The offer through the Onion would have seen them forego that money in order to ensure that the Onion won the sale.
> the megaphone that caused harmed in the first place
This is dangerously close to making the penalty the loss of his first amendment rights. In any case the studio equipment and domain names were for sale. There would be nothing stopping Jones from starting again with new equipment and a new domain name.
> even less restraint since he knows there are no consequences
He was put into bankruptcy due to a default judgement entered due to discovery issues. I think he's well aware of the consequences for a handful of his many statements and for not taking legal processes seriously.
> What recourse is left when the legal system is this broken?
Was there any chance that Jones' assets present and future would be worth anywhere near $1 billion+ dollars? Bankruptcy and this process was inevitable. There was extreme injudiciousness on all sides of this process.
His business wasn't about the exercise of first amendment rights, it was about selling supplements and whatnot.
Prison and fines are punishments, having to pay damages is not. When you can't afford to pay your debts, bankruptcy is not a punishment, it's a process to clear out the debts so both debtor and creditors can move on.
Punishment regulates the relation between a person and the state and is a part of criminal law, paying damages is part of civil law.
Just fyi he did, the court kept claiming he had to produce documents / analytics he said he didn’t have. There’s no evidence the documents ever existed, but judge disagreed, so they issued a default judgement (ie no trial).
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/15/1055864452/alex-jones-found-l...
They then had a jury trial to determine damages were in the billions (lol)
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4996347/alex-jones-liqu...
And lost in all this is what jones actually did… which in my judgement is not even liable and we wouldn’t even know because a trial was never held —
https://www.mediamatters.org/alex-jones/here-exactly-what-al...
Which, sure I think is nuts. But I don’t see anything in there besides his opinion and trying to support his bat shit crazy opinion. So what, he thinks it was a fake event. As far as I can tell from this (and perhaps I’m missing something), he didn’t do anything to anyone. If we start penalizing calling people a liar, we’re going to end up in a much worse place where all we have are liars
Which his lawyer then mistakenly sent to the Plaintiff's lawyer, so, they did have them.
Also FYI 'a trial was never held' is a common talking point used by Alex Jones on his program. He and his lawyers are responsible for there not being a trial. Their conduct guaranteed that there was no trial. It's a farce for him to complain about something that he is responsible for.
Their point is literally punishment. That is why punitive damages exist in civil law. It's what the word punitive means.
Compensatory damages are awarded in an attempt to compensate the plaintiff for the damage they received due to the actions of the defendant. Punitive damages are awarded to the plaintiff on top of the compensatory damages and their exact purpose is to punish the defendant for their actions.
They are two different types of damages and the exact purpose of punitive damages is to be a punishment. It's their raison d'etre. They were created to provide further levers to punish people.
Would you accept a jurisdiction where, instead of going to prison, you could just pay someone a bunch of money after you've raped or performed some other obviously criminal act against them?
None of what I've written in this thread is about the correctness in how damages are measured, I don't see the relevance of your comment. To me it seems like you're confusing suffering with punishment. Debt is commonly painful, but it's not a punishment.
The purpose of paying damages is to substitute someone else for harm you've caused. This is altogether another purpose than punishments. Paying damages is a reparation, punishment is based in another set of principles.
But we all know the precedent set in this case was a lie. Otherwise anyone who said the kids were really killed would have standing, since Jones thought they were "crisis actors."
We all know this was really used as a back door way to pay the parents for dishonoring the dead. Basically "meh we can't extract justice from the murderer, best we can do is get a lot of money from someone with mutual hate."
Edit: s/precedent/historical precedent/ . I did not mean to imply as assumed below this precedent is legally binding.
Less relevant to this case, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress can also both be against the law in the United States.
Your right to sell things derives from the first amendment.
Commerce is constitutionally regulated in another way, by article I of the US constitution having a commerce clause allowing regulation, which, for example, is the basis of drug prohibition.
> There would be nothing stopping Jones from starting again with new equipment and a new domain name.
so... it doesn't constrain his speech at all. I don't see how that is "dangerously close" to taking away his 1A rights
It’s fascinating (and worrying) how the people who cry the loudest about the first amendment are the ones who least understand it. The right to free speech doesn’t mean you can say literally anything without consequences. If you’re a deliberate liar who provably lies to profit and harm others, you can and should be punished.
I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said “Twitter wants to censor bullying and harassment, and the idea of free speech is that you can bully and harass people”. No dude, not it’s not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Right, and how do you obtain that "proof of deliberateness"? Or measure that non-physical harm in a way that doesn't give power to people who just don't like what you're saying (possibly the truth)?
Most people in favour of free speech already know about libel and defamation, you're just trying to muddy the waters here.
Bernhard Gaetz famously said (accurately) the victims family never got a dime from him after the lawsuit. It's quite likely similar will be said from Jones, although they can take the scraps of Infowars which is worth very little without their star loon. They are grasping at straws while being yanked around by attorneys, while the brutal truth is the real enemy that murdered their children is in a grave and they will never be able to truly dish out justice to him while they flail around looking for it elsewhere.
People do have their children murdered, and it's terrible, but they often go on with their lives.
Because of Jones, these parents were harrassed for years, forced to move home and go into hiding. Yes, it wasn't Jones doing the harrassing directly, but he was the one accussing them of being actors for years.
Now being a thinking, somewhat empathetic human being I understand people handle grief differently. I don't think he was an actor. But I understand why he might be viewed that way. It seems insane to me that somehow it was lawfared that Jone's real interpretation that it looked like acting to him (it looked like acting to me, but I know it wasn't and those kids really were killed) and somehow it is his fault that he is liable for harrassment others do under the flag of agreeing with Jones' take. That has an incredibly chilling effect on speech.
Jones did lose the civil case but it was a weird one, in the right venue, at the right time, in the worst possible light, and with pretty bad representation both of himself and spotty counsel. It's not something to look at to rest your hat on for how these things will continue to be interpreted in the future.
Again, if he’d said this once, or even a couple of times, we wouldn’t be here now. If jones could have provided any reasonable evidence to back up his claims, we wouldn’t be here now.
It is important people like Jones exist, even if what they spout almost all the time is vicious lies that nutjobs cite to harass people. Someone needs to bear the banner of the conspiracy angle, and drum up whatever evidence they can find.
