way makes money and the other one doesn't. | ||
| I feel like we both know which way works. | ||
| That's an unfortunate thing to have to see right in front of you. | ||
| Man, I really would. | ||
| And this might be the crazy thing for me, right? | ||
| But if I had spent my entire career not reading things and then suddenly was starting to be told more and more terrifyingly that the lawsuits weren't going well, I would take... | ||
| Maybe a whole week to just really read through everything that I'm supposed to know about. | ||
| That way I wouldn't be surprised when I was in a deposition. | ||
| And maybe I wouldn't get caught in so many of these fucking traps. | ||
| You don't want to have a sort of consistent heavy breath of grief throughout a deposition. | ||
| Not good! | ||
| Not good! | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| Deflation is not an ongoing thing you want to feel. | ||
| You want to be deflated and then done. | ||
| You don't want to constantly keep going. | ||
| Your response to seeing something that is really unfortunate and damning shouldn't be, oh no, not again. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Ooh, you got me! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again! | |
| You're just putting those needles in me! | ||
| So the idea about Alex's relationship with Jim Fetzer is supposed to be that he didn't trust him as a source. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, even before the 2017 getting sued. | ||
| Now he knows. | ||
| And so this is weird. | ||
| Okay, I've shown you what I've marked as Exhibit 11. And I know that this has a real, like... | ||
| That's a lot of stuff, and it's in really tiny print. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| The only thing that I'm actually... | ||
| I think when we get into this document, we'll quickly discover that it may not be necessary to even read all of this stuff. | ||
| But if so, I may need to give you some time to go read it if you want to do that. | ||
| But what I want to ask you about this document is, up at the very top, you see that this is an email on June 29th, 2018? | ||
| Okay, that's about a month after you were sued? | ||
| You understand that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I don't know what's in this email. | ||
| What was Nico's job title at that time? | ||
| Radio producer. | ||
| Okay, and then Daria, what's her title? | ||
| She was sound operator then. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And today she's a producer as well, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so Daria is sending this to Nico, and the subject is forward vanishing blog. | ||
| Not only is Noah Posner a fiction, but his father Lenny is also a fake. | ||
| Have you ever seen this email? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't think I need to ask you anything else about it. | ||
| If you've never read this, I don't think we need to talk about it. | ||
| Maybe I should talk about it? | ||
| Do you have any idea why Nico would be sending things to Daria from Jim Fetzer right after you were sued? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| No, I have no idea. | ||
| And I can't have an idea. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I find this to be... | ||
| Very surprising. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| It's revelatory. | ||
| It is revelatory. | ||
| It's not surprising. | ||
| I think what's more surprising to me is that it appears as though he still thinks he's got a chance. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It really feels like the way he's talking, he's like... | ||
| Okay, maybe I lost on this question. | ||
| Maybe I'm losing on this one. | ||
| But next one? | ||
| Maybe there's that little glimmer of light I can sneak through. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think how do you operate in life if that's not how you feel? | ||
| Man, if I was in this deposition, I would be like, literally everything I say, you're going to have a clip for. | ||
| So fucking say whatever you want to say. | ||
| Here's my answers to your questions. | ||
| Yes or no. | ||
| Whatever you want. | ||
| I will just say, I don't know, over and over again. | ||
| And then we'll go home. | ||
| And then we'll go home. | ||
| Because you won! | ||
| You won! | ||
| We'll run out the clock on you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, literally, we've already had the default judgment. | |
| You won, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, of course, there are more documents. | ||
| And we're shifting now over into the Wolfgang Halbig section of some of these documents. | ||
| And Mark brings up this email, and he reads it. | ||
| This is a bit of a longer clip, but this email is important. | ||
| And I believe that some of the goal of this is just to establish and make Alex recognize, like, This dude's a bad source. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You shouldn't be trusting this guy. | ||
| Let's get down to this. | ||
| I want to talk a little bit about Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Do you know what I mean when I talk about the Super Bowl picture? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you know what I mean when I talk about the Super Bowl choir of fourth graders from Sandy Hook? | ||
| Yes, I've heard of that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And that's when I really started thinking it probably did happen because it just gets too wet. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's just crazy, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That's what happened. | ||
| I've shown you what I've marked as Exhibit 12. You'll see, again, at the bottom, there's no Bates number on this one, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This one is dated 11-19-2016. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a good year. | |
| Towards the end of 2016. | ||
| It is from Wolfgang Halbig, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| The two line, the main people it's sent to include Nico. | ||
| That's an InfoWars employee, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Then a couple of addresses to the Trump organization, correct? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rob Dew, who is also another employee of yours, right? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then Jay Rintz. | |
| Do you think it would be a fair assumption to say that's probably Jeff Rintz? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then also copied, there's a CC line. | ||
| And there's several other people copied who are either media organizations and there's also some government. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, there are also a bunch of attachments listed. | ||
| Do you see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And those attachments appear to be PNG files. | ||
| Those are images, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then the subject line says, trust, but always verify. | ||
| Please verify with your uncle. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then I'm going to go ahead and read this email to you, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come on. | |
| It says, Nico and Rob. | ||
| Rob, please send this video to your uncle, the former FBI agent who attended my Connecticut Freedom of Information hearings in Cartford, Connecticut. | ||
| He told me that I was right about what was happening, which gave me a tat more courage. | ||
| He has friends who can verify this video to be accurate, and now we know that the children who supposedly died at Sandy Hook are at the Super Bowl on February 3rd, 2013, and that is why we have never, ever heard them sing again. | ||
| Think about it for just a second. | ||
| They sing before 110 million people worldwide with Jennifer Hudson. | ||
| They have 87,000 people in the stadium of over 3,500 news reporters, and we never have one interview in the newspaper of on television from them. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Just think about how much money came flowing in after that February 3, 2013 Super Bowl performance from across the world. | ||
| Why have they never performed again if they were so great to be asked to sing at the February 3, 2013 Super Bowl? | ||
| Why, no appearances on the national early morning television shows. | ||
| They sing before 110 million people and they simply disappear. | ||
| Even Beyonce met them. | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| Are they all dead? | ||
| Are they divorced and threatened by the NFL and CBS sports and by their own parents never to talk about the greatest day in their lives? | ||
| Are they part of child trafficking? | ||
| Who would do this to fourth grade children when we all know that children need to express their feelings or emotions or it can have long-term mental health issues? | ||
| Then below that is a YouTube link. | ||
| And then it says, please have your uncle verify and tell me that I am not crazy because I have now run out of funds chasing the truth. | ||
| Please help if you can afford it. | ||
| Wolfgang Halvig. | ||
| And then he gives his address and phone number. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| I've read all that correctly? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| When he asked them to verify that he is not crazy, that's not something that can be done from this email. | ||
| This is crazy, isn't it? | ||
| That is when I really started thinking that it probably did happen when things took these turns, yes. | ||
| But then I still saw some anomalies. | ||
| But I'm not the progenitor of this. | ||
| I'm not saying this. | ||
| No, I understand that. | ||
| But once you see this, you have to understand that Wolfgang Halbig isn't reliable anymore, right? | ||
| Yes, when he first came out, though, I'd seen him on national TV as a big top expert and all the things, so that's why I was relying on him. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So this is an important foundation here that's being built through this email because it kind of boxes Alex in. | ||
| And honestly, he did it to himself. | ||
| Because he's getting presented with a clearly insane email that Halbig sent Rob Du trying to reach Rob's uncle, Alex has to say that it's not coming from a credible person, but he also has to maintain that it wasn't wrong for him to have seen Halbig as a credible source prior to this. | ||
| That's why Alex tries to use this excuse that it was actually, this was when he decided that Halbig wasn't a good source and that he shouldn't listen to him. | ||
| This is a really dumb piece of information to Alex offer up, essentially unprompted, because what it does is it puts a hard deadline on the point where you yourself are admitting you had no reason to take this person's claim seriously. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| This is basically creating an unanswerable question for Alex if you can demonstrate that he took Halbig's claim seriously at any point after this, and that's a real problem for Alex's appearance of consistency. | ||
| This is also a double-edged sword because Alex is also essentially testifying that the things that Halbig did or sent Infowars prior to this were not enough to get him to think that Halbig was nuts and shouldn't be trusted as a source. | ||
| So remember the date of this. | ||
| This was November 19th, 2016 was when this happened. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's one where you really... | ||
| That's an own goal. | ||
| That should be... | ||
| That's on Alex right there. | ||
| Because the moment you are given the opportunity to have a date... | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| On something you think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you're Alex? | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| That's not a good idea. | ||
| Well, again, it's that thing we talk about a bit, and that's the, like, specificity is a real danger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And when you're giving this, whether it's that exact date of the email or this time that this story was being pushed by Halbig, that is too specific for you to be able to play games with. | ||
| You can't have that. | ||
| Which, again, if I'm doing this... | ||
| I would say look into when I actually started listening to Halbig and when I stopped talking about Halbig. | ||
| You might not want to do that. | ||
| It would feel bad. | ||
| And I would not, not agree to a date prior to the end of when I started talking about Halbig. | ||
| But what's fascinating about it, too, is if you listen to it, he's not agreeing to something. | ||
| He's saying it himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| That is not a question that Mark asked him at all, which is wild. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So there's a long chunk that I skip over here because between the last clip and the next one, and it's not because the stuff wasn't interesting, but because it's not really relevant to some of the questions we have. | ||
| It consists of Mark and Alex discussing how the alternative media is really important in the country because the corporate media isn't really something that we can trust to get us out of the mess we're in. | ||
| Mark keeps trying to work in a recognition that it's important for the alternative media to hold themselves responsible when they get things wrong. | ||
| And then Alex just goes off about how he's the victim and the mainstream media is out to crush all alternative media. | ||
| It's a bit of a circular thing, but it seems like the goal is to try and attempt to build some rapport. | ||
| That has the effect of possibly confusing Alex and getting him off his set plans, and it also makes it so the kinds of rebuttals can't really be used effectively. | ||
| Alex can't excuse his behavior by condemning the mainstream media. | ||
| Because Mark can just say, you're telling me, man, but that's not what we're here to talk about. | ||
| So it's, again, just sort of creating that camaraderie almost. | ||
| I find it interesting that Alex is such a weird dude that you can play both good cop and bad cop in the same deposition. | ||
| He's fucking pinned Alex's ears to the wall. | ||
| And Alex is still like, yeah, no, you don't like the mainstream media? | ||
| Me neither, man. | ||
| I think we got a lot of common ground here. | ||
| It is weird to hear there's a bit of guard letting down. | ||
| It's like, you have to know that this isn't for your benefit. | ||
| You've got fucking railroad spikes through the stigmata, man. | ||
| You're fucked, okay? | ||
| So there's a bit of that, and then another email from Wolfgang Halbig is brought up. | ||
| I want to show you this. | ||
| This I've marked as Exhibit 13. Okay. | ||
| This, as you see at the bottom, it says FSSTX-039550? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is from Wolfgang Halbig, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and then this is to a couple email addresses that I bet you don't know who those people are, right? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| Yeah, the one safeandsoundschools.org. | ||
| Have you ever heard of an organization called that? | ||
| Not in my memory. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to assume, though, that you see the address is written to somebody named Michelle? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then the subject line is, I urge Michelle to stop using Josephine in making money and appearing on speaking engagements. | ||
| You saw that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The date of this email is December 21st, 2014? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And as we see from Free Speech Systems at the bottom, this is a document from Infowars corporate files. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Okay, yes. | ||
| The attachments here, we see a bunch of PNGs. | ||
| That's correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to go ahead and read the email to you, alright? | ||
| So, this is another email from Halbig, and you'll notice that this one's dated prior to the one about the Super Bowl choir, which is where Alex has claimed that he realized Halbig is no good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So this email was in Infowars corporate files, which itself is weird, because no one at Infowars seems to be copied on this email itself. | ||
| It's very weird. | ||
| Its existence in the files implies an awareness of its contents, since it wasn't emailed to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this wasn't good enough to get Halbig blacklisted, and this is a mess. | ||
| I'm gonna go ahead and read the email to you, alright? | ||
| Michelle, how could you and your husband, as responsible parents, even allow your precious child, Josephine, to attend that filthy and deplorable-looking school on December 14, 2012? | ||
| This school, as you must have known, is and was a toxic waste dump, as reported by environmental consultants who requested more money from City of Newtown leaders before demolishing the school and transported. | ||
| All of the high levels of lead paint, high levels of asbestos, and especially the high levels of PCPs in the groundwater at Sandy Hook out of state. | ||
| Josephine, your child should have expected more from you before that tragic day as a parent. | ||
| You are supposed to protect her from serious lifelong health risk when you send her to that school every day. | ||
| Why would you as a parent and all those other parents who supposedly lost a child to gunfire allow their children, as you did, to serious toxic waste? | ||
| This all unfolded before the first shot at that school even occurred. | ||
| Did you not see the filth and deplorable conditions when you went to that school, or are you blind? | ||
| I do not understand, unless you explain it to me, and the world, why you and your husband failed Josephine, who is a nonverbal child, as you stated and depended on... | ||
| Oh, that was a big sigh. | ||
| She's needed you to protect her from all the serious health risks that you sentenced her to on a daily basis. | ||
