The Onion's acquisition of Alex Jones' Infowars network was paused Thursday by a federal bankruptcy judge in Houston after attorneys for Jones and a company affiliated with him that bid $3.5 million complained about how the auction was conducted and how the publication's bid was managed.
Jones was forced to put conspiracy-minded Infowars and other assets for sale after a judge ruled in June he had to pay roughly $1.5 billion in damages for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut was a hoax. For sale were Infowars' website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; video archive; and other assets.
The Onion, which planned to relaunch Infowars as a parody website, was named the winner of the bankruptcy auction held in Houston earlier Thursday.
But Judge Christopher Lopez of U.S. bankruptcy court for the Southern District of Texas said he was concerned about how the bidding process played out and ordered a hearing for next week to review how the auction was conducted, The Washington Post reported Friday.
At the court hearing Thursday, Christopher Murray, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy auction, said The Onion did not have the highest bid, but because the Sandy Hook families agreed to forgo some of their defamation award to pay off Jones' other creditors, The Onion's bid was the best deal, the Post reported.
Murray did not share the dollar amount of The Onion's bid but said he followed the rules laid out by the judge that allowed him to skip a round of bidding that would have let interested parties try to outbid each other.
"We're all going to an evidentiary hearing, and I'm going to figure out exactly what happened," Lopez said, according to the Post. "No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction."
During his Infowars show Thursday, Jones called the sealed bidding process "rigged," according to the Post.
In a statement to the Post, Ben Collins, a former NBC News reporter and CEO of Global Tetrahedron, The Onion's parent company, said the bid from his company and the Connecticut families has "been selected as the winning bid for Infowars. The sale is currently underway as part of the standard processes."