It actually wasn't. The case was decided on a default in discovery and no facts were ever tried. Then the separate penalty trial was started immediately afterwards. The judgement is being appealed, but in Texas, you can collect anyways. If the appeal is successful, then the claimants may have to pay any difference back, or reduce the total amount they can expect to receive from escrow.
I really don't think people appreciate the precedents involved here. Including that one of the claimants is was an active FBI agent at the time and was suing over claims involving his job performance which has never been done before.
> Jones as a deliberate lair
Well, it could be that he actually believes what he says, if so, what exactly should happen then? This was never heard by a jury or judged on those merits.
If only there were a system of formal rules and a process where evidence is presented by highly trained and experienced experts, presided over by an impartial arbiter, with deliberation, established precedent, a system of appeals, and if only that system had been used here.
The first amendment absolutely gives you the right to lie, and the right to profit from that lying if you're not explicitly committing fraud or defaming anyone. You may disagree with it, but that's what the law is.
You don't have a right to lie.
This is defamation, which is also against the law. However, the damages here are incredibly minor, and thus not worth punishing. Most people probably don't believe you.
However, if I made a lie about you that caused you to lose your employment and become unhireable, is that also protected speech?
You don't have a right to harm others with lies. You don't have a right to lie.
I'm aware. That's why I mentioned it. There's no remediation if there's no damages.
If I'm made of marshmallows I'm not human and not eligible for health insurance. If my insurer believes your claim which is a reckless disregard for the truth and I'm denied coverage, you're liable. If my wife leaves me because she didn't want to marry a marshmallow and causes massive legal damages and emotional harms you're liable for defamation.
It's like you're arguing you have the right to punch. Like, sure, swing your arms wherever. But your right to swing your arms ends at the tip of my nose.
You don't have a right to lie about me.
However, there are very specific exceptions. You are not allowed to lie under oath. You are not allowed to defraud. You are not allowed to defame. Those states are each defined separate and apart from “lying,” which is freely permissible.
Also, doctors and lawyers are subjected to discipline by their respective guild. So even if it's your right to say bullshit, you might lose your job and license.
Arguably, there's no to little consequence of being a nobody and lying about something like autism and vaccine. It's probably isn't worth the effort to sue folks. That said, misinformation is clearly harmful and we shouldn't let people lie unchecked.
The amount of whataboutism and history rewriting going on in these comments is impressive
This is the perfect illustration of the first amendment in the US vs the UK. In the UK a violent Maoist (red guard-like) police mob went after teenager for causing offense: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12399911/Revealed-M...
The Sandy Hook parents received death threats for years because of him. That’s not “being offensive”, it’s tormenting people and putting their lives in peril.
https://archive.ph/20221013141353/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
If this trial went all the way through it seems only proper to sue MSNBC and CNN for several billion. We can directly tie the assassination attempts on a former sitting president to their violent rhetoric. They have literally used terms such as “kill”. Twitch streamers should similarly be bankrupted for even more violent rhetoric.
Fact of the matter is I am unaware of any case Jones called for this behavior. If you say something and a crowd interprets it differently that is covered by the first amendment. This isn’t a “fire in a theater” situation this is trying to use a relatively unliked character to get your foot in the door for widespread censorship.
It’s good for everyone that this didn’t go through. If you want to persecute someone go directly to the people making the threats and make an example of them. This is already illegal. Jones case was yet another left wing lawfare battle in a long war to establish completely censorship of wrongthink under the banner of “fact checkers” and “misinformation”.
The sandy hook promise people are professional lawfare soldiers. They’ve also found an end around to killing the 2nd amendment - suing gun companies into the ground. Much like BLM we aren’t allowed to ask any questions about it.
Also he certainly may have won the defamation cases against him. Too bad he totally made a joke of the process which led to the default judgement. Maybe he thought providing the discovery info was worse?
Listen to his depositions yourself if you don't believe me. Jones is a sociopath.
Before calling something impossible, consider the bare minimum effort to skim the linked article, or read any article on this subject. It is in fact quite trivial and provable.
How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
What if I, in fact, have today received 400 calls on the matter you have stated? Am I eligible to sue you?
Example lines of inquiry: How does one identify the “first mover”? How does one identify the integrity of the “calls”? What if the calls are a single caller represented separately? What if the calls are falsely represented by motive?
It's horrifying to me that when people don't like a defendant they're willing to justify almost any reduction of that person's rights in an effort to see them "punished."
> you can and should be punished.
This is a civil case. Why should he be "punished?" Shouldn't he just have to pay a settlement? Why is a billion dollars a reasonable penalty for his actions? Why must he necessarily sell his platform when the platform will make the most money staying in Jones' control? Why is it important to the victims in this case to ensure that a specific owner controls these assets?
> I’m reminded of the Twitter engineer who said
Okay, does that have any bearing on this particular case, or it's details?
They'll never be able to stop him from creating "The Alex Jones Off the Deep End Show" where he thrills listeners with zany tales of conspiracies that can only be held at bay with these brand new supplements. He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
So you're unable to think about this problem without putting your bias at the forefront?
> He just has to forfeit Infowars and its assets.
Actually, with this ruling, he does not. Roger Stone's group will get a legitimate change to purchase it to keep it under Jones' control. If you think that's a miscarriage of justice, as the OP does, can you explain why?
Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
He is a conspiracy theorist, this is his thing. And he sells supplements on his show. Those are facts, right? I suppose my bias only shows with the characterization of "zany tales"? But IMO it's not even a stretch, this guy seems really quite off base.
> Why is forfeiture of his platform a necessity in your eyes?
I mean, it's not. But he has assets and liabilities, right? Right now his liabilities vastly outweigh his assets. So it's unjust to deny his creditors access to his assets. He can keep his house and a car, I guess. Or whatever is normal/typical assets to be preserved in bankruptcy. But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.
He has free speech, freer speech than any generation before him. He could broadcast a new show from his personal cell phone and it would be dynamite production value compared to AM radio shows that have been used in decades past (and still used today). He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims that he walked back during the trial. He just risks new liabilities if he does that.
Does his typical content or advertisers have a bearing on the particulars of this case?
> But his interest in Infowars is not an inalienable right.
Neither is The Onion's or the victims. Whoever has the most cash gets the asset. So, if his partners have the most cash, why do you or the OP have a problem with him retaining the asset?