| Now you talk about school security. | ||
| You have got to be joking. | ||
| You have all these experts on your staff who are now part of your conspiracy. | ||
| They should be ashamed of their actions in supporting you. | ||
| A mom puts her own child at risk on a daily basis and is now the expert on school security? | ||
| I look forward to meeting you one day when I can take your deposition about not about the shooting, but why you and your... | ||
| Your husband failed Josephine by sending her to that filthy and deplorable school with all that toxic waste. | ||
| We call this child endangerment when you know of the danger that exposes your child to serious lifelong health risks. | ||
| You must have known without a doubt, because pictures do not, and it says LI, but I believe that means lie. | ||
| You put her life in serious risk every day, knowing how filthy and deplorable that school is. | ||
| I am enclosing photos that you must recognize since you took your child to school, and having a child in special needs, you would expect a school environment and school climate that allows children to learn and teachers to teach. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Please explain to me, if you can, why a school principal, Dawn Hopspring, would allow her school to be so filthy and deplorable-looking. | ||
| There is not one female elementary school principal in this country who would allow her school to be that filthy and deplorable, both inside and outside, and most of all, allow her to become a toxic waste dump, placing every child in her school status. | ||
| That needs to work on brevity. | ||
| Lifelong health risk, right? | ||
| All of the pictures are taken by the major crime squad from the Connecticut State Police. | ||
| Please respond, since you are now the expert on school security. | ||
| Wolfgang W. How Big, www.sandyhookjustice.com. | ||
| I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How do you feel about that, Emo? | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| I've never seen this before. | ||
| I mean, I guess he sent it to us, too. | ||
| Oh, it's in Inforware's corporate files, right? | ||
| Yeah, I just don't. | ||
| I don't even see Inforware's on here, though. | ||
| I wonder why we had it. | ||
| That's going to be my next question. | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this is an email where Halbig is harassing and terrorizing Sandy Hook family. | ||
| This was before the point where Alex said he realized that Halbig was bad news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And this looks bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And see, some of these clips are a little bit longer where Mark's reading these emails. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I think that it's important because it honestly was kind of a revelation for me, too, because I understood that, you know, Halbig's behavior was characterized this way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I hadn't heard the contents of these emails. | |
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it really did make me, and not like take it more serious. | |
| Right, right, right. | ||
| It's personal. | ||
| It made it more visceral. | ||
| Knowing the actual behavior and the ways that he's contacting these family members and the things that he's doing simultaneously to the time when Alex is promoting him and such, it really just gets pretty inexcusable and pretty disgusting. | ||
| I've got a new rule for my life, which is that I don't want to be around people who, if I were to have their emails read to me in a deposition, Are both so awful I would have to sigh and put my head in my hands, but also so long that I have to do it multiple times. | ||
| Yeah, there were a bunch of sighs in there. | ||
| That was the most, like, oh, fuck. | ||
| Like, you could not get more opportunities for one man to say, oh, fuck. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Oh, that was a bad one. | ||
| Oh, this sucks. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| Is there more? | ||
| There's more. | ||
| There is more. | ||
| Holy fuck. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| There's another email. | ||
| No! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| Jesus! | ||
| I'm going to show you what of Marsha's Exhibit 14. You see at the top there's another email from Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Right? | ||
| And on this one... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see about right here? | |
| Yep. | ||
| See how the blue line is? | ||
| Let me show you again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You see that? | |
| And so you see on your document too? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You've got Infowars email addresses there? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and that would be Rob Dew and Nico who got this email. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This was March 21st, 2017? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The subject was, anyone needing the address for a visit to welcome them to Florida, please call, and this was a great day for me. | ||
| Who says that you cannot catch a big fish in Florida? | ||
| That's what the subject line says? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then there's a PNG attached, an image file? | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then I'm going to go ahead and read this email to you. | ||
| So here we have another email from Halbig, and the date on this one is March 21st, 2017. | ||
| So as we can tell from Alex's telling of the timeline, this is supposed to be after he'd realized that Halbig was not a good source. | ||
| Possibly a content warning. | ||
| This email is very disturbing. | ||
| I found it a bit chilling to hear, and I don't want to just spring this on people without a little bit of a heads up. | ||
| It's not like explicit or anything, but it's real messed. | ||
| Real messed up. | ||
| And then I'm going to go ahead and read this email to you. | ||
| It says, Nick and Laura Phelps did a great job acting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. | ||
| I visited their home today at 1924 Westover Reserve Boulevard, Windmere, Florida, 34786. | ||
| And thanks to Lieutenant Van Gailly, Telling me during my wellness check of Nick and Laura Phelps that they no longer live in Newtown, Connecticut, and that they are now Richard and Jennifer Sexton. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| He is totally right, and can you believe it that my Newtown Police Department guided me in the right direction? | ||
| They have a beautiful home with a three-car garage. | ||
| They were not home today. | ||
| But the good news was that the three adult female moms with their children standing outside their homes observed me and wanted to know what I was doing. | ||
| It was spring break. | ||
| It is spring break for Orange County, Florida school children. | ||
| I showed them this picture and I told them that I did not want to go to the wrong house to surprise Nick and Laura from Newtown, Connecticut, a.k.a. | ||
| Richard and Jennifer Sexton, today. | ||
| It took a few minutes for them to look at the pictures, and then when they asked why I wanted to speak to them. | ||
| I told them that I had been in Newtown and wanted to surprise them since they now live in Florida. | ||
| They asked for my name, which I gave them as Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| They told me how I knew them, and I told them that they have been on the national news, so I wanted to meet them again. | ||
| Our conversation was all about Newtown, Connecticut. | ||
| So she said, do you mind if I text her? | ||
| I said, absolutely not. | ||
| Waited about ten minutes, only to learn that they did not know me, which surprised me. | ||
| They verified the pictures, and why would she text them about Newtown, Connecticut, and that someone from there wanted to visit if they were not Nick and Laura Phelps now, Richard and Jennifer Sexton? | ||
| At first, I did not want to enter, since it is a gated community, but several people told me, just go on in there, there is no security guard at the gates. | ||
| If there is CCTV, they will see me being told to go in, and that is the only reason or I would not have entered. | ||
| Now, who says law enforcement does not know what they are doing? | ||
| Thank you, Newtown, Connecticut Police Department. | ||
| Can you turn the document over? | ||
| First of all, read that email correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then on the back, you see there's a picture here, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And at the top, it says Sandy Hook hoax actors, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it has arrows pointing to the Phelps, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then at the bottom, it says playing the part of grief-stricken parents, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is a horrible email, isn't it? | ||
| I've never seen this email, and it's... | ||
| Yes, I don't like this email, and again, this is someone else, Wolf King Halbig, after I'd already clearly knew that he cracked up, and so that's not my work. | ||
| So that sucks. | ||
| Just a dude bragging about stalking grieving families. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| That's psychopathic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In a fucking serial killer. | ||
| That's a serial killer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that should be treated with the same level of true crime terror as a serial killer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's, uh... | ||
| Holy fuck! | ||
| It's hard to imagine something more unsettling in the context of, like, what Wolfgang could have been doing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in, like, most true crime documentaries, the cops are the bad... | ||
| Bad guys, as always. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| I don't know how much you take what he's saying. | ||
| No, I'm not saying that he necessarily... | ||
| Literally accurate. | ||
| So at the end there, you can see Alex essentially taking the bait that he set for himself. | ||
| He's established that he knew Halbig was no good after the Super Bowl thing in 2016, and then after that, this email comes from after that. | ||
| So he gets to absolve himself of any responsibility. | ||
| He gets to use this trick that he pulled out. | ||
| He would. | ||
| But, like I said, this is a trap that Alex set by giving a pretty specific time period when he has no excuse to not know that Halbig isn't reliable, and this immediately becomes a problem. | ||
| Yes, I don't like this email, and again, this is someone else, Wolf King Halbig, after I'd already clearly knew that he cracked up, and so that's not my work. | ||
| Next month, you did a video called Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed, right? | ||
| Someone... | ||
| Edit a video, put that name on it. | ||
| I've seen that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And during that video, you repeated all Wolfgang Habe claims, right? | ||
| His 16 questions thing? | ||
| I don't remember that. | ||
| I'd have to see that video. | ||
| But I believe it was about people using it to continue to try to get gun control and money. | ||
| So, yeah, we have a demonstration and a point made that after this, even all this, your timeline doesn't make sense. | ||
| After all this bullshit, the stalking of families, the horrifying emails being sent to Nico and Rob, and after the 2016 point when you had every reason to doubt his credibility as an expert, you're still repeating his things in the Sandy Hook Vampires video. | ||
| I can't believe he... | ||
| That's just dumb in every direction. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| It makes it so much easier to point to, like, oh, okay, so at this point you're not supposed to trust him, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So explain this. | ||
| And again, just that, like, tiny glimmer of hope of just like, well, you know, I haven't seen the video. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| We're at our whenever of this. | ||
| If he says he's got a video of you saying it and you haven't seen the video, click. | ||
| You can play it at any time, man. | ||
| It's here. | ||
| Yeah, and the I don't know, I haven't seen the video is only going to get you out of answering this question now. | ||
| It's not a good answer. | ||
| It's not a good excuse. | ||
| You're fucked. | ||
| So we got another Hal Big email. | ||
| Oh, goddammit. | ||
| Yeah, this one's not great either. | ||
| I mean, I'm not even associated with him and I'm making the sounds that Alex is making. | ||
| Mr. Jones, I've handed you what I've marked as Exhibit 15. At the bottom, we see it says FSXTX-040027. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So there's an email from Infowars Corporate Files. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| At the top, it says Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's who it's from. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It says 2wildrosefarm1740 at gmail.com. | ||
| Do you know who that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's my client, Scarlett Lewis. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The subject line. | ||
| Says, how could you as a mother stop and buy your special brand of coffee on December 14, 2012, when you heard as a mom that shots had been fired at the Sandy Hook School? | ||
| You read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is a March 10, 2015 email, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He says in this email, I read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So at least an... | ||
| Infowars had received information that Mr. Halbig was harassing Ms. Lewis, correct? | ||
| We get millions of emails. | ||
| I've never seen those up until the time of these lawsuits, so I'm not Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| All I'm asking is, Infowars received that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So now we have another email where Halbig is harassing the families of Sandy Hook victims. | ||
| This email's in corporate files for InfoWars, and this one's from March 10th, 2015, which is prior to the supposed cutoff of Alex thinking Halbig is credible. | ||
| The picture starts to come into focus a little bit, where you have Halbig demonstrating a pattern of behavior that people at InfoWars had every reason to know about, given their access to these emails, and Rob Dew, news director for the nightly news, being copied on almost all of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Also, this doesn't come up in the deposition, but Wolfgang Halbig was a guest on Alex's show on March 10th. | ||
| March 4th, 2015. | ||
| Just six days before he wrote this email harassing Scarlett Lewis. | ||
| And, like, it's not hard to put some pieces together of Wolfgang is on Alex's show. | ||
| His website's given out. | ||
| It's conceivable that donations are accrued by his appearance on here. | ||
| And days later, he's engaging in this behavior where he harasses... | ||
| Grieving parents. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I'm Alex in this situation, I hear those three emails and I immediately switch tactics and I just go, that guy's a real piece of shit. | ||
| We got to go get him. | ||
| And then I'd grab everybody and we'd go to Newtown, Connecticut or whatever it is we need to go. | ||
| We're in Texas. | ||
| We got to get him. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| We're in Texas. | ||
| Let's form a posse. | ||
| Let's get a posse together. | ||
| We got to get this guy. | ||
| He's a real piece of shit. | ||
| Mark, you're deputized. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| Everybody has guns now because I'm Alex. | ||
| Brad, get my horse. | ||
| Like, Jesus, what a piece of shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck me! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a fucked up fucking wow! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, it's also interesting to recognize that these evasions of, I didn't know about this stuff, no one knew about this stuff, we get so many emails, it just doesn't really fly. | ||
| I'm sure you would have marked as exhibit 18. You see at the bottom is F-S-S-T-X-0-3-9-8-9-7? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This is a 2015 email sent March 6, 2015? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And this is, the top email is Nico forwarding something to Rob Duke, correct? | ||
| And it says, forward two cents from a third-year law student. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then it says, some comments on Hal Big's last interview from a law student. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then I'm going to go ahead and read you this email from a gentleman named R. Darren Brumfield. | ||
| It was sent to mediacontacts@infowars.com. | ||
| He writes, "Two cents from a third-year law student. | ||
| Madam or sir, I am in my final semester of law school." I listened to the Wolfgang Haubig video and some significant alarm bells went off. | ||
| I also wrote on the YouTube page, but I copy and paste here. | ||
| Okay, so I just get this straight. | ||
| Starting at 3130, he filed his lawsuit in Seminole County Court in Florida. | ||
| Not in federal court in Florida, but in state court. | ||
| There is a legal requirement called, quote, standing, unquote. | ||
| He does not have standing to sue in Seminole County Court. | ||
| He was not a party in the shooting in any fashion. | ||
| There is also a concept called, quote, jurisdiction, unquote. | ||
| Either the man is lying or the judge is insane. | ||
| A Florida county-level judge would not have jurisdiction for any reason other than a contract, tort, or crime issue indirectly involving Halbig. | ||
| Something is completely wrong here. | ||
