InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones could soon sue his own lawyers, as Jones and his company scramble to blame someone else for their legal failures in lawsuits over their lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Jones and InfoWars have consistently lost in courtrooms across the country to families of the school-shooting victims who have filed suits over Jones’s claims that the massacre was a false flag. Last year, judges in Connecticut and Texas took the unusual steps of ruling Jones and InfoWars in default over trial, effectively declaring that they had already lost the cases as punishment for their many failures to follow legal procedure.
But the public shamings haven’t stopped InfoWars from floating the possibility that someone else is at fault for all their legal maladies. Namely, their frequently rotating members of their legal team.
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In a February deposition obtained by The Daily Beast, a representative of InfoWars’ parent company said the conspiracy-theory outlet was discussing the idea of suing Jones’s former lawyers for legal malpractice.
“I did have concerns on behalf of the company regarding the company’s prior representation, yes,” Brittany Paz, a lawyer acting as a representative for the company, said.
The possibility that Jones will sue his own lawyers struck Mark Bankston, an attorney representing Sandy Hook families in a Texas case, as odd.
“It’s unusual to see a defendant turn on his lawyers in the midst of litigation, but it certainly fits the pattern of Mr. Jones blaming everyone else for his problems,” Bankston told The Daily Beast in an email.
Bankston is also representing the estate of a man InfoWars falsely accused of being the Parkland gunman. Paz made the remarks about InfoWars’ lawyers in that case.
Paz doesn’t say in her deposition which of their former attorneys InfoWars might sue. But she singled out three lawyers—Marc Randazza, Brad Reeves, and Robert Barnes—for special criticism. Paz also accused some of InfoWars’ lawyers of badly botching document discovery in the cases, an issue that has plagued InfoWars and prompted accusations from plaintiffs’ lawyers that Jones’s lawyers were deliberately sabotaging the process.
“I’m not really sure what documents were produced in which cases,” Paz said. “And that’s a problem with the organizations amongst the attorneys.”
InfoWars’ court problems have dragged on for years, and include an apparently accidental transmission of illegal child pornography to the plaintiffs’ lawyers as part of a document request. Jones’ companies recently tried to declare bankruptcy in an apparent attempt to further delay the lawsuits.
Both Randazza and Barnes have become celebrity free-speech attorneys among conservatives for their work on behalf of InfoWars and other controversial right-wing clients. Randazza once pleaded guilty to ethical violations in a Nevada Bar investigation into whether he had cut a side-deal with another client’s legal foes.
In a statement, Randazza told The Daily Beast said that other, “utterly terrible” lawyers who have worked for InfoWars are trying to distract from their own mistakes.
“The revolving cast of lawyers at Infowars has included some outstanding lawyers who are confident in their own abilities,” Randazza wrote. “It has also included some utterly terrible lawyers who made some of the dumbest moves I’ve ever seen. Those in the latter camp seem to be interested in deflecting attention from their incompetence on to the competent lawyers who compete with them.”
Reeves, who represented InfoWars in the Parkland case but told The Daily Beast he resigned from handling InfoWars legal cases shortly before the deposition, said in an email that he isn’t sure why Paz would criticize him.
“I am confident that nothing I did (or did not do) during my time representing Infowars constitutes any sort of malpractice,” Reeves wrote. “Any suggestion to the contrary is really nothing more than an attempt by other counsel to deflect from their own mistakes.”
Barnes and InfoWars didn’t respond to requests for comment. But it’s unclear how serious the rift between Jones and Barnes actually is, with the lawyer appearing on an InfoWars broadcast just a few weeks ago.