The asset is changing hands due to bankruptcy not due to any specific ruling. You seem to believe that there is a direct ruling which dictates he must sell the asset. You see the problem with this thinking?
> freer speech than any generation before him.
Does that have any bearing on the case? Are you saying what is happening is okay because he enjoys his rights more than previous generations? Where do you get this legal theory from?
> He can even resume saying things about Sandy Hook victims
You again show that your thinking is dominated by bias and you are unwilling or unable to detach from it.
Bankruptcy itself aside, the judgement against Alex Jones here is huge. I haven't looked it up but I'm sure it broke records. The plaintiffs' initial demands of trillions of dollars were absolutely insane. They could have actually gotten more money with a lower judgement that allowed him to pay over time. But clearly restitution is not the objective.
It's not the only objective, punishment is also an objective. If not you get settlements like Purdue Pharma's one which even after paying billions in damages still had made more money than that, you don't want an incentive to break the law like that, it becomes just another cost for the business and not really a punishment for it.
Not sure why the bankruptcy trustee working with the companies largest creditors, so large, that a simple proportionate would result in them claiming pretty much the entire possible payout, can be considered collusion.
The only people who can possibly be harmed are the creditors themselves. If they want to strike a deal that results in more equitable outcome, but with less total cash, that’s their business. Remember Alex Jones is on the hook for close to a billon dollars, and that sum has already been through various appeals and due process already, it’s no longer up for debate. The only question left is how Jones is gonna pay it. Unless someone creditably believes someone is going to hand over close to a billion dollars to purchase InfoWars, it seems silly to reject an offer that the creditors themselves believe is fair and reasonable.
Because there is no actual money, there must be consensus among creditors, and the assets in question might more than pay the debt (in general). I believe there are also tax implications to writing off debt in some cases, as well as tax implications associated with the actual sale of property. So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
What makes you think there wasn’t agreement from all the creditors? There is zero chance the assets can cover the debt (which is close to a billion dollars). The whole point of the deal was that the primary creditor was giving up part of their claim to allow the other creditors to actually see a real payout. There was real cash on the table, and under the rejected deal, every creditor, except the biggest, would see more actual cash in their pocket.
All of this was only possible because the largest creditors worked with the trustee to create a better deal for everyone involved. The fact it also allowed the largest creditors to stick it Alex Jones was icing on top.
> So no, you can't just go rogue and take possession of someone's property for any price you like without even having the cash, just because they haven't paid their debts or they are an unlikeable person.
If you’re the one that owns their debts, then yes you absolutely can. The current owner has already forfeited their claim to the property when they defaulted on the debt and started bankruptcy proceedings. Why the hell would the owner of the debt be required to have the needed cash on hand to repay themselves, that’s ridiculous.
Just to reiterate - the trillions number is irrelevant - it's just an initial damages claim. The judgements were for 965M and 50M - slightly over 1B in total - and the expected final award to the injured parties is likely going to be below 200k.
> But clearly restitution is not the objective.
Sure. And damages can be punitive in nature.
Free advice, kids: stay in school, don’t do drugs, and comply with court orders when you’re sued.
No they are not. Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay. That is why public auctions are the default. The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders. Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
Yes they are. They encourage people to make the best bid they reasonably can based on their desire to ensure the purchase goes through. There's a reason they are the de facto standard for bidding on government contracts.
> Technically nobody knows what someone might be willing to pay.
This is correct. But what you don't seem to understand is that this also causes people to overbid. This is the reason why the vickrey method was created - to ensure that the highest bidder does not massively overpay against the second.
> That is why public auctions are the default.
Public auctions are the default for... what? Bankruptcy? In the US, yes. In Canada and other parts of the world, no. And default does not mean only option or best option.
> The only reason an auction should be private is to protect the identity or interests of the bidders.
They are frequently used explicitly because they often get the person selling the best offer. If the people bidding in auction have asymmetric purchasing power, in an open auction, the winning bid will be slightly over the purchasing power of the weaker party. In a sealed bid auction, the winning party will frequently have a bid with a larger delta than they would have in an open auction.
> Taking one round of bids from private parties is not an auction.
Nothing about the word 'auction' precludes a single round of bidding, sealed or otherwise.
Being liable for an amount more than you have means the people you owe won’t be able to get the full amount, but it doesn’t mean you get to keep all your stuff and pay them nothing.
I think what Alex Jones is more than mere defamation.
Repeatedly lying about the reality of a school mass shooting, over years, in such a way that he caused threats to be made against the families of victims?
Incitement to credible threats of violence, and especially continuing to do so even after you're aware that's what your listeners are doing, deserves severe consequences.
Incitement means means explicitly encouraging. Just because someone people made threats of violence to the families because they believed what Alex Jones said about the shootings, doesn't mean that saying "The shootings were faked" is incitement. If Jones had explicitly said "the families deserve to suffer violent consequences for helping fake the shootings", that would be incitement.
That's why he wasn't convicted of incitement, he was convicted of defamation.
He was literally, as in literally, comparing the families of the victims to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
I don’t know about you, but if someone has been screaming at me for years that I need to be ready for armed conflict with “the enemy” and then points to someone screaming “that guy’s Hitler”, I would definitely take that as explicit encouragement. But obviously it’s all “just comedy” right?
Isn't that the standard rhetoric of progressives towards conservatives?
Tell me with a straight face that such comparisons are entirely unfair.
Especially when Trump himself says things like that he wished he had "Generals like Hitler had". Or joking that he wants Americans to treat him the way North Koreans treat Kim Jong Un
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/06/15/donald-trump-...
These people make the unsavory comparisons to themselves but Democrats can't point it out?
There’s a reason even the right wing hardliners abandoned this guy.
More to the point he has Roger Stone and Steve Bannon on the show constantly, who in turn have direct access to Trump.
Alex is firmly within the mainstream of the right wing.
I am going to pick ignorant in this case.
> “Folks, we got to get private investigators up to Sandy Hook right now. Because I’m telling you this — this stinks to highest heaven.”
> “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag — to get control! Why do governments stage these things — to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?”
Surely it strikes you as odd that the "restorative justice" crowd, which is loathe to punish real crimes, gets all worked up in defending an obviously punitive and exorbitant settlement for... mean words?
The guiding principle is obvious--For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.
https://thepostmillennial.com/new-former-fbi-current-cia-say...