| Had he said, quote, in the federal district of Florida, quote, or whatever district it might be if the state is split, that may at least be plausible. | ||
| This is completely insane and cannot go anywhere but into the trash can. | ||
| No standing, no subject matter jurisdiction, no personal jurisdiction, two cents from a third-year law student who is legally current in his education. | ||
| Demand seems to be grasping and stretching. | ||
| No judge in their right mind would do such a thing as he describes. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| Imagine there is a crime in Las Vegas and the criminal kills himself. | ||
| There is no law whatsoever that would allow Alex or anyone else to file a suit in San Antonio for anything regarding the crime in Las Vegas. | ||
| There is no claim that could be made in Texas for something that happened in Nevada. | ||
| It is a rule. | ||
| R. Darren Blumfield. | ||
| Did I read all that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So here we have that not only did Infowars receive information suggesting that what Halbig was up to was completely insane, in Darren Blumfield's words, but actually Nico ended up forwarding that information directly to Rob Dew, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which is good that he found that, because we get about 10,000 emails there, at least we did. | ||
| What? | ||
| It's good that he found that in 2015? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it wasn't shown to me. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Is that what you think? | ||
| I guess Rob Dew wanted to know about anything coming in about San Diego, because he was interested in it, and so that's why it was sent to him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Yeah, it's good that he found that. | ||
| It's not good for you right now. | ||
| Explain to me how you could make my jaw drop more than for Alex to be like, well, it's good that he found that. | ||
| What? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| Wait. | ||
| How could Rob do have kept this from me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| Rob, I'd like you to also meet my friend, Buss. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| This might be bad for me. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Rob sounds like a real piece of shit. | ||
| Let's get together and go get him! | ||
| Come on, guys! | ||
| This posse is gonna be busy. | ||
| We're gonna be very busy for a while. | ||
| So, the pattern with these emails that has kind of been illustrated, I believe, is they have this horrible behavior that Wolfgang is engaging in, that evidence of is... | ||
| Clearly in Infowars files, and people from Infowars are forwarded on these and CC'd on these emails. | ||
| And have taken action such as forwarding them further. | ||
| Well, the email that is forwarded further from Nico to Rob is someone questioning the sanity of this person, which I think in terms of due diligence, maybe you would take a second look at the person and notice that, hey, there's these emails. | ||
| Where he's harassing Sandy Hook family members. | ||
| You might think that would happen, but I guess it didn't. | ||
| And this is a bizarre sort of picture that you get from these emails. | ||
| But I think it's remarkable to see that Alex's response to this is bordering on what he would expect a person to feel. | ||
| You hear these emails and this is a horrible email. | ||
| That's awful. | ||
| I didn't know about this. | ||
| That's exactly what you would do if you... | ||
| I had feelings. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| If you were a human. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Maybe it's an indication that he's a human. | ||
| Eh, well, we'll see. | ||
| So after this, we get into a little bit of a conversation about Dan Badondi and... | ||
| The Kraken! | ||
| Yes, Alex sending him to Newtown. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Look, he plays the clip of Alex calling Badandi the Kraken, and he's like, the Kraken's a mythological beast, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Trying to get into sort of the record and have Alex respond to, like, you know, the Kraken, that's not somebody that's, you knew he's going to go cause trouble. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And obviously that's the case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And Alex is evasive about that. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| Which version of the movie are you talking about? | ||
| Because, I mean, Liam Neeson wasn't as good, I don't think, when he said it. | ||
| I have a lot of thoughts about movies. | ||
| I mean, now that we're in a territory I'm comfortable with, let's get into it. | ||
| Can I tell you about Oblivion? | ||
| So, we have one last clip here from Alex's deposition, and it's a question of... | ||
| We've seen a lot of bad behavior from folks within Infowars vis-a-vis Sandy Hook and Wolfgang and Fetzer. | ||
| You could say that. | ||
| Illustrated throughout this deposition. | ||
| Possible. | ||
| So the question of editorial standards and that kind of thing comes up. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And this isn't the best response Alex could have. | ||
| Your company has never disciplined anyone due to a false fact about Sandy Hook published on InfoWars, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, two, four. | |
| I don't remember. | ||
| Good work, Knott Barnes. | ||
| You think it's possible you may have disciplined somebody for saying something false about Sandy Hook? | ||
| I wouldn't say false. | ||
| People have gotten in trouble for talking about it. | ||
| I've tried to stay out of it and myself get sucked back into it. | ||
| I think people testify to that, too. | ||
| At least that's what I was told. | ||
| You just said you wanted people to look into it! | ||
| In 2015, you went to people like Adan Salazar and told him to stop printing articles about Sandy Hook. | ||
| It's because Leonard Posner kept getting strikes against the company, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| I don't remember if it was Leonard Posner. | ||
| I mean, I know... | ||
| I've seen people make a big thing between me and Leonard Posner. | ||
| I barely know who he is, and I've seen him in some shows, but I know. | ||
| I just did not... | ||
| Yes, I mean, I did not want to... | ||
| I had seen... | ||
| Some of the anomalies and things be proven to not be anomalies. | ||
| And so I wasn't sure that it was staged. | ||
| But then, you know, I go back and forth like anybody on these kind of these mysteries. | ||
| What? | ||
| So that's where I stand on that. | ||
| That's not an ideal answer. | ||
| But have you punished anybody? | ||
| Is there any consequences for anybody who's published false things about Sandy Hook? | ||
| Hey, look, this is a mystery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I just don't... | |
| I don't know... | ||
| I don't know how you could take this to a jury and not say to them, like, listen, this is a man who's already lost the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is a man who's under oath in a case that he lost for saying that this isn't real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Saying this isn't real, or it might not be, or he still has questions over it. | ||
| We're well past the point where you can say, like... | ||
| Oh, we'll have our day in court. | ||
| It's already gone! | ||
| So there's no way to do anything other than say, this man has to be stopped. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of the appearance that you get from this deposition is certainly a lack of remorse, a lack of having learned anything, a lack of... | ||
| Even seeming to be willing to understand the problem. | ||
| Basic comprehension of reality. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's also clearly an indication that he intends to continue the behavior. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, and almost a strange, extreme solipsism. | ||
| Almost as if like, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? | ||
| This happened outside of what I experienced, so it doesn't matter. | ||
| It's not real, because I didn't read this email, so it doesn't matter to me. | ||
| Yeah, and even beyond that, like... | ||
| A real lack of institutional guardrails within Infowars where there is no standards for what they can or can't report. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| There's no consequences for anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no standards for sending the fucking... | |
| Not prosecution. | ||
| Plaintiff. | ||
| A fucking background report. | ||
| Which you don't know you did. | ||
| Which you don't know you did? | ||
| Before we even start with the journalistic standards, what do you even have? | ||
| Take an inventory of what you even have. | ||
| What's in the building? | ||
| So now, Jordan. | ||
| We jump over to the corporate representative deposition of Daria Karpova. | ||
| Oh boy, here we go. | ||
| I was a little disappointed, I believe I said this when we were talking to Mark, that it wasn't Rob Doe again. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But there are Doe-ish characteristics to this. | ||
| It's due-esque. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Hints of due. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that we'll probably skip over a fair amount of this, because it is, in the same way that Rob's deposition was, there were a lot of just, like, I don't know. | ||
| Like, does the company know or not know? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if the company knows. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, there is a ton of that, and the deposition itself, Yeah, from the way you described it to me, I got a little bit of like, what would it be like to depose Donald Rumsfeld? | ||
| I think that Donald Rumsfeld might take less long pauses before answering questions. | ||
| He's a lot slicker. | ||
| Every single question, there's a long pause before she answers. | ||
| Actually, I think it's probably a good strategy. | ||
| Oh, it's much smarter than Alex's strategy of saying whatever. | ||
| Hey, what do you not know that I can give to you that would help you? | ||
| Although, I will say that I think that some of the strategies that she does employ in terms of answering questions are not much better and maybe are more shocking and way more offensive. | ||
| Well, that sounds about right. | ||
| So strap it in. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| So at the beginning of this, at the start, Mark asks a number of questions to try and nail down how much preparation Daria did for the deposition and with whom she consulted. | ||
| The preparation is clearly minimal, and the questions are kind of repetitive, so I'm going to skip past that bit where that's discussed. | ||
| I'll put it this way. | ||
| On a scale of 1 to 10, she's not very prepared, but a little more than Rob do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So she's a 1.2. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| On a scale of 1 to 10, she's a 0.8. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Oh, I thought with... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's not zero. | ||
| Well, I thought do was at the 1, since it's a scale of 1 to 10. You can't... | ||
| I have a negative on a scale. | ||
| Oh, you're cheating. | ||
| I'm in a number war. | ||
| You are. | ||
| So this leads us to Mark presenting Daria with a folder that she had brought along that contained what she wanted to introduce into evidence. | ||
| She had brought along some documents, and this is where we're at. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| No, I understand. | ||
| I've been given a folder. | ||
| Do you recognize this folder that I'm holding right here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I've been told that these are documents that you reviewed prior to this deposition. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So you have taken... | ||
| The documents that you prepared yourself for today and put them in this folder? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I want to right now... | ||
| No, let's do them individually. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably not the best. | ||
| That's not the worst idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So, ma 'am, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a sticker on this folder itself, and we're going to mark that as Exhibit 1. Okay, and I want to talk to you about some of the documents in here. | ||
| So each exhibit is going to be like 1A, 1B, 1C in this folder of things she's brought. | ||
| And I think I can say this without giving away any privileged information. | ||
| This was the first one. | ||
| In terms of day one was the Daria deposition and the next day was Alex. | ||
| So this was my first moments of being in this setting. | ||
| I was just like, I gotta get a seatbelt. | ||
| I gotta strap this in, because here is where we begin with these documents. | ||
| I've marked this as 1A. | ||
| You recognize that, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's a document that you reviewed prior to this deposition, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| That is the Wikipedia entry for false flag, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Can you tell me why you looked at this document? | ||
|
unidentified
|
*laughter* | |
| I thought it would be a good idea to bring it as a reference to some of the points for topic number one. | ||
| If I could have the list of topics that would help me to identify the exhibits. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| In fact, let's do that. | ||
| So the topic that Dari is referring to is the sourcing and research that went into the productions of the videos that are listed in the plaintiff's case. | ||
| So I don't know what she needs the false flag Wikipedia page for. | ||
| I felt like this had not started well. | ||
| I was worried. | ||
| I mean, I'm thinking about this now, and I'm thinking about removing the sticker that says 1A and putting a new sticker on that says Grape Job, and you can scratch it, and it smells like grapes, Dan! | ||
| Four stars, tell her to go home to her mother. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Good God. | ||
| So here's the next document we get. | ||
| So now I've handed you what I've marked as 1C, which you recognize, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And that is the Wikipedia entry for the Reichstag fire, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| The Reichstag fire was a Nazi party arson attack, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Can you tell me why this is relevant to the case? | ||
| Same answer as for the previous exhibit. | ||
| I thought it would be a document pertaining to some of the points in topic number one as an example of false flag. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Another Wikipedia page. | ||
| To paraphrase the one funny thing Pete Holmes ever said, it seems like you printed out a part of the internet for us to throw away. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's strange because, again, as the corporate representative, the lion's share of what she's supposed to be discussing is sourcing and personnel who worked on the videos in question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that has nothing to do with the Reichstag fires Wikipedia page. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Disagree? | |
| Sources? | ||
| Mostly Nazis. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Let's see if the next one's better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're putting to you 1D. | |
| You recognize that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you read the website at the bottom? | ||
| What website does that come from? | ||
| HistoryToday.com. | ||
| Okay, so this is a History Today article about the sinking of the Maine, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Was a 19th century warship, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| And that warship exploded in Havana Harbor, correct? | ||
| No problem. | ||
| Let me ask that again. | ||
| That warship exploded in Havana Harbor, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| There is significant historical evidence to suggest that that ship was intentionally exploded by the United States government. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's correct? | |
| There is a controversy about it. | ||
| In other words, what I'm wondering is, from reading that article, did you come away with the idea that there is substantial evidence, in other words, non-trivial evidence, which people could use to support the idea that the USS Maine was intentionally destroyed by the United States government? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| I would say one could infer that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Can you tell me why that particular article is relevant to your testimony today? | ||
| It could be viewed as an example of false flags throughout history. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| So at this point, I think it becomes a bit clear that the strategy of the articles that Daria has in the folder amounts to a lazy attempt at illustrating that false flags have happened in the past, and thus it's not so out of left field for Alex to question whether any event may or may not be another one. | ||
| That's all good and well, but it's really superfluous to the questions at hand. | ||
| And the thing that I find most interesting is that while being questioned about the article concerning the sinking of the main, Daria seems unwilling to commit to even saying that there's evidence that it was a false flag, only going so far as to say that there's controversy. | ||
| She's cagey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's some of the vibe you might be getting in the early stages of this. | ||
| I thought that was a little bit weird. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| But I guess maybe it could make some strategic sense. | ||
| You don't have to prove anything as a false flag. | ||
| All you have to do is prove that some things people say are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Because that's the behavior you're trying to justify in terms of Alex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I want to ask this. | ||
| I just want to ask this question over and over and over again to all of these people. | ||
| Just like, let's strip away all the bullshit. | ||
| On a fundamental level, do you know why you're here? | ||
| Why? | ||
| What are you here to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Again, it's going back to that stuff with Alex. | ||
| You have to get back to fundamentals. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What is water? | ||
| Is it the wet stuff? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Is it something else? | ||
| Can you breathe water? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hey, listen. | ||
| If you think water is air and that's how we have to talk about it and I have to say water is air and air is water, that's fucking fine as long as we agree! | ||
| At least we'll be able to communicate. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| That's all I need to know, man! | ||
| Yeah, it's that idea that the beginning of communication is the definition of terms. | ||
| You can't really... | ||
| And I do think that that does come into a problem with interacting with folks from Infowars, as it seems from these depositions in particular that I've seen. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It seems like you're talking in different languages. | ||
| Do you know what it makes me think of? | ||
| When we talked to John Ronson, he very briefly had this moment where we went kind of far off, and he just said, you know, he was wondering, how is it that we can judge Alex? | ||
| You know, just in this sense of, like, do we judge him the way we judge other people? | ||
| Because he's clearly not like other people. | ||
| Who can you judge him by? | ||
| What is the standard by which Alex can be judged? | ||
| And it's like, when you have an entire organization that is thinking it's totally fine to print out a Wikipedia article and take it to a deposition, I don't know. | ||
| They're aliens. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| They're just aliens, you know? | ||
| It introduces a really strange question that is like, is this somebody who's trying to bluff a report? | ||
| Like, ah, this will do. | ||
| Or is it someone who doesn't care? | ||
| Or is it an active insult? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Aliens. | ||
| Just complete aliens. | ||
| I don't understand what is happening. | ||
| Yeah, but maybe the rest of these documents will help you sort that out. | ||
| I'm sure they will. | ||
| I'm going to put in front of you one E. You recognize that, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A Wikipedia entry for the Pearl Harbor Advanced Knowledge Conspiracy Theory, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Is this the same answer as the other documents? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So this is another example of potentially... | ||
| Well, let me back up. | ||
| Would you call this a false flag, for instance? | ||
| Let me rephrase that question. | ||
| If the allegations about this conspiracy theory are true, would you consider that a false flag? | ||
| I would say so, yes. | ||
| So we have another Wikipedia article about conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor. | ||
| I think the point's made by this point, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| No, you don't understand. | ||
| I don't know why we need more. | ||
| So at least the documents aren't all just Wikipedia pages. | ||
| Some of them are bios for weirdos. | ||
| Ooh! | ||
| Like the back of a book jacket? | ||
| I'm going to put it in front of you one F. You recognize that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you explain what that is? | ||
| Yes, it is an article that was archived from the website DC Clothesline, which includes Mr. Halbig's biography, which I wanted to have on hand. | ||
| Okay, so this is just biographical information about one of Infowars' sources? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we've got Wolfgang Halbig's bio. | |
| And we have another bio. | ||
| Alright, now I'm going to show you what marked as one H. You recognize that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's from Dr. Steve Pachinik's website, isn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And that's basically a biography of Dr. Steve Pachinik? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And you wanted to have that because Steve Pachinik is somebody who has appeared on InfoWars at one point to talk about San Diego? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I do regret that, unfortunately, in this deposition, more questions aren't asked about Steve Pachinik. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think having anybody have to answer for, like, even just the bio, just be like... | ||
| How much of this do you actually think is... | ||
| Let's just go through it and you tell me what's true and what's not true. | ||
| You brought it into evidence, man. | ||
| That's what's going on now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we've got the bio of these two people, which I think is... | ||
| I mean, I don't think it matters much, but at least it seems more relevant to what you might bring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's another document in there, and this is where things start to get real fucked up. | ||
| My daughter drew a picture! | ||
| Things are real fucked up at this point. | ||
| It is really weird. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Okay, I'm going to show you now what I have marked as one eye. | ||
| You recognize that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's a Guardian article, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Guardian's a newspaper in Britain, am I right about that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This article says, it's headline says, Sandy Hook fathered Leonard Posner on death threats. | ||
| I never imagined having to fight for my child's legacy. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| What did you need this article for in your testimony today? | ||
| That's not a good question. | ||
| Why did you feel you wanted to review this article for your testimony today? | ||
| After this, there is a long pause. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A very long pause. | ||
| I don't know if it's a long pause of trying to remember why, or if it was like a, how do I say this? | ||
| I'm not sure, but it goes off the fucking rails. | ||
| The reason I wanted to have this article is that I thought... | ||
| One of the victims' mother... | ||
| There was interesting information regarding the victim's mother and her request to have an open casket for the funeral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's interesting here? | |
| It seems to me that... | ||
| The motivation for doing so would be to exploit a child's death for a political agenda. | ||
| Might another reason for it is because a bunch of people were saying that child was fake? | ||
| Couldn't that be a reason for it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| So, she has brought a Guardian article that references how Miss De La Rosa had opted to have... | ||
| An open casket funeral. | ||
| So, um... | ||
| You know, this is Dicey. | ||
| This feels real Mark Dicey. | ||
| I'm not stoked about the direction it's going. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| And it gets... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Sitting here right now, if your child... | ||
| Let's back up. | ||
| You just had a baby, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's say six years from now, your child walks into elementary school and is massacred in a gun violence incident. | ||
| And some news organizations are saying that your child is fake. | ||
| Can you see that a possible way to combat that would be to have an open casket funeral for your child? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| That's not something you would ever consider? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| You can imagine how somebody else could consider that. | ||
| Not if they have a heart and no political agenda. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you think that this Jewish family's choice to have an open casket funeral for their child Was politically motivated. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to object to this being outside the scope of her corporate representative testimony. | |
| That's fine. | ||
| Ooh! | ||
| So they discuss this objection, and then they determine that she should answer the question. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I thought Brad finally had one good thing to, you know? | ||
| Well, I mean, the objection might be fine, but it's still going to answer the question. | ||
| So the court reporter reads the question back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And, ooh. | ||
| What has being Jewish having to do with this? | ||
| I'm not here to answer your question today. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My answer is... | ||
| My personal opinion, I find it unconscionable. | ||
| It's something that I would never bring myself to doing. | ||
| People have open casket funerals every day, don't they? | ||
| Yes, however, considering the circumstances and how the child was disfigured based on these articles, I find that... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So Daria didn't pick up on this, but the reason that Mark brought up the fact that the parent is Jewish and decided to have an open casket funeral for her son is because that's a huge deal. | ||
| In most Jewish traditions, it's not acceptable to have an open casket funeral. | ||
| Out of respect, it's traditionally understood that you're not supposed to gaze upon the face of the deceased. | ||
| The fact that a person of Jewish heritage would make the decision to have an open casket funeral because people were saying that her son didn't exist indicates a very strong conviction that the world not be allowed to pretend that this didn't happen or try to mentally hide behind safe images. | ||
| As Veronique, the mother in question, told the foreword, quote, I just want people to know the ugliness of it so we don't talk about it abstractly, like these little angels went to heaven. | ||
| No, they were butchered. | ||
| They were brutalized. | ||
| And that's what haunts me at night. | ||
| It's a subtle nuance that's being hinted at in this question that's completely missed by Daria, because in preparation for this deposition, it doesn't seem like she's done all that much. | ||
| Still. | ||
| A little better prepared than Rob Du. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's impossible to beat that bar. | ||
| You're never going to do worse than him, I don't think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, the worst part is... | ||
| Well, I guess if Rob Du had shown up drunk, maybe. | ||
| That would have been nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That would have been a good day for us. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| I mean, the strange thing is I believe her, but partially because she's on the other side, so she's not going to do that stuff because she knows it won't fucking do a thing. | ||
| I... | ||
| Kind of agree with you. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| That I emotionally agree that she is not lying. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That she thinks that they would do this for political reasons. | ||
| And if you had a heart, you would never do. | ||
| She believes that. | ||
| I don't think that's coming from an analytical place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| I think that is an emotional truth. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Because she knows what somebody would do to somebody who did that. | ||
| It sounds that way to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we got another article. | ||
| This is weird. | ||
| Here's another article about that, right? | ||
| Exhibit 1J. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So you actually pulled two separate articles about Noah Posner's funeral having an open coffin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct? | |
| I pulled this one article because it was linked in The Guardian, and I wanted to make sure that I have the sources of where I got... | ||
| I'm thorough, baby! | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so, of all the documents that you've reviewed regarding the plaintiffs... | ||
| The only ones you've reviewed that you chose to go review were two articles about Mrs. Posner choosing to have an open casket for her son. | ||
| Correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That wasn't the reason why I reviewed the article. | |
| That's not what I'm asking you, Ms. Garpova. | ||
| I'm asking you, of all the documents you reviewed about the plaintiffs before this deposition, the only two that you did review are articles that discuss Noah Posner's funeral having an open casket. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| They happen to mention that, but that's not the only thing they discuss. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Let's make it even broader then for you. | ||
| The only two pieces of documentation that you have reviewed for this deposition about the plaintiffs are two articles, both of which discuss in the article Noah Posner's open casket funeral. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Tell me any other information from those articles that you believe is relevant to this deposition today. | |
| I've already mentioned that the state of the physical body that the child had for | ||
| the This is | ||
| bizarre. | ||
| You have Wikipedia articles, Steve and Wolfgang's self-written bios, and multiple articles about Noah Posner having an open casket funeral. | ||
| It's upsetting. | ||
| If I was going to subtitle this deposition, it would be... | ||
| When you say it like that... | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Wait until we get deeper into this. | ||
| Every time she hears something, it's like she hears it for the first time. | ||
| She's like, oh, well, when you put it like that, it sure sounds like I'm an asshole. | ||
| There's some deep bizarreness that is even... | ||
| This is just the amuse-bouche of how bizarre this is going to get. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Mark tries to get into the actual topics that she's there as the corporate representative to discuss, and that is a dead end. | ||
| Topic number one is the sourcing research for the videos described in plaintiff's petitions. | ||
| When was the last time you watched those videos? | ||
| What? | ||
| Back up. | ||
| Made an assumption there. | ||
| Have you watched the videos in plaintiff's petition? | ||
| Ever in your history of indifference? | ||
| I've watched some of them. | ||
| What? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So one thing you can say is that in preparation for this deposition, you didn't watch those videos, correct? | ||
| I'm sorry, Ms. Karpova, is that a difficult question for you to answer? | ||
| Well, I've already answered some of the videos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I understand that you have in your history at Infowars since 2015, you've probably on occasion seen some of these videos. | ||
| I understand that. | ||
| What I'm asking you is since the date you were told you were given this deposition in November and you were preparing for this deposition, you haven't watched any of these videos, right? | ||
| I have not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Ooh. | ||
| So this is a bad start. | ||
| Because you now know that you're not going to really even be familiar with the videos in question. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And that is kind of limiting, is your ability to testify as a corporate representative. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Once we've established here that she hasn't watched these videos in preparation, it turns out also that, by extension, that means she doesn't even know what they say. | ||
| Do you see that paragraph 14 identifies a January 27th, 2013 video entitled, Why People Think Sandy Hook is a Hoax? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're familiar with the claims made in that video, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
projection form. | |
| I don't recall the exact video. | ||
| And so, sitting here today, you're not familiar with the claims made in that video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And because of this, so much of the questions that are being asked end up being her guessing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, like, what are the sources for this? | ||
| Well, I would assume that it's Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or, you know, like, I have an educated guess that it's this person. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And then Mark will push back about, like, what did you do to try and figure out, if anything, who made this video, who worked on this, what are the sources? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And she'll be like, well, nothing. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I mean, how do they pick who shows up? | ||
| Did they throw a dart or something? | ||
| Like, what is happening? | ||
| I think there's an InfoWars elder who goes into a trance. | ||
| The InfoWars elder goes into a trance. | ||
| And then they choose somebody. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The confidence with which you would walk into what amounts to the end of your professional career. | ||
| So we're going to skip a bunch of the back and forths of just like... | ||