In such a way that somebody else decided on their own do something...
Repeating the verifiable lie that the Sandy Hook incident did not happen, and promoting violence against the surviving families, despite repeated opportunities to stop without penalty, is beyond forgivable.
And this penalty is because he declined to defend this behavior. Remember, it's a default judgement.
The conditioning to the public is that this behavior is not tolerated in a civil society, no matter what your political leanings. Him losing his "intellectual property", but not his voice, is getting off lightly.
Targeted harassment, defamation, libel, intimidation? Sure. Dishonesty, however, doesn’t seem to even remotely cut it.
Indeed. This should be a matter of criminal charges. Jones should be in jail.
OTOH, he would, of course, be pardoned in a couple months.
The First Amendment is nearly absolute, and must protect unpopular and offensive speech even more than it protects popular speech.
(Don't start with the bogus "fire in a crowded theater exception" - that wording comes from Schenk v. United States (which was not even a 1A case, but involved the Espionage Act), and was nearly entirely overturned in 1969's Brandenburg v. Ohio. The clear falsity of the "Fire!" claim has repeatedly and wrongly used as a justification for suppressing speech for a century, to the detriment of us all.)
As much as I'd personally enjoy never hearing from or about him again, I agree that 1A is an extremely important right that should be defended, even if you hate what the person is saying.
But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences. Taking away infowars does not stop him from continuing to speak his nonsense.
> But free speech does NOT mean freedom from consequences
Freedom of speech most certainly means freedom from coercive consequences. Or do you think the first amendment merely prevents the government from engaging in physical prior restraint such as putting duct tape over your mouth, and post facto punishment is legal? Ultimately this "consequences" refrain is a broken talking point that was arrived at by people arguing for the attractive cryptofascism of big tech censorship [0].
The right answer is that there are "exceptions" [1] for freedom of speech based on other concepts. For example, forming a contract (especially a verbal one) is done entirely through speech but yet still commits parties to performing other actions in a legally enforceable way. Defamation and harassment are other concepts that get equitably weighed against the ideal of freedom of speech. And those last two are what Jones ran afoul of.
[0] It started off something like "... consequences from private parties" and then the last bit got dropped because the focus wasn't a good faith discussion of freedom but rather a cheering on of the consequences. See also the fake libertarians saying "edgy" things like those who can't afford food should die - their focus isn't really the freedom but rather it's the death.
[1] In actuality they are not exceptions but rather equitable balances. The axiomatic-foundation framing of rights is a dead end, as it intrinsically supports the cryptofascism of denying rights through an ever-increasing amount of preconditions.
You're going to be hearing that word a lot in the next four years. May as well get a head start on it.
How is a bankruptcy case "stealing stuff through improper process"?
On the point of "any award in the billions (much less trillions, as they initially demanded) is exorbitant for mere defamation" this is a pretty clear misunderstanding of our legal system as it is today. Initial claims are a mere formality that do nothing but potentially limit damages - the judgements rendered against Jones were 965M in the Connecticut case and 50M in the Texas case - no other numbers are relevant. Finally, referring to 1.015B as "Billions" feels rather dishonest - the total award is technically above a billion but the families will see nothing near that amount in the final resolution.
Ok then, the lawsuit was settled with an absurdly large judgement. Nobody thinks he has this money.
>Initial claims are a mere formality that do nothing but potentially limit damages - the judgements rendered against Jones were 965M in the Connecticut case and 50M in the Texas case - no other numbers are relevant.
I think it's relevant as to the intent, which is to get a ridiculous sum rather than simply a reasonable one.
> Finally, referring to 1.015B as "Billions" feels rather dishonest - the total award is technically above a billion but the families will see nothing near that amount in the final resolution.
It's not a mere technical distinction. The fact that the number is so high essentially guarantees that AJ cannot pay it. A lower amount might have actually been paid. What can we make of this? The intent was not to get restitution, but rather to destroy the business. That seems unethical. But we're arguing about petty distinctions now. I doubt you will see things my way today so let's stop here.
> It's not a mere technical distinction. The fact that the number is so high essentially guarantees that AJ cannot pay it. A lower amount might have actually been paid. What can we make of this? The intent was not to get restitution, but rather to destroy the business. That seems unethical.
There is actually an important reason to secure an absurdly high judgement - some of the creditors involved in this situation are Jones parents (and I believe some affiliate companies also hold some of the debt). The judgement will be divided proportionally by debt so the size of the judgement will impact how much money from the bankruptcy sale Jones' parents will receive.
I also think it's fair to view this case through the lens of ongoing damages - Jones has received C&Ds about Sandyhook and ignored them - even during the trial he continued to cause additional damages. There was every indication (to me at least) that if the business survived the damages would continue and the only way to reasonably make the other parties whole was to destroy the business.
I understand this may feel like unnecessary censorship but the path to this point was AJ repeatedly ignoring the justice system saying "Stop doing that" and his response to the process up to this point hasn't been to act in good faith.
The judgement was derived from the absurdly large damages he was proven to have caused to his victims.
If he has no money to compensate the victims of his actions for the absurdly large damage he caused then this means he's bound to declare bankruptcy.
> I think it's relevant as to the intent, which is to get a ridiculous sum rather than simply a reasonable one.
The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
Obviously the amount of damages is entirely subjective. AJ said mean and inaccurate things on his podcast or something and that's about the extent of what happened. No person or thing was physically harmed because of this. There was no doubt some stress involved in being the subject of his podcast, but how much is that worth? There are people who literally get killed or maimed and their families don't get anywhere near this kind of settlement.
>The intent is to ensure that people like Alex Jones cannot cause damages to innocent third-parties. The intent is to bring down legal consequences that match the damages caused to others in order to hold him accountable for his actions. Think: if you are going to constrain damages to your cash grab perspective, you'd be ensuring that those well off would be free to cause damages to everyone around them provided the are not as rich so that worst case scenario they would pay a symbolic fine and change nothing in their antisocial behavior. Do you think this makes sense?
The emotional damages caused to others here are unfortunate but not worth a billion dollars (at least from where I'm sitting). You don't have to go to such extremes to discourage someone rich from doing bad things. It could have been a more reasonable number that can actually be paid over a reasonable amount of time. Making those payments would remind the offender to be more careful.