| Who did this? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Probably Wolfgang? | ||
| Probably Wolfgang. | ||
| And there's a lot of it. | ||
| And I don't skip it because it's not relevant. | ||
| It definitely is. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| And it paints the picture of how unprepared she was for this deposition and the lack of respect that's being shown to the process. | ||
| But in terms of, you know, we're doing a show also. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think it would get grading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| In much the same way it was clearly in the room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we're going to jump to a question about the Super Bowl pick. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this is the pick that Alex was asked about. | ||
| It's a Wolfgang Halbig sent it to Nico. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And we couldn't determine whether or not Alex should answer if this is crazy. | ||
| Actually, he did say it was crazy. | ||
| Here is Mark beginning to bring this up to Daria. | ||
| I'm just trying to make sure. | ||
| Have you or have you seen this document? | ||
| I don't recall reading this particular exchange with Mr. Halbig and Nico. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm going to start at the bottom here. | ||
| And this document that I'm reading from you is marked FSS Texas, FSS TX, dash 039429. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. | |
| And you will see at the bottom email, Mr. Halbig writes to Nico. | ||
| Do you know who Nathaniel Folks is, the person he copies? | ||
| No. | ||
| Nico, though, is an InfoWars employee. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What's his job title at this time? | ||
| He's not employed. | ||
| At this time. | ||
| Oh, at this time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He would be the head producer. | |
| Nico's no longer employed by Infowars? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Does Infowars possess his last known contact information? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Mr. Halbig in this email states, Nico, the picture of the Sandy Hook Elementary School choir is one of the keys. | ||
| Other pictures are great for discussion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These are the CT crime pictures. | |
| Wolf. | ||
| I've read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Nico responds and says, Got the Super Bowl picture. | ||
| Thank you for sending. | ||
| We will be calling you on Skype at 1 p.m. Eastern Time. | ||
| How long will you be available for the interview today? | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Nico. | ||
| I've read that correctly? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And then the final email says, As long as you and Alex can put up with me. | ||
| Wolfgang. | ||
| Read that correctly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Does this help you refresh your memory about what the Super Bowl picture is? | ||
| So we've got the topic introduced. | ||
| We have Nico's response to getting the Super Bowl picture. | ||
| I will say, though, if I can say one positive thing about Wolfgang Halbig, it's that sometimes he signs off his emails, wolf. | ||
| Ooh, that's not bad. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not consistent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eh. | |
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I think if my name was Wolfgang, I'd be constantly making people call me Wolf. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Sometimes you sign your emails Dutch, don't you? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| So, we get to talking about the Super Bowl pick itself. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This... | |
| Oh, God. | ||
| This is... | ||
| I don't even... | ||
| I'm having trouble figuring out how to just, like, prepare you for how insane what's coming up is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I can't be prepared. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Alright, I'm going to show you what I marked as Exhibit 5. You can take a look at that picture for me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| *sad music* | ||
| Do you see at the bottom corner where it says FSSTX.04476? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Have you seen this picture before? | ||
| Personally, I have not. | ||
| This was a document though. | ||
| You can tell from the number at the bottom. | ||
| Produced by the company, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Can you read what it says at the very top of the picture, the white text? | ||
| Ten Sandy Ho children found alive and well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Does the company now admit that this picture is outrageous? | ||
| Objection form. | ||
| Hey, listen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen. | |
| It's been a long fucking trial. | ||
| And you guys have been dicks. | ||
| Are you ready to admit that this is outrageous? | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Are you ready to say you're full of shit? | ||
| Neener, neener, neener. | ||
| Go fuck yourself? | ||
| Yeah, so apparently this is worth an objection. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it deteriorates. | ||
| Well, what I'm saying is if there's an expert and you've been relying on him... | ||
| A guy's supposed to be a school safety shooting expert, whatever it is. | ||
| And you're relying on him. | ||
| And then, just hypothetically, that person just starts saying absolutely crazy things. | ||
| And it's pretty clear they're going off their rocker. | ||
| Maybe they were even credible at one time. | ||
| But suddenly they start saying a bunch of crazy things. | ||
| To the company, when it's deciding whether to put stuff on about Sandy Hook, it needs to, it should consider whether what the things its expert is saying are crazy. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Well, if he's the expert on the subject matter, and who knows a lot more on the subject than any of us working at Free Space Systems, it would be reasonable to believe that we would want to listen, consider the information that he's bringing. | ||
| What exactly, in Wolfgang Halbig's history and expertise, makes him an expert that you should defer to on whether this picture of the Super Bowl choir... | ||
| Well, that's a good question. | ||
| That's why I brought his bio, which I would like to read. | ||
| No. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| No. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| No. | ||
| One of the things I think is really interesting that's going on there is that Daria is essentially appealing to authority. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just being like, well, Wolfgang said so, and he's the expert on things. | ||
| No, that was like, really? | ||
| You're gonna tell me? | ||
| If the expert says crazy things, they're not crazy, because this person's the expert. | ||
| Those things, by being said by this person, become credible. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So what you're telling me is that the editorial standard for Infowars is if somebody was an expert, we would believe them. | ||
| Could we even qualify that further? | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| If they claim to be an expert. | ||
| There we are. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So before we even get to expert. | ||
| If you make up credentials for yourself that are really impressive, you get to just do whatever you want. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you're telling me that the tip of the spear against disinformation from the mainstream media. | ||
| They do a lot of backgrounds. | ||
| The people who work 11 hours a day. | ||
| Oh, Alex is up until 5 in the morning sometimes, always researching. | ||
| You're telling me that you don't need to verify any of that shit on your own? | ||
| No, no, because this guy's an expert. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So, Mark wants to know if this picture of the Super Bowl choir that was sent to Nico... | ||
| It was made by a sane person. | ||
| Will you admit, sitting here right now, this was not created by a rational, sane human being? | ||
| Or are you going to tell this jury that this is created by a rational, sane human being? | ||
| I don't have an opinion, a personal opinion on it. | ||
| So you see this picture, and in trying to determine whether it was created by a sane, rational human being, you look at it and go, I have no strong feelings either way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct? | |
| I'm not a psychiatric medical expert to determine who is sane and who isn't. | ||
| That is quite a response. | ||
| Ooh, boy. | ||
| I mean, you know, listen. | ||
| Goldwater rule. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| I guess there's really no way around that from a questioning perspective, really. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you aren't, but you're just trying to dodge the question of it's very clear if you look at this, you'll be like, this is... | ||
| Well, as Mark said, outrageous. | ||
| No, I mean, the problem with this little chunk right here is we're in a situation where the rules are such that Mark can't be like, hey, listen, you know. | ||
| And she can't be like, I know. | ||
| But you know, right? | ||
| And he can't be like, well, yeah. | ||
| No, I know why. | ||
| Why don't you just level with me for a second? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, everybody knows what's going on. | ||
| This is so infuriating to me. | ||
| It's because Mark knows she's full of shit, and she knows she's full of shit. | ||
| Now, I agree that that is a frustrating dynamic. | ||
| It's very frustrating. | ||
| Now, listen to me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That dynamic breaks. | ||
| The status quo changes. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| In the midst of this conversation about whether or not a sane person would make this Super Bowl picture. | ||
| And, oh my god. | ||
| If somebody sent you this while you were doing reporting, you would thank them for it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It depends on the circumstances. | ||
| I wasn't there when Nico was having this exchange, what information he had at the time. | ||
| You're the representative of the business. | ||
| Well, I'm asking you what if you had this information. | ||
| A picture that says at the top, "10 Sandy Hook children found alive and well." And then the Super Bowl choir in front of millions of people. | ||
| Would you look at that and go, "Man, I'm glad that he sent me that." Personally, I would rather think that those kids were alive than... | ||
| Don't. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| No, I want it. | ||
| The idea of kids being murdered for no reason, the innocence of those children who didn't deserve what that kind of fate, I would hold out hope to the last bit of my soul hoping and praying that that picture was, that that was something that'd be possible for those kids to be alive. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| If I saw that picture and then asked somebody a question about that picture and then they gave me that response... | ||
| I would throw a table through the wall. | ||
| I almost gasped. | ||
| That is fucking crazy. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's such a bizarre response to the questioning over the Super Bowl picture, and it's not even relevant to the question she was being asked. | ||
| This is volunteered of her own desire to express this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's really hard to understand this mentality unless you recognize that people like Daria, and I would assume most of the people at InfoWars, don't ascribe to the rules of reality, things like cause and effect or object permanence. | ||
| In her mind, choosing to believe that the kids who were killed at Sandy Hook are actually secretly in the choir at the Super Bowl, that's an optimistic idea because the alternative is choosing to believe that the kids are dead. | ||
| There's so many problems with this idea. | ||
| I mean, the most obvious being that what she's describing is essentially just living in a fantasy world because reality is too tough. | ||
| But also, she seems to be ignoring how this isn't an isolated thing. | ||
| Like, if the kids at Sandy Hook were secretly in that choir, the implications of that are horrific. | ||
| And I don't know if this would actually be an optimistic scenario. | ||
| No, it'd be the worst-case possible fucking scenario there's ever been. | ||
| If the government had just pulled off a massive false flag and then they were rubbing it in by having the fake kids sing at the Super Bowl, I suspect those kids would not live past halftime. | ||
| These are the people who work for the literal devil. | ||
| They're not above that shit. | ||
| I find it hard to believe that if the global... | ||
| I mean, for your response to that question to just be like, you know, I choose hope. | ||
| It's just fucking... | ||
| Go! | ||
| Go! | ||
| Get out of here! | ||
| So when I heard Daria say that, I thought, well, this trip has been worth it. | ||
| I had heard something that was completely unpredictable. | ||
| That was something I never expected I would hear. | ||
| And then it actually even goes on. | ||
| So if you think about it, from your point of view, if you think about it, if the parents of my clients saw this picture, it should give them a lot of hope, right? | ||
| They should react really positively to this with a lot of hope inside, right? | ||
| Objection form. | ||
| Is that what you're saying? | ||
| I'm not those parents. | ||
| I'm looking at it as an outsider. | ||
| And I would much rather, and I don't know a person with a heart, would rather think, would rather believe that the kids are dead versus that the kids might be alive. | ||
| I would say it's reasonable for a person with a heart to have that sort of optimism. | ||
| As I'm sure Alex wanted to believe that those kids, if there was any possibility that the kids were not dead, then he was going to grab onto it because that's a much better proposition to have in your heart and mind than to realize that they weren't. | ||
| So, Alex Jones, according to how the company views things in terms of your Sandy Hook coverage, Alex Jones said the kids didn't really die, and they were really alive, in part because he has such a big heart and a lot of hope and optimism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You might not have heard it because the lawyer was talking, but she said yes. | ||
| That's truly bizarre. | ||
| And remember, this is somebody testifying as a corporate representative. | ||
| Yeah, I was going to say, that's something that's really important to remind people here. | ||
| She's there in an official capacity and still decided to take a very ill-advised swing at trying to pretend that spreading Sandy Hook conspiracies is an act of kindness. | ||
| Listen, the editorial position of InfoWars and Free Speech Systems is that not only was Santa real in Miracle on 34th Street, he is real outside of Miracle on the 34th Street. | ||
| If I were Mark, I would have kept... | ||
| I do believe that she does think that if you were... | ||
| That you would never engage with conspiracy theorists if your kid dies, because it won't matter either way. | ||
| That makes sense to me. | ||
| She's saying this with the same tone of emotional honesty, and this is batshit crazy. | ||
| Yes, there are a couple moments where you get that. | ||
| Outside of the I don't know answers about sources, and I didn't do anything to prepare for this. | ||
| Those two of the moments that are like... | ||
| That are, like, really stand out. | ||
| And I think this one is particularly upsetting. | ||
| It's very upsetting. | ||
| And I think the point that Mark brings up about, like, oh, my client should love this picture, that it should give them hope. | ||
| Like, the fact that she can't register or refuses to register. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's obviously... | ||
| It makes her idea look absurd. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because, of course, the parents are furious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| So here's the dumb thing you said. | ||
| I'm going to take it to a logical end point, and now you're going to see that it's dumb. | ||
| And she's like, well, I would rather die than see that it's dumb. | ||
| And actually, I find it much more comfortable to live in this dumb place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you have a heart, how? | |
| Could you not believe that I am writing a unicorn home after we record this show? | ||
| If you have a heart! | ||
| There is also this focus of having a heart. | ||
| Just have a heart, Dan. | ||
| It is weird. | ||
| Sure, we harassed and destroyed many people's lives, but that's because we have a heart, Dan. | ||
| Right, it's for the good of... | ||
| Hearts. | ||
| All of you lawyers trying to get some sort of remuneration for these Sandy Hook families that we've badgered and horrifically fucked with for the past ten years or whatever it is. | ||
| Those people. | ||
| You should call InfoWars Cheerios because it's heart healthy. | ||
| Heart friendly. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| So, Daria... | ||
| There's more questions that you can't answer about sourcing and stuff. | ||
| And so they end up taking a break. | ||
| And this is where I was like, oh my god. | ||
| There's just a recognition that she is in trouble. | ||
| You see there it's talking about an April 22, 2017 video called Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You understand that that is the video that Mr. Posner and Mrs. De La Rosa based their defamation claim on? | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| When preparing for this depot, did you know that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Did you watch that video? | ||
| I mean, unless you've watched it in the last couple hours, you haven't watched it, right? | ||
| For this deposition? | ||
| I'm familiar with the video. | ||
| Did you watch it in preparing for this deposition, though? | ||
| Yes, I believe so. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| When did you watch it? | ||
| Earlier today. | ||
| Earlier today when? | ||
| During the break. | ||
| Oh, so during the break, when it became apparent that you hadn't watched these videos, you went and tried to watch this video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You didn't watch the whole thing, though, did you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because it's a 45-minute video, right? | ||
| It's a lengthy video. | ||
| Yeah, so you didn't watch this video. | ||
| You watched pieces of this video, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| How many pieces did you watch? | ||
| How many minutes total did you watch of this video? | ||
| It did not count. | ||
| That's a tough thing to admit to as a corporate representative. | ||
| I recognized a couple hours into this deposition that I was so underwater that I needed to go on break and do the preparation that I should have done beforehand. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So when I came into this, I was judging myself by Rob Dew standards. | ||
| And you're doing great. | ||
| And I really thought that I could do no wrong because I brought in Wikipedia articles and that was DW no wrong. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| But now, after talking to you, I'm realizing that I really should have crammed for my homework. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I should have done something. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It would have been really nice. | ||
| I'm still better than Dew. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I watched a video during the break. | ||
| See, Dew didn't do that? | ||
| That, I think, won't play well. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's gotta... | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Pretty bad. | ||
| So, this next... | ||
| You know... | ||
| Well, a judge read that, right? | ||
| Like, she knows that somewhere along the line, a judge is gonna go, you tried to watch it when? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| So this next clip has to do with an email exchange between Rob Dew and Dan Badandi. | ||
| So Dan Badandi had wanted to get clearance for some man-on-the-street questions that he wanted to do. | ||
| Do a man-on-the-street piece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, sure, sure. | |
| And Rob Dew responded, no. | ||
| Go to Newtown. | ||
| Cover Sandy Hook. | ||
| Get the fuck out! | ||
| Right. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| So here's how this goes. | ||
| Okay, so what we see basically here is just some proposed questions that he wants to ask random people on the street, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the follow-up email from Rob Dew, he doesn't want Dan to do that, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's going to be old by the time they can air it, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So he says, go to Sandy Hook. | ||
| We will cover that. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it was an intentional choice by Mr. Duda to want to get Dan Bedondi to go to Sandy Hook. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes, because it was in the news and the nature of the beast, so to speak, in the news. | ||
| The 24-hour news cycle expires really fast. | ||
| How was Sandy Hook in the news on 7-7-2015? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There we go. | |
| I was about to say. | ||
| I don't have the record of that right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you don't know that it had anything to do. | ||
| Sandy Hook has been in the news despite the fact that Alex have not mentioned it in years and it keeps being put in the news as if Alex is the one who is the purveyor of the Sandy Hook news. | ||
| Sandy Hook and him talking about the parents, yet it's the mainstream media who keeps mentioning the parents and tormenting the parents and the entire situation. | ||
| When you say purveyor, when he's saying, go to Sandy Hook, we will cover that. | ||
| InfoWars is being the purveyor. | ||
| Almost three years after Sandy Hook is being the purveyor of Sandy Hook coverage. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| No. | ||
| What is that then? | ||
| Is he saying that we're going to cover it and not air it? | ||
| He intends to put whatever Dan Badani does on the air, correct? | ||
| Depends on... | ||
| If the report is good or not. | ||
| And then again, in answering this question, you speculated out of thin air that there was something going on around January 7th, 2015 that put this in the news. | ||
| That made it timely. | ||
| But that was pure speculation. | ||
| You have no idea what that might be. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| That's the nature of our news. | ||
| That's how we do news. | ||
| If there's something in the news, then we'll cover it. | ||
| Yeah, y 'all were going to make news. | ||
| Do you understand that? | ||
| You were sending Dan Badani there to Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Do you know what they did there? | ||
| That's not good that she doesn't know. | ||
| I mean, if I were the corporate representative, I would definitely know that. | ||
| And I would have written some long explanation for why it's somehow okay. | ||
| Maybe some kind of rationalization at the very least. | ||
| Because it's, yeah, it's bad. | ||
| It would need to... | ||
| Look, St. Thomas Aquinas would have been proud of whatever I had written to try and get out of that bullshit. | ||
| Because it takes a lot. | ||
| St. Thomas Aquinas is fun because actually Wolfgang Halbig was harassing people at a Catholic school. | ||
| Take that! | ||
| So it's actually appropriate. | ||
| No, they were probably Cistercian monks. | ||
| So there's another email from Dan Badandi that leads to a little bit of drama in the room. | ||
| Alright, what we have here is from TruthRadio9990 at Hotmail.com and this was something sent to Rob Dew at InfoWars, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, and so we have this email here from Dan Badandi stating... | ||
| Someone you may want to get in that documentary on Sandy Hook. | ||
| And it says forward, Dan, Alex announced that he is going to do a Sandy Hook doc film. | ||
| Sheila Matthews, who you met in Hartford at a Halbig hearing, is a friend of mine who lives in the next town, and I'm going to guess that says over. | ||
| And we don't know what it says after that, but then it says, Sheila asked me to provide you with her telephone number. | ||
| It gets a telephone number, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then Rob sends it to you. | ||
| And this is April 24th, 2018, correct? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And he says, if Alex wants to go the Sandy Hook route, they want to get this lady on. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, so this is just shortly after the company was sued, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's why he wants to make this documentary, right? | ||
| I'm not sure the exact reasons for Alex wanting to do a documentary. | ||
| What is the Sandy Hook route? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| You don't want to answer that question. | ||
| I've never heard of it. | ||
| What? | ||
| So, we have Dan Badandi suggesting a guest and writing an email where there's an awareness that Alex is wanting to or planning to make a documentary about Sandy Hook. | ||
| In 2018. | ||
| Okay, so the Sandy Hook route. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, there's not a lot of beaches in Austin, but there are some. | ||
| And when you go to the beach, all right, there's sand everywhere. | ||
| And I don't know if you've heard about sand. | ||
| Sand is actually a bunch of crashed, you know, like it could be rock. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It could be glass. | ||
| It could be any number of things. | ||
| So there's sand, right? | ||
| And we were going to go fishing! | ||
| We were going fishing! | ||
| There was a sand! | ||
| We were going fishing! | ||
| There's a hook! | ||
| See? | ||
| Sandy Hook route! | ||
| Completely different! | ||
| Completely different! | ||
| Alex was working on a sort of a scene, you know, like sort of a tableau, an art decorative piece. | ||
| Oh, that sounds interesting. | ||
| Right, and it was Peter Pan versus Captain Hook, but all of the characters were Pecan Sandys. | ||
| They're all cookies. | ||
| Wow, that sounds like a delicious treat. | ||
| That is the root. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So no, her sort of response to this, generally speaking, is that like, oh no, it had nothing to do with the documentary. | ||
| It was just, Rob was suggesting this person maybe Alex would want to have on the show as a guest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't really understand how that helps that much. | ||
| No. | ||
| But she's just trying to evade... | ||
| Answering or recognizing that there was at least some kind of an internally discussed plan that Alex wanted to make a documentary about Sandy Hook in 2018 and that Dan Badandi was sending sources. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| The question about Dan Badandi sending sources, this is where things go off the rails. | ||
| If Rob Doon was sending to you a source from Dan Badandi, the truth warrior, we can be fairly certain. | ||
| That that guest was going to support the idea that Sandy Hook was fake, right? | ||
| That's a fair assumption. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| Don't answer that question. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because that's extremely misleading. | |
| That's not a proper basis to object to an instructor. | ||
| Go read the rule. | ||
| Madam Court Reporter, can you read my question back? | ||
| So it's pretty clear that the reason that this was a question that if you can pull off... | ||
| You don't want your client to answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, absolutely. | |
| You do not want that. | ||
| No, no, no, of course not. | ||
| It would be one thing for Dan Badandi just to be suggesting a guest, but for him to send in a guest on the subject of Sandy Hook, referencing a documentary Alex is thinking of making, and then for Rob to forward that on to Daria, that indicates that there was internal action being taken on Badandi's suggestion. | ||
| It wasn't just something that they ignored, like they want to pretend they always do with Dan Badandi. | ||
| You get 10,000 emails a day! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The implication is clearly that there was an interest in interviewing guests who would support that the Sandy Hook was a hoax narrative after Alex got sued in the case. | ||
| And that's why Brad, the lawyer, is saying don't answer that question. | ||
| Yeah, don't answer that question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If Rob Due was sending to you a sorcerer in the Gandhi, the truth warrior, we can be fairly certain that that must be going to support the idea that Sandy Hook was fake, right? | |
| That's a fair exception. | ||
| Have her answer the question or I'll move for sanctions. | ||
| I will move to compel that answer. | ||
| If you're having her not answer that question, it's very clear what you're trying to hide. | ||
| I want her to answer the question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't appreciate the threats. | |
| It's not a threat, Brad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is a threat and I don't really appreciate it. | |
| Look at where we are in this case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| If you know the answer to the question, proceed with answering the question. | ||
| I get sent a lot of guests on a daily basis. | ||
| There's no way for me to know this specific guest would be pro Sandy Hook conspiracy theory or the official version. | ||
| No idea. | ||
| No, I don't think that's a reliable answer. | ||
| You couldn't predict. | ||
| But I think that's... | ||
| You know, fine. | ||
| It'll just look, you know, that just looks like obfuscation. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I'm a little confused as to what Brad's up to here. | ||
| I mean, maybe Brad's just like, I gotta make it look like I'm working. | ||
| Because if I was Brad, I'm just looking at hours, man. | ||
| I think he gets the implication of answering that question. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| And if you can pull off an objection there... | ||
| You might want to. | ||
| Totally, crucially. | ||
| However, again, you're going to be fired in like a month or two. | ||
| It's past his prelude. | ||
| Alex's lawyers are not long on the job. | ||
| No, so just show up. | ||
| Why would you get into a fight with Mark? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| We both know what's going on here. | ||
| So this leads to an assessment. | ||
| Of how Badandi... | ||
| Like, what does he do? | ||
| What is he up to? | ||
| How is that guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what Dan Badandi believes about Sandy Hook, don't you? | |
| You personally, Daria Kaprava. | ||
| I do not. | ||
| You don't know? | ||
| I personally do not. | ||
| No. | ||
| As an Infowars producer here to testify as behalf of the company, you also didn't do anything to prepare to know what Dan Badandi did, right? | ||
| That's not part of the topics you were asked to talk about today? | ||
| I know Dan Badandi had questions and believed that there was a cover-up in the Sandy Hook case. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which he did his hardest trying to investigate. | ||
| As a good reporter would. | ||
| You were testifying here right now, Dan Bedondi is a good reporter. | ||
| Is that what you were testifying to? | ||
| Insofar as him trying to investigate what happened and find the truth, that's what a good reporter is supposed to do. | ||
| You seen any videos of Dan Bedondi in Connecticut and what he did? | ||
| You ever watched him? | ||
| Not recently. | ||
| You might not be the best person to qualify to talk about whether Dan Bedondi was a good reporter in Newtown, are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form, that's not what she said. | |
| That's what I'm asking her a question, Brad. | ||
| I'm asking you. | ||
| You may not be the best qualified person to talk about what Dan Badani did in Newtown, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You, Daria Kaprova, InfoWars employee. | |
| My definition of a good reporter is somebody who seeks the truth and is going to great lengths in order to find it. | ||
| So you don't... | ||
| But you can admit to me right now, you don't know what Dan Badani did in your town. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Specific auctions? | |
| Do you know about St. Rose of Lima Catholic School in Utah? | ||
| Not off the top of my head. | ||
| That's a Catholic school in question. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So yeah, that's priceless almost. | ||
| The corporate representative being unaware of what Dan Badanti did, but also saying that... | ||
| He's a great reporter. | ||
| He's one of the best. | ||
| Because you can just play he's a great reporter and then show the footage of him yelling at people in Newtown. | ||
| I mean, I assume they think that's what a great reporter does. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| The dogged persistence. | ||
| Yeah, they're very, very shallow people. | ||
| So one of the questions in this case is regarding whether or not the Sandy Hook kind of materials were used strategically in terms of marketing or that kind of thing. | ||
| And Daria says absolutely not. | ||
| Has Infowars, when making its editorial discussions and decisions about the Sandy Hook coverage, has it ever attempted to use its Sandy Hook stories and videos? | ||
| no the idea that we would make some video uploads about Sandy Hook as a strategic measure that's not something that would be a would be a part of InfoWars editorial discussion Never. | ||
| All right, so I'm a quarterback in the pocket, right? | ||
| I'm starting to feel pressure, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should. | |
| All of a sudden, I'm starting to see the defensive end running straight towards my face, because this question is not a calm and happy question that is going to end with your answer being accepted as okay. | ||
| It's a blitz. | ||
| You don't have a football, and it turns out all the rules have been lifted. | ||
| Yeah, and it's 20 against one. | ||
| There is no offensive line. | ||
| Nope, it's just you getting your ass kicked. | ||
| I'm going to show you what it marked as Exhibit 15. Can you tell me who at the top here... | ||
| Well, actually, let me start at the bottom. | ||
| At the bottom corner, you see there's a mark that says FSS-TX-076069, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Now, can you tell me... | ||
| First, let's just look at the top of the email. | ||
| Who is Darren? | ||
| Darren McBreen. | ||
| His title in 2015, do you know? | ||
| Editor. | ||
| Okay, and Rob Du we've talked about, correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Louis S. we've talked about, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, the next other person that's on here is Travis Knight. | ||
| Do you know who that person is? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay, and do you know what their job position is? | ||
| Editor. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then this email is being sent from Louis S. to Travis Knight, Rob Du, and Darren. | ||
| And the subject is video files for Facebook upload on September 24, 2015. | ||