A judgement is what happens when the parties fail to come to any agreement about a settlement; A settlement would be where you'd figure in realistic actual compensation odds.
Also: "Destroying a business" and "unethical"? Businesses are artificial constructs we create and protect only for the social benefit they bring; They have inferior ethical status to human being in terms of accountability, behavioral psychology, and the sheer intangibility of meaningfully "harming" a business. We should be employing meaningfully large civil judgements against businesses far more often, because our criminal laws being difficult to apply at corporate scale so often fail to deter criminal wrongdoing which the justice system would otherwise throw the book at a biological human for.
Steal one person's house out from under them using fraud and we throw you in prison for 10 years. Do it with 100,000 houses from beneath the corporate veil, and we bail you out for your losses from having to relinquish the mortgage.
If not sizable fines, we should be employing "The Death Penalty", and simply revoking their corporate charter and seizing all their assets in a blanket action, when they do abhorrent things. Because, and I can't stress this enough - they aren't people, they're potentially dangerous, amoral / psychopathic algorithms which will only comply with rules to the extent that rules will be enforced in a way that destroys shareholder value.
Sometimes destruction of the business is restitution. Nothing unethical about that.
Someone saying publicly that you faked your child's death is an unforgivable insult. Money is beside the point here.
Now, most of these parents have dealt with consistent harassment of varying severity revolving around their dead kids for longer than the children have been alive in the first place. Many of these parents never even got the chance to grieve in peace before the harassment, stalking, assault and attempted murder (not sure what else a drive-by-shooting qualifies as) began.
Certainly, if any of these nutters continued to harass the parents after Jones issued a retraction, that's entirely on the nutter. But the thing about our legal definition of slander/libel is that it does take into account what happens when third parties hear and act on the slander/libel. Like, if I accuse somebody of pedophilia, and somebody else, of their own accord, murders the person I accused, the murder is considered in determining what the legal remedies are against me, even as the murderer is on the hook for the murder as such.
Hide: "put or keep out of sight; conceal from the view or notice of others."
The fact is that most of complainers here would be laughed out of the bancruptcy court, yourself included.
Selling assets for nothing before bancruptcy is legal, but will almost certainly be scrutinized by the court. The court has a broad power to collect the proceeds, sue the purchaser for the difference from the market value, and take additional steps to recover assets.
You can argue about the legality of what he did if you want, but being a pedant about the dictionary definition of the word "hide" just detracts from your main point by showing that you're arguing in bad faith.
The problem is that the vigilante might not have the right version of justice
(And plenty of the black and whites were guilty.)
"Years of lead" in a political sense I mean. In a more general sense, you already are in "Years of lead".
Atrocities against people were committed using this logic since the dawn of humanity. The bigger problem is this way of thinking is used to justify the vilification of people even to this day. See debates on supporting US election candidates.
Someone one day might decide that your mom/dad broke law and evaded justice and it's therefore OK to un-alive them because the court system failed.
Which is why countries where vigilante justice is common are significantly more dangerous and worse to live in than where it's not.
He was fined over a billion dollars, in what world is losing a billion dollars no consequences?
Parent’s point is that the amount of the fine doesn’t matter if he is able to avoid paying it. It could have been a quadrillion. A fine only matters if you actually have to pay it.
On an average-person-level, some municipalities nearby me have decided to not basically not do anything about parking fines. As a result, there are vehicles that over ten thousand dollars of fine. But they are still allowed to renew their registration and drive their vehicle. So it’s just a made up demerit.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280221/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1501065112
https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
However
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/frogs-rev...
but, > The findings in no way exonerate pollutants like the widely used herbicide atrazine, scientists caution.
I was always under the impression that the performance art he did with the frogs was in reference to Chlorpyrifos. And I am in concert with Alex Jones here. I agree with him. This crap is not good, is banned throughout the world, and is a mammalian neurotoxin.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1203396109
https://www.salon.com/2020/12/08/chlorpyrifos-neurotoxic-pes...
But you and I both know he crosses the line (and enjoys doing so) from authentic to clown. He'll bedazzle a libertarian and country boy with quirky strange perspectives that have a kernel of truth and then drag them down into the dark ass netherworld he's living his life in. He spins people up and inflames their amygdala's and connects the dots to some dark metaphysical Ba'al. But then he still comes back around and sells you some seeds and some product to stock your nuclear fall out shelter. He's one part performance artist one part grifter. But he crossed a third rail when he tried pulling the parents of a school shooting into his bi-polarish world. Bottom line with a guy like Alex Jones is that he's always going to connect the natural failure-state of a system (FDA regulatory capture) to some fever dream Ba'al conspiracy vs acknowledging that humans and their systems are flawed and that the natural state of a government is one in which it is picking winners and losers (cronyism) and it's been that way in his country since Washington's soldiers and officers mutinied over pensions. https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collect.... That didn't need the illuminati becuase, like the FDA, it's the natural mode of humanity and a system to fail.
Trans frogs, sure, but sex and sexual orientation are different.
> EE2 exposure at all concentrations lowered male sexual arousal, indicated by decreased proportions of advertisement calls and increased proportions of the call type rasping, which characterizes a sexually unaroused state of a male.
So the males also became uninterested in sex with females. Given that I think you must be really nitpicking to find fault with what he said.
I mean...this IS Hacker News. Extreme levels of pedantry is just par for the course, isn't it?
Also - until he actually pays any of that billion dollars, there have been no consequences.
His lawyer already stated “Finally, a judge followed the law.”.
That $5.25m debt forgiveness would have to be valued at $1.75m or more for the winning bid to actually be higher, but if other creditors are assuming that they will have losses of higher than 66% then the $3.5m all-cash bid would actually be better for other creditors.
So long as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways.
Did the judge argue against the single round or the sealed price?
Criticising sealed bids is nonsense. The gold-standard auction (Vickrey, or more accurately, VCG) features sealed bids. If the judge is criticising sealed bids at all, The Onion should appeal.
Criticising a single-round auction, particularly with two bidders, on the other hand, is valid.
> as the families forgoing parts of their judgements is allowed to be part of the bids though any competing bids seem doomed, it's a big war chest they can throw around that's essentially meaningless because they'll never be able to collect it anyways
Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
> Isn't it also meaningless if the person whose estate they're collecting is bidding against them?