| That's correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He asked them, can I get these video files for future strategic Facebook uploads? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct? | |
| Yes. | ||
| One of the files that he was asking for is why people think Sandy Hooks is an oaks. | ||
| He didn't think they used the fucking word. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| So we can tell from this email, and then Darren follows up and says, any luck finding these. | ||
| Correct? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We can agree from this email that Editor Darren and Louis S. were attempting to use a video about Sandy Hook being a hoax as a future strategic Facebook upload, correct? | ||
| It's one of the videos out of eight videos that he's requesting. | ||
| Sure, so it is one of the videos being used for a future strategic Facebook upload, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| Yes. | ||
| But won't you consider that there are seven others? | ||
| Oh, it wasn't just a sack. | ||
| It was a strip sack, and the defense is running all the way for the score! | ||
| Well, I mean, like... | ||
| I think, obviously, you asked the question with the word strategic in it because you know that... | ||
| Because you know the word strategic is going to be used. | ||
| It's not so much a magic trick as it is preparing. | ||
| No, well, I just would never have expected them to really have used the word strategic. | ||
| I think that at a certain point, there probably wasn't a concern about it. | ||
| No, they just didn't give a fuck. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| So Mark wants to talk a little bit about this idea of Wolfgang Halbig, because obviously he's a source for a lot of the stuff. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And especially the way that Dari is presenting it, a lot of it's probably just Halbig stuff. | |
| So the bio that she brought. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Let's go through it. | ||
| Word for word. | ||
| Let's go on to talk about Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| Would you mind opening up your blue folder for me? | ||
| You see that article on top? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's something you brought today and you were talking about how much you wanted to read it. | ||
| Today, right? | ||
| To talk about Wolfgang's qualifications? | ||
| Yes, his bio, specifically. | ||
| Right, his bio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So this article that you've brought is what you believe... | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Is that something that Infowars had before you went and looked for it for your deposition, or is that something that you got for your deposition to help you acquaint yourself? | ||
| The latter. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So before this deposition, Infowars did not have this document in its corporate files. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| The files that I looked through, that I searched for Halbig's bio, I could not find anything. | ||
| As well as, it seems like he's been memory-hold on the internet as well. | ||
| So that's the only article that I could actually find in an archive. | ||
| What? | ||
| I'm sorry, what? | ||
| Actually listed his bio. | ||
| Did you go try to search Wolfgang Halbig on Google? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you do that? | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And so when you say he's been memory-holed, I take it you're ignoring the dozens of mainstream articles about Wolfgang Halbig. | ||
| You don't want to use the mainstream articles. | ||
| No, I'm talking specifically his bio and his credentials have been memory-holed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There are mainstream articles that talk about Wolfgang's credentials or his alleged credentials, right? | ||
| Did you see any of those? | ||
| I've looked at many of them, and I did not see an actual biography. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you brought us instead this Exhibit 1F written by Dr. Eowyn. | ||
| Do you know who that is? | ||
| I do not. | ||
| I didn't bring it for the author. | ||
| I brought it for the bio that is including this article. | ||
| So now, if you're Daria sitting there, you have brought this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if the, you know, the name Dr. Eowyn, for example, it's a pretty Detail, like a small detail of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| That's being brought up. | ||
| You probably should, you know, maybe recognize it's for a reason. | ||
| Oh, no, I would be like, hold on, can I have that document real quick? | ||
| And then shred it. | ||
| Eat it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Nah, you can't prove shit, man. | ||
| Yeah, because there's bad news about this. | ||
| Do you have any faith, sitting here today, that the information contained in that article is accurate? | ||
| Yes, because even the people who disagree with Wolfgang Halbig... | ||
| Admit that he has a lengthy bio that's impressive. | ||
| Who said that? | ||
| I've read it in different articles when I was searching for his bio. | ||
| I thought you said his bio has been memorable. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| They failed to mention his bio, but they do acknowledge that he's got an extensive bio if that bio is covered accurately. | ||
| But I could not find the actual bio because the bio was not included. | ||
| It's accurate mean to you. | ||
| You think it's covered accurately there? | ||
| That's what you think? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the person who wrote that, Dr. Eowyn, do you know who that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| He doesn't have a last name, right? | ||
| I do not believe that's the person who wrote this article. | ||
| Go back and look at the first page. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I understand that the article was posted by the said Dr. Eowyn. | ||
| The bio that's been screenshotted here, it's not even typed, it's screenshotted from somewhere else. | ||
| From where? | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| I do not have the source, the exact source where it was printed from. | ||
| You have no idea where that came from. | ||
| But like I said, people who disagree with Halbig and who criticize him admit that his bio is impressive. | ||
| I'm still waiting to see that. | ||
| Do you have any information you can point me to that? | ||
| Anybody you say who's an opponent of Halbig who admits that he has an impressive bio. | ||
| Yeah, I would have printed those documents if that's what I thought I needed for you, but... | ||
| To my satisfaction, I did the research, and to my satisfaction, this bio checks out. | ||
| Let's talk about what satisfied you, which is apparently a screenshot that you cannot identify where it came from, printed in an article by Dr. Eowyn, who did you, who, first of all, that's... | ||
| Let me pull this question back. | ||
| Do you know who Dr. Eowyn is? | ||
| Did you know Dr. Eowyn wrote chapter two of Jim Fetzer's book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook? | ||
| There we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Ooh. | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Did you know that the doctor that you brought into here is only good for my case? | ||
| Wrote a chapter of Jim Fetzer's book, No One Died. | ||
| Do you want to be more closely associated with Jim Fetzer? | ||
| Let's get it. | ||
| You've created more trouble for yourself by bringing this bio. | ||
| Bananas. | ||
| This is a bananas... | ||
| Double-decker of depositions. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I'm going to skip a couple of clips here, because they're long, and they essentially achieve a very similar thing that we see in all of these, and that is this idea of, like, if you'd known that Halbig was a bad source, would you have acted on it earlier? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And then, of course, Mark produces an email from March 2014 of somebody being like, this guy's credentials do not check out. | ||
| This is no good. | ||
| Salazar responding to the guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| And so, like, there's interaction with this person who's clearly bringing up long before they stopped having him on the show that he appears to be full of shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then they did nothing. | ||
| They took no action on it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Didn't double-check his credentials or, like, whether he was a reliable source. | ||
| I mean, it looks bad, but it's something that we see kind of a bunch happen in these depositions. | ||
| It feels like, and this is what is getting into my head, It feels like neither Alex nor, and let's face it, all of Infowars, does not understand that when they are in a deposition, the plaintiff is not asking them questions. | ||
| For fun? | ||
| For fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I said, with Alex, he's not asking about your audience size for a puff piece. | ||
| No! | ||
| This is not because they know the answers! | ||
| That's the point of the deposition, is for you to say some dumb bullshit, and you're doing that! | ||
| Yes, and oh my god. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So, hold on to that idea. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Because the emails from Wolfgang that were harassing the Sandy Hook families that Mark read. | ||
| Alex, yeah. | ||
| And the Alex deposition come back up, and we heard how Alex responded to them. | ||
| Now let's see how Daria does. | ||
| So this first one is about the dirty school email. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So how could you let your daughter go to that school? | ||
| How could you let your daughter go to that school, yeah. | ||
| And here's Daria's take on it. | ||
| Okay, so first of all, how does the company feel about this email? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| What's your objection? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vague. | |
| How does the company feel? | ||
| Does the company have feelings? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| No problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's good. | |
| Good work, Brad. | ||
| How does the company feel about this email? | ||
| Mr. Halbeck is asking, it seems to be concerned for the well-being of this child. | ||
| Thank you, Ms. Karpow. | ||
| Actually, I want to read this email to the record so we can talk about it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Mr. Halbeck writes, Michelle. | ||
| How could you and your husband, as responsible parents, even allow your precious child, Josephine, to attend that filthy and deplorable-looking school on December 14, 2012? | ||
| So Mark's reading it afterwards because she was responding to having read it to herself. | ||
| She was, like, silently reading it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that was wild. | ||
| And listening to this all the way through, especially if you've heard Alex's deposition, you start to notice some really weird dynamics that only become clear if they're being asked about the same documents. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| This document where Halbig is harassing this parent about how filthy the school was is read by Daria, and then she immediately responds that it sounds like a person who's concerned about the well-being of the child. | ||
| It's just so great to know that someone cares. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a couple things that I could think of that might explain these different responses. | ||
| The first is that they may have prepared for the depositions differently, so Alex might have been slightly more prepared. | ||
| The second is a possibility that Alex has at least a modicum of emotional intelligence and can tell that he's supposed to not make excuses for an email like that, whereas Daria's just in, like, cover-your-ass and deflect mode. | ||
| As I was thinking about this, or as I call it, researching in my mind, I think I came up with another possibility. | ||
| This feels like maybe it's connected to Daria's bizarre comments about it being a function of optimism to promote the idea that the children from Sandy Hook were still alive. | ||
| I jumped right to that immediately. | ||
| This is a fantasy reality where no one with a heart would want to believe that Wolfgang Halbig was an almost cartoon-level asshole who spent his free time harassing grieving parents. | ||
| Anyone with a heart would want to believe that he's just very concerned. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yet another option I considered is that it's really difficult as an emotional thing to confront, you know, to see the actions in the real world of a person who you were an active participant in promoting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you see that he was harassing and stalking these parents and you know that your network and all your coworkers were whitewashing his reputation, raising money for him, and effectively enabling his behavior, that's got to be a bit of a gut punch. | ||
| And I can kind of see why you might want to pretend it's not real. | ||
| Here's my take on it. | ||
| Because I see where you're coming from, and I'm going to be far less generous, as is my want. | ||
| Yes, that is our roles. | ||
| I see it more like, in order to be the host, right? | ||
| In order to be on screen, in order to attract an audience, people have to be able to make an emotional connection with you. | ||
| They have to. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whether or not you're a true psychopath or whatever it is you want to say, at the very least, you have to have the emotional ability to evoke emotion. | ||
| Well, I mean, you see that with Alex all the time. | ||
| The fake and crying. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And I would say that to work with Alex, it would require an abdication of general human sympathy and empathy entirely. | ||
| And that would kind of make sense why Daria's never been an on-air personality. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, when I think about it, the more I think about people like, you know, listening to Daria's deposition, I think about fucking Tucker Carlson. | ||
| You know, like, Tucker Carlson can go on his show, and if he didn't have editorial people stopping him, he could easily, easily do all the same Alex shit. | ||
| He's just got a bigger network with people reining him in. | ||
| Lawyers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those people... | ||
| Are fucking psychos. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| Like, it's the only way that you can work with a fucker like Tucker Carlson and not kill yourself. | ||
| So I think Daria is just a stone-cold fucking psychopath. | ||
| You can say that, and I mean, like, obviously you're violating the Goldwater rule. | ||
| Yes, I am. | ||
| I think that some of these answers and, you know, this trend that you see of, like, kind of, what if we pretend everything is good? | ||
| I think that it's a bizarre way to engage with the world, and it does kind of at least speak to that difference, that dynamic of Alex knows what is expected of him to appear normal, and Daria... | ||
| Doesn't care. | ||
| She doesn't give a shit. | ||
| Doesn't need to. | ||
| No. | ||
| Because she's not somebody who's forward-facing. | ||
| No, and she's not named in the lawsuit. | ||
| I guess she'll be out of job. | ||
| She will be out of job, but that was going to happen anyways. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So now we get her response to the email about the stalking, where Halbig showed up at these people's house and was talking to their neighbors. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I wonder what her response is. | ||
| That email doesn't creep you out? | ||
| You personally? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| Creep me out the way you're reading it, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It doesn't creep you out to have Wolfgang Hobbich showing up at these people's houses and describing their three-car garage and all that stuff? | |
| Accusing them of being people they're not actually are? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That doesn't have any strong feelings one way or another on that? | |
| traction form. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Are you asking my personal opinion? | ||
| Yeah, your personal opinion. | ||
| Strikes me as a passionate man who's doing an investigation, something he believes in his own heart and wants to get to the bottom of. | ||
| Thank you, Ms. Carpova. | ||
| That's a mic down. | ||
| That's a drop-the-mic kind of moment. | ||
| That's the type of psychopathic response that CEOs give to fucking Congress, where you're like, oh, you guys just are willing to watch humanity explode. | ||
| You don't give a fuck. | ||
| But that response from Mark, that thank you, Mr. Paul, is like a... | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| It's almost like you can tell it's a containing of elation. | ||
| Like, I can't believe you said something that's going to be so damaging. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, again, Daria's steadfastly refusing to see, like, these negative things in what Halbig did. | ||
| The other email was concerned about the cleanliness of the school, and this one's a passionate investigator. | ||
| That's how they rationalize this. | ||
| I think that probably feels like good spin at the moment, but this is a huge mistake, because in a deposition setting, you need to be considering that your words are going to be played for a jury, and you should account for them having basic human emotions. | ||
| Anyone in the jury who reads or hears that email is going to be disgusted by Hal Biggs' actions, because... | ||
| It's clearly a man stalking grieving families, and when they see you making excuses for it or characterizing it as just a passionate investigator, that's going to look really bad for you. | ||