The blatant attempts to move assets out of InfoWars during the bankruptcy is an entirely different story but that money may technically come legally from outside the estate.
Sure. But nobody uses Vickrey because it's impossible to explain to the public why the highest bid wasn't accepted.
> Without the second price you're trying to bid just enough to outbid the other party/parties which won't maximize bid size
Which is exactly what happens in any single-round first-price format. The only thing an open auction does is facilitate collusion. Let me repeat: for a single-round first-price auction, sealed bids are the only way to go.
> that money may technically come legally from outside the estate
It may but it doesn't. Jones saying the judge "ruled in our favour" (emphasis mine) sort of gives away the game.
Google used to use second-price for all their ads, though I think they've stopped: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10858748
(Which I think, sadly, supports your claim around them being confusing)
This sounds small, but it's a huge difference. Let's I know that some widget is actually extremely valuable, and would be willing to pay up to $1,000. You don't know this, and are willing to pay $80. In a true second-price auction I put in $1000, you put in $80, the bids are unsealed and I pay $80.
But with the e-bay system, if I put in $1,000 at the beginning I've partially tipped my hand by bidding it up to $80. You started with some uncertainty about the value of the object, but knowing that I agree it's worth at least $80 pushes you in the direction of thinking it's worth more. This is a major advantage of sniping: by putting your bid in only at the last minute you keep others from reacting to your bid by changing theirs, and so convert the auction into something much closer to a true second-price auction.
There's also some assumptions built into these analyses that there's at least two people who have a reasonable perception of the value of an item. Things get massively more difficult to analyze when you start including changes in perceived value.
The point is, in the above example, you wouldn't bid $1,000. So I will bid $50. Then $60. Then $70. Then $80. Then $90. And then, seeing the price has changed, I will stop. And wait. I am willing to pay $1,000. But it doesn't ever make sense for me to bid that.
That's the beauty of the eBay system it works for people to interact in two ways, as a more boring sealed second bid system and as a live cry auction. The biggest point it falls apart is you need a certain number of people to understand the system to act rationally about it. If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one.
Yes. It's why people use bots, e.g. [1].
For low-value products, particularly amidst repeat auctions, the incentive to do so is small enough that one can mostly ignore it. For a high-stakes auction, you're just devolving the game into a high-frequency race.
> If you only have people treat it like a live cry auction then it defaults to acting like one
The point is it really only works as an English auction. The "sealed" bid is for convenience. (It's not really a sealed or even semi-sealed bid, it's just a dumb auto-bidding bot.) Run a major auction with this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
> this format and you'd have zero activity until the millisecond before bids were due followed by a mountain of lawsuits.
Sure but no one does, the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism. Major auctions don't need to make that accommodation, the audience can be relied on to read and think about the auction structure which is unfortunately not an option you can really take for a mass market tool.
Of course you can. You repeatedly enter marginally-higher bids until you crest their limit. The only case where the auction is efficient is if the automatic bidder is the highest and someone else bids up to their maximum.
> can't snipe a true higher still sealed bid not matter how good your bot is
Correct. But eBay doesn't have sealed bids. You can absolutely snipe an auto-bidder; this is like the first high-speed algorithm that was ever developed in the real markets.
> no one does
Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
> the eBay model is a compromise to make the bidding structure more familiar to people who don't understand the second price mechanism
...yes. The eBay model is a compromise that works for unsophisticated bidders and low-value auctions. eBay's model is a known-flawed model that does not "discover the best price an item can be sold for in a reasonably constrained time" [1].
That's not sniping. Inherent to last second sniping is you get a limited amount of chances to boost your bids, in the best case you're taking one shot at the bid to place it at the last millisecond eBay will accept your bid. You're trying to get the last bid in on an auction so no one has a chance to respond. Incrementally bidding up to find the ceiling is directly opposed to the goal of having a sniping bot.
> Literally pointed you to an eBay bidding bot.
That was talking about other auction runners using the eBay model for extremely high value items because of the complexity of execution, not about people using bots. I know people use bots it's just that to win they have to beat the bid placed by people using the second price functionality. I'm not denying their existence just questioning how effectively they actually distort the auction structure.
If a lot of different people (using different bots to avoid GIXEN's automatic mini auction) all place their maximum bids at the last second the winner is still the person with the max bid be that a bot user or a pre bidder.
The winning strategy to win that bidding war is still to place your maximum bid in the bot and if everyone does that it's just a normal sealed second price auction. The bot strategy just relies on there not being enough interest in every item and finding one where you can bid less than your maximum and still win which is also true of a pure sealed second price auction. I'm just not seeing where the strategy and outcome differ by including bots if there are second price bidders in the mix bidding their true max.
The reason people don't do this on eBay is because sellers can have a friend bid on the item to raise the second-place bid more than you're willing to pay (shill bidding). The Nash equilibrium for second price auctions is to only bid the maximum you're willing to pay. Bidding a higher amount leaves you vulnerable to these shill bidding tactics.
Of course... why would you ever bid more than you're willing to pay? Huge doesn't mean more than your maximum.
Also those shill bids are also betting on being able to perfectly find the point where they are juuuust below your max bid without knowing the actual max bids on the item at any given moment. If they fail they can not pay out but the seller is out their time and any listing fees (depending on the eBay era we're talking about). Conceivably you're still willing to pay your maximum bid the second time an item is available in most circumstances.
Even shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item. The goal of the auction is to benefit the seller not the buyer's ability to get a deal. It would probably be fixable by making the bid more binding but that's a separate issue you're still paying at max your nominal maximum price if you win.
Yes. That or you use one shill to uncloak the max and then another to bid just below it. Worst case, as you said, you're only out your listing fee.
> shill bidding aligns with the goal of auctions to find the maximum price for an item
Which is why for high-value items in a system subject to shill bids, bona fide bidders don't put their actual maximum price into an unsealed (or semi-sealed) system. Which lowers the auction price.
Klemperer wrote an approachable intro to auction theory.
VCG is second price, so we're already in a sub-optimal regime with a first-price format. (All while illustrating why Vickrey auctions don't work with unsophisictated observers. Could you imagine the shitshow if The Onion won and then didn't have to pay their bid, but Jones's?)
Given first price, I don't think the number of rounds is revenue equivalent.