| It gives the strong impression that you're either lying to cover something up, or maybe you actually don't think that Halbig's stalking these families was that bad a thing for him to have done. | ||
| So I have some suspicion that Alex is smart enough to realize that dynamic, which could help explain why he had the responses to those emails that's congruent with how you would want the jury to see you and how you know the jury is going to respond to them. | ||
| And I don't even necessarily know where, like... | ||
| That's a conscious decision, but it might just be like, Alex gets that. | ||
| I love the way that Mark set up these emails, because you could have set it up in a different fashion and made some different points, but I just love the fact that it's like a limbo bar for empathy that he keeps raising. | ||
| You know, like, that first one, if you don't see that as monstrous, you know... | ||
| Wow, you just smacked the fucking limbo bar. | ||
| Mark then raises the limbo bar up a thousand feet of true monstrous behavior, and she's like, I bet I can hit that bar. | ||
| And that limbo bar is really just asking, like, that's bad, right? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Hey, hey, you know, if somebody were lit on fire, that would be a bad thing, right? | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there's a bunch of questions that come up about figuring out the size of the audience, trying to gauge metrics and traffic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Basically, it all just boils down to Daria having, like, I didn't do anything to figure out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Great. | ||
| Good work. | ||
| Then, we're hours into this deposition now. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| This question is damning. | ||
| You understand that the company produced documents from its own corporate files, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And you understand that some of those document requests asked for documents about my clients, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do you know who my clients are? | ||
| Can you name them? | ||
| I have four clients. | ||
| Do you know who they are? | ||
| Yeah, it's on the notice. | ||
| I mean, from memory, you don't. | ||
| You've got to pull this up, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're the corporate representative. | ||
| You don't know the names of the people suing you four and a half, five hours into this deposition. | ||
| Do you know why we're here? | ||
| It's rank disrespect to not even take this seriously enough to know. | ||
| Even if you don't want to know their names as people, maybe... | ||
| Be aware of the names of the cases. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| No, I mean, this is one of those things... | ||
| It's easy to laugh at how terrible they are in these depositions. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's very easy, because they're garbage, and they're just dumb on an astronomical scale. | ||
| But when you do hear that, it reminds me all over again, like... | ||
| That's why it's fine for them. | ||
| That's why they don't care. | ||
| It's because they never cared. | ||
| That's why they will always go find another Sandy Hook. | ||
| Because they don't care what the names are of the people who are going to bankrupt their fucking business. | ||
| They didn't even bother to know! | ||
| Well, because most of the time they won't end up bankrupting the business. | ||
| Right, but that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's why it has to be. | ||
| It has to be a bankruptcy. | ||
| I see where you're coming from. | ||
| So we only have a couple more clips left. | ||
| And one of the things that was really mysterious in the... | ||
| Alex's deposition is the questions about the giant background check of Leonard Posner. | ||
| So this comes up, see if we can get some more answers on this one. | ||
| So in terms of the document, the single document that was recently produced to me about Leonard Posner, you've never seen it. | ||
| And this is the single document? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| You see where it says FSXTX-808544? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| You don't know what this is, do you? | ||
| If I wanted to ask you, what is this? | ||
| You couldn't tell me. | ||
| Just like a background information? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I can figure that out, right? | ||
| Like, we can look at the top at the table of contents right here, and it says, for licensed investigator purposes only. | ||
| Do you see where it says that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And then you see where it says, Leonard Posner comprehensive report? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Do you see where it has all these entries about all this information about Leonard Posner? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is a lot of knowledge that the company has in its possession. | ||
| Concerning Leonard Posner. | ||
| You'd agree with that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Okay. | ||
| And some of the information that the company has about Leonard Posner and its knowledge include his possible relatives, right? | ||
| Do you see that down near the bottom of the list? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And possible, likely associates and possible associates, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And like, for instance, if we go to, do you see where it says page 66 for possible relatives? | ||
| Can you flip to page 66 in that document for me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| This is a bunch of people's personal information, isn't it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you can't tell me why the company has this, can you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No one has any idea. | ||
| I listen to these, and I just wonder, like, who could answer that question? | ||
| I know! | ||
| I mean, I genuinely believe them when they say they have no idea why they have it. | ||
| I suspect that... | ||
| I mean, I don't have any reason to believe that they are lying about that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| But it's... | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Like, who does know? | ||
| I'm not saying who knows. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| I will tell you who knows. | ||
| Rob? | ||
| You know who it is. | ||
| David Jones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Let's get him in. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Let's go get that guy! | ||
| The... | ||
| The... | ||
| The HR? | ||
| The HR! | ||
| Not anymore, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, well. | |
| That was actually a question that came up during Alex's deposition. | ||
| His dad is no longer HR. | ||
| And it turns out that it might not be that crazy that he was HR to begin with because he did some human resources for the dental company that he was a part of prior to this. | ||
| So there may be actually some tip of the cap. | ||
| Either way. | ||
| So this last clip is not where the actual deposition ends, but I would say it's where it kind of spiritually ends. | ||
| And that is in an exchange where... | ||
| So, I gotta give a little bit of a context, I guess, to this. | ||
| In the Connecticut cases, there's a guy named Corey Sklanka, who basically is a partner of Wolfgang Halbig's, an associate in some of the nonsense that he was into. | ||
| And so, part of the request for production of documents in these cases in Texas involved anything involving Corey Sklanka. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sklanka. | ||
| That's hard. | ||
| That is hard. | ||
| Sklanka? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, they obviously would know. | ||
| That there are documents involving him because he's a co-defendant in the case in Connecticut. | ||
| They would know that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So Mark and these lawyers would know that there is something that would be respondent in that request for documents. | ||
| Well, if they had done their research. | ||
| But of course, nothing came up. | ||
| And nothing was delivered. | ||
| And so this is where I think you can tell throughout this that there is a sense of growing frustration with dealing with this deposition. | ||
| And this is kind of where I feel like, well, this is... | ||
| This is... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are we even doing? | |
| You know who Corey Sklenka is, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Corey Sklenka is an associate of Wolfgang Helbig, who is a co-defendant with N4s in the Lafferty suit. | ||
| Does that refresh your memory on who Corey Sklenka is now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, not really. | |
| Okay. | ||
| You would admit being a co-defendant with Corey Sklenka in the Lafferty suit. | ||
| The company possesses documents about Corey Sklenka, correct? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Objection form. | |
| Nothing to do with the Texas cases here. | ||
| It has to do with the documents produced in response to our discovery requests, and our discovery requests were Corey Sklanka, which you would know if you ever answered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I mean, Brett, this is the most disrespectful deposition I've ever been in. | ||
| We've been in two depositions where you presented the same, your company's presented the same kind of deponent who didn't know anything about what was being on these topics. | ||
| And now for you to come in and object to topics about, I'm asking about documents produced to my discovery request, and you tell me Corey Sklanka is in response to this case. | ||
| Both of y 'all need to get up to speed on what this case is about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me. | |
| First of all, I am objecting on the basis of you asking about the Connecticut litigation. | ||
| I'm not saying you have any... | ||
| I'm not objecting to you asking any questions about your discovery requests. | ||
| Second of all, no one is trying to be disrespectful here. | ||
| She's doing her best job, and I don't care whether you... | ||
| I don't really care what your personal opinions are on her or not. | ||
| If you have a problem with it, which I'm sure you obviously do, you're going to try to do something about it. | ||
| And you know I'm going to, Brad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Everyone here has been working as hard as they can to actually get you answers that you want, and I'm sorry that out of the hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that you're asking about specific ones that she doesn't have the exact answer to. | |
| You haven't produced hundreds of thousands of pages. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, man. | |
| You know what? | ||
| You haven't even answered Discovery, Brad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So if you're going to sit here and lecture me, I would like you to show me the ones you're saying have not been responded to. | |
| What's that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which ones are you saying have not been responded to? | |
| You haven't responded to the Posner discovery in any way, shape, or form. | ||
| Have I been compelled by a court order to actually respond to those documents? | ||
| Because I got defaulted, but I haven't actually seen a motion to compel on that. | ||
| Right, and I'm proving all that up right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I understand that. | |
| But I'm unclear on if I'm defaulted on it, and I'm unclear of the obligation to actually supplement it. | ||
| But if you want to ask me to do that, then I'll do that for you. | ||
| I'm not asking that at all. | ||
| I'm asking her. | ||
| Directly, that they haven't produced me documents to my discovery request. | ||
| And I want them to admit that they refuse to answer them. | ||
| And you've just kept interrupting me about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, well, I'm sorry. | |
| I didn't mean to interrupt you. | ||
| I apologize. | ||
| That's not my intent. | ||
| And I will go ahead and answer the question to the extent you can, please. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was not hard to make that teenaged boy fall down. | ||
| That was really... | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I found that a bit tough, because it is obviously the boiling over of frustration of dealing with this nonsense. | ||
| No, everyone there knows what's going on, and they're furious. | ||
| And the response of Brad being like... | ||
| Yeah, everyone's doing the best they can. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| It's just kind of such a perfect button to end on, kind of, of these depositions. | ||
| It's like, no, everyone is not doing the best job they can. | ||
| Brad. | ||
| Brad. | ||
| I mean, he's their lawyer. | ||
| You can't be a fucking lawyer for a goddamn corporate representative and come at me with what my mom would say if I got a C and my dad was pissed. | ||
| He's doing his best. | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| So, I think we... | ||
| I mean, we're almost... | ||
| I mean, we're probably over four hours now. | ||
| Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Probably about that. | ||
| Unsurprising. | ||
| So I think one of the unfortunate things about this is that obviously there is, you know, the Alex deposition is like three hours long and the Daria one's like five hours long. | ||
| And there are things that we just obviously couldn't. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And so there are little other tidbits that are, you know, of interest. | ||
| And obviously for someone like me, it's like everything is... | ||
| It was catnip. | ||
| Yeah, there's a ton of stuff that I would sit here for 12 hours and talk to you about. | ||
| No, you really would. | ||
| If I felt like it was an acceptable thing to do. | ||
| If you felt like you could survive the encounter. | ||
| I don't think I could. | ||
| I think that your patience would wear thin right about four hours and two minutes. | ||
| That's about where... | ||
| Is that where we are now? | ||
| Pretty close. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So I found these really illuminating in many ways. | ||
| I think that obviously the Daria one as a corporate representative is... | ||
| It's not as funny as Dew, maybe. | ||
| And maybe that's because Dew was wearing the Kangol hat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he seemed scared. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he was much more scared, and he also had kind of an almost laissez-faire attitude about it, too, of like... | ||
| Hey, if I know something, I'll tell you, but if I don't know something, I'm just going to say I don't know, man. | ||
| His fear and confusion made it funny, whereas Daria's lack of preparation is clearly demonstrated in the deposition. | ||
| It didn't have the same humor, and the things that were interesting about it were upsetting. | ||
| Terrifying! | ||
| The things that she said were deeply, deeply upsetting. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I mean, yeah, that's... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Okay, it's like that psychopath test thing, you know? | ||
| Sorry to bring up John twice. | ||
| But it is like that story of, you know, like, oh, this psychopath goes to a funeral, meets somebody cool, and they're like, how do you meet him again? | ||
| And the psychopath thinks, oh, you kill somebody. | ||
| You only meet them at funerals. | ||
| That is exactly what I felt whenever... | ||
| Daria heard the email about Wolfgang fucking stalking people and she was like, oh, it's nice to know somebody cares about you. | ||
| And you're like, you are terrifying. | ||
| He's a committed reporter. | ||
| You are terrifying. | ||
| Passionate. | ||
| Yeah, these answers are incredibly bizarre. | ||
| And I think that certainly something that I wasn't as aware of before is the content of some of those emails. | ||
| That are just deeply upsetting. | ||
| Fucked up. | ||
| And the relationship between the times, when these emails are getting sent, when the harassment's being done, when there's pretty strong indications of negligence and just ignoring what they're doing and who they're promoting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just looks really bad. | ||
| No, it does not look good. | ||
| Does not. | ||
| So I'm glad to be on the other side of this. | ||
| I'm glad that now we can, you know, it's out in the open. | ||
| It is lovely. | ||
| It's a little bit of a weight off my shoulders. | ||
| Yeah, you're not good with secrets. | ||
| No, certainly not. | ||
| But I am proud of, you know, not tipping the hand at all. | ||
| You should be. | ||
| I mean, we're almost two months now. | ||
| I know, no. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| I'm proud of you for not tipping the hand, but more proud of you for doing it and all that stuff. | ||
| I'm not going to compliment you. | ||
| Please don't. | ||
| Mark already did that shit up top. | ||
| Please don't. | ||
| I'm just gonna say good work. | ||
| Thanks, Barnes. | ||
| So, hey, I guess that brings us to the end of this, but I think we may have another episode that's sort of deposition-ish next because of Alex going to the January 6th. | ||
| We'll see what happens. | ||
| So we look forward to that, but until then, we have a website. | ||
| We do. | ||
| It's knowledgefight.com. | ||
| Yes, we are also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at knowledge underscore fight, not go to bed Jordan. | ||
| Yeah, we'll be back. | ||
| But until then, I'm Neo, I'm Leo, I'm DZX Clark, I'm Daryl Rundis. | ||
| And now here comes the sex robots. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. |
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