The VCG auction is only good in theory. In practice, most people don't know how much they actually value a thing, and when they are trying to play the VCG game they typically underbid and later have deep remorse. That's the most common mistake, but I've seen plenty of other mistakes as well.
In other words, VCG auctions tend not to work well because the bidders often don't have a strong enough grasp over game theory nor a deep enough understanding of how valuable an asset is to them, and therefore the VCG usually generates suboptimal outcomes.
In my experience, the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go. Instead, you have to talk yourself into taking a risk on being left holding the bag if you choose to push the price up.
May I hazard a guess that you worked on low-value recurring auctions? You're describing unsophisticated bidders unwilling to expend search costs. For them, yes, "the seller has an interest in providing participants with as much information as possible about the object’s value" both before bidding starts and during it, the latter due to the impact to bids being less than the overcoming of search costs.
> the auction that seems to work the best is the Ebay auction, where you get immediate feedback if you underbid, but you aren't allowed to see how high the other person is willing to go
Another comment highlights why this doesn't work for high-value items [2]. (They also assume bona fide bids, which isn't a problem if you can filter out shill bids.)
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2020/pop...
It varies. In all cases, the value was below $20,000, in many cases the auction was non-recurring and >$1,000 (for example, specific web domains). I've seen enough smart people fumble a $1,000+ VCG auction that I'd be nervous to assume bidding would be any better at $100 million. I've also seen enough investors fumble $10m+ investment deals (not auctions though) to feel comfortable asserting that a higher value auction does not necessarily imply that the participants will be better at auction theory.
So it sounds like the judge specifically had issues with the use of sealed bids.
The creditors already own the asset. The estate is selling, not Alex Jones.
If you asked every creditor which bid they preferred, which do you think they'd choose? The creditors forgoing their claims obviously prefer one. As for the rest, they'll choose the one that pays them more: The Onion's bid.
This isn't how bankruptcy works in practice, but it's a good shorthand for what the correct answer should be.
The parent comment, quoted above is misinformation.
What?
The whole point of bankruptcy is that the creditors do not get to vote and the solution that makes the majority happy isn't the best one. In an ideal bankruptcy everyone recovers the same percentage of their debt.
As opposed to selling the building for $1 million cash and everyone getting 2% of what they are owed.
If this case were an article in The Onion, it'd seem too unrealistic to be funny. Well done, Global Tetrahedron!
(Perhaps they should.)
Recusal is evaluated case-by-case so an all-for-everything situation, like you've described, is unwarranted.
If the judge has a one degree of separation personal relationship with the party, then yes, they should.
Federal Bankruptcy Law provides the procedural framework.
So, Delaware law does in fact have nearly everything to do with it.
Federal bankruptcy law sets the substantive as well as procedural rules for bankruptcy, and its substantive provisions trump any state law, but, OTOH, state law has some role both in determining what the set of claims going in to bankruptcy are and, to the extent permitted in federal bankruptcy law, setting things like allowable personal exemptions, etc.
How would the corporate charter affect the fairness of how the auction was conducted?
So potentially has massive implications for the auction and its fairness.
What does Delaware have to do with it? If DE had any jurisdiction, what law would have been broken?
https://www.dailydac.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/0859-Win...
So it is more of a question to the bankruptcy court itself, as I would agree that there's no value in Infowars without Jones. So my opening bid to the court is $1.
He paid $44B. He probably could have got it for less at the time, but if you think it's not worth that, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally where all news gets broken. All of it. And he's using it to influence global politics.
Not everyone thinks this. Are you talking about the financial geniuses in the comments?
>To the point, he was forced by a court to honor his original higher price than what he wanted to pay after re-evaluating it.
What's your point? The original comment was to imply "Haha! Elon overpaid for Twitter!". The company is worth more than $44B. Not sure why you're quibbling about being able to buy at the absolute rock bottom price, even when he got and will continue to get value from the purchase.
It's indisputable that Twitter was worth $44B at the time of the sale because by definition the price of something is what the buyer and seller agree to perform the transaction.
What's also indisputable is that even Elon Musk was refusing to pay that much for Twitter and tried to back down until he was sued to force him to put his money where his mouth was.
I know you think this is some kind of deep philosophical insight, but there's an entire industry built around getting value from an asset beyond the price paid. We don't live in a world of perfect information.
FUAC's offer was all cash. The Onion offered less cash, but offered other incentives (AIUI, a share of whatever revenue they make from Infowars in the future). Saying that The Onion's bid was lower requires you to put a dollar value on those other incentives. The fact that the two creditors (read: victims' families) that would benefit from those incentives were willing to sacrifice some of the debt they were owed so they could benefit from those incentives suggests that at least _they_ think those incentives were worth more than the cash upfront, and the amount of debt they were willing to sacrifice gives you an implicit baseline for that dollar value.
Given the site we're on: it's like saying that an offer with a lower base salary but higher equity is automatically a worse offer than a bigger salary with no stock.
What is that realistically? They said they will turn it into gun safety information. How does a gun safety information site make money out of an audience of people expecting a guy shouting about conspiracy theories?
That doesn't make sense. A genuine offer for an unprofitable thing could be made. That's not farcical, just a bad investment.
The structure of the bid was quite complex but essentially the largest debtor agreed to enlarge the share the second largest debtor would receive by supplementing it from their own share due to the awards in the two court cases being so drastically different (basically the largest debtor decided to decrease their own share in that specific bid to supplement the second largest debtor) - this bid was the one that the primary debtor prefers and would award a lot more value to the secondary debtor than the bid that was, on paper, larger.
There are some good detailed analyses of the arrangement out there that would give you a much better understanding than I can communicate second-hand - I'd suggest the overview by LegalEagle[1], personally.
The debtor generally deserves their case to be discharged resolved liquidated closed and done forever.
Paying ongoing reparations in royalties or whatever the onion proposes doesn’t accomplish this. Alex Jones himself could convert his case to a chapter 13 and set up a “repayment” plan based on his own anticipated/potential earnings from his own business. It would possibly even be higher, infowars intended audience is probably more profitable than people laughing at infowars on Ben Collins bluesky feed.
The people who got a personal judgment aren’t made whole by a promise of future restitution by someone purchasing his business assets.
What if the onion went bankrupt next year and said oh we’re not going to pay that anymore?
That would be an interesting case to test: a person being relieved from a fraud or criminal tort, as it’s handed off to a third party buying their business, who themselves didn’t commit fraud or a criminal tort and merely became insolvent which is dischargeable.
In the case where the “creditors” own the asset to settle their claim, that’s another story, whether they make $1 or a billion dollars disposing of it is no longer the debtors problem
In the same way that returning my smashed up uninsured car to a secured lender doesn’t make them whole for my discharged loan either.
Sure it does, the Onion would be paying the royalties, Alex Jones already doesn't own it, it's essentially owned by an estate that is selling it off to cover Alex Jones' debts.
The creditors own the asset. If every dollar the creditors are owed voted, which bid would they choose?
If this is the case, dollars voted are less important than outcome value to the creditors. It is their asset, no? They are assigning value and signaling accordingly.
Sure. I’m trying to approximate a metric that gives their weighted interest. My point is the owners of the asset are selling it, and it seems their interests are obviously maximised by one bid.
The Judge has decided that's unfair, likely due to some bias (intellectual, political, etc.)
Who is right I don't know.
Sealed-bid auctions are incredibly common across markets [1]. Real estate. Corporate mergers.
Note, too, that an English auction is revenue equivalent to a second-price sealed-bid auction [2], and here we had a first-price sealed-bid auction with two bidders.
There may be valid reasons to challenge this auction. Sealed bids is absolutely, definitively not one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-price_sealed-bid_aucti...
[2] https://www.sfu.ca/~idudnyk/Auctions_Part2_Revenue_Equivalen...
No, it really isn’t. Not with two bidders. The moment the first party announces their bid you have perfect collusion (if the second party, rationally, runs out the clock) or a stalled auction (if running out the clock is impossible, thereby always allowing someone to always claim they’ll bid better).
Wrong. Vickrey auctions are well studied in single-item auctions even with two bidders [1]. (They perform between 4/3 and 2 compared to an optimal omniscient auction. Not solved. But not unstudied.)
> claimants to receive 100% of the equity of the business
This is Chapter 7. The bankruptcy estate already legally owns the asset, not Jones.
[1] https://www.timroughgarden.org/papers/bk.pdf Examples 4.6 and 5.2
Call it 52,000 from the onion sale.
well now someone says I could have bought it for 10 million.
trustee now gets $300,000. They’re not going to get in the way.
Blind bidding doesn't let people improve their bid, but it also lets someone bid much higher than the second best bid, so it can be extremely profitable in some situations. Compare to a version of said auction where you bid only once, but where the winner will only pay the second best bid plus one.
Imagine game theory dynamics in poker if an unhappy player could say "well, come to think of it, I guess I did not really want to see, I'd rather fold"
What evidence are you basing this on?
The judge seems to take Jones, the guy who lost the auction, as the arbiter of what happened. That is a problem and not just because of the strong potential for bias, and not just because the trustee would be a more obvious source of truth - because he ran the auction. Its a problem at a deeper level because the judge seems set on taking Alex Jones as a good faith actor. Every step in the court process has shown that not to be true. We aren't here randomly and this bankruptcy doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Even setting aside that nonsense. THe judge seems confused on the difference between money and value. Thats the type of thing an undergrad gets wrong.
That seems a very foreseeable outcome.
Instead we have people crying that free speech is the actual evil crime here.
Is this a satire comment? I hope so or else you need to do some reading on what "free speech" actually means. It doesn't let you defame someone, for example, by telling them they were crisis actors in a mass killing of school children.
This is basically going to be the United States for the immediate future, if you're connected to the right people.
Downvote all you want, but we see it with our own eyes.
It followed a long-established historical precedent.
Clinton pardoned his brother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_pardon_controvers...). The Bushes pardoned their Iran Contra cronies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby_clemency_controv...). Trump pardoned his son-in-law's father (and now appointed him to be the French ambassador; https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charles-kushner-nominatio...). Pardons have always garnered controversy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
> Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.
Another interesting thing I found about Hunter's pardon was that the president openly said isolated prosecutions of lying on the 4473 are unfairly targeted, but then baffling only pardoned his son for it.
Comparing one guy who was in the hot seat only because of his surname to the incoming shit storm is risible.
And some of these incoming people threatened to keep going after him just to inflict pain on his father.
These are no longer the party of Romney and McCain. "The cruelty is the point".
They rejected it because it was worded to absolve him of all crimes, not just those charged, and the judge found the parties did not agree on which interpretation was correct so there was no agreement. It is completely appropriate for the court to want to know exactly what the plea agreement covers and to make sure both sides actually agree on the meaning of it. They could have ended it by coming up with a simple, normal plea agreement that doesn't have that strange ambiguity.
If anything, that looks more like an attempt to do a backdoor non-pardon pardon than some kind of persecution. It was only "dragged out" because Biden's DoJ did not agree in court with Hunter Biden's lawyers on what they had actually agreed to.
And despite the "they" in your sentence seeming to refer to Republicans in some capacity, from start to finish, the Hunter Biden prosecution was done by Joe Biden's Department of Justice. You may complain that the judge was appointed by Trump, but the charges couldn't have been brought to begin with without Biden's DoJ authorizing it.
There exists boatloads of concrete evidence Hunter Biden was guilty of several categories of crimes, related to drugs, corruption, illegal firearms and child prostitutes.
There’s a reason he had to be pardoned by Joe, right? He essentially created a “the full laptop” pardon, complete unprecedented.
Any other person guilty of half these things would be in for life.
You got it backwards. He didn’t get a shit storm due to his last name. He got a free pass due to it.
If Harris had won, Biden would not have pardoned Hunter. Likely Harris would've pardoned him in a year or two after he'd seen prison.
Exactly. The lawfare must stop.
Since the murderer was a broke nobody, they instead went after someone who defamed the dead. The cultural leanings of Alex Jones are easy to attack and he had deep pockets.
The premise is basically Jones defamed the living by lying about the livings factual representation of the dead. But that is only a deceptive legal spin of what actually happen, that Jones defamed the dead. But you can't win judgements for defaming the dead, so you just say you've defamed the living by saying they're lying about the dead.
It gives me incredible joy to know Jones has mitigated this effect with the same legal deception used against him.
Surely there must be a legally viable way to resolve such a bankruptcy that doesn't involve the assailant buying back the gun with funds raised from friends.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/supreme-judicial-court-chief-justi...