The judge thinks that the Sandy Hook families are really concerned about a couple of million dollars in what is essentially imaginary money anyway, since there’s no way they’ll collect any more than a small fraction of the $1.5 billion he owes them. They considered shutting down Infowars to be far, far more important and were essentially saying “Instead of Jones owing us about $1.5 billion that we’ll never see, we’ll say he now owes us $1.498 billion that we’ll never see”.

I’d want the same damn thing. I’d want Infowars seized and turned into a memorial site for the victims and promotes gun control legislation. Hell, I’d say “Hey, you can knock the judgement down to $1 billion if I get control of infowars.” It’s not that I believe infowars is worth anywhere close to $500 million in real money, but it’s certainly worth $500 million in imaginary money I’ll never see anyway just to make sure he doesn’t have it.

With that said, given this timeline this doesn’t surprise me in the least. Part of me is expecting that this whole case will be reversed on appeal, either through the SC, a Trump-friendly judge along the way, or somehow through Trump’s meddling. And honestly, there’s a non-zero chance that one of these kook judges says that somehow, Sandy Hook owes Jones ten figures. Because this is the timeline we live in.

In a court filing last month, Murray’s lawyers called First United American’s request to disqualify The Onion’s bid a “disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open election process.”

Oh you know, just the usual suspects back at it again.

Can we just have something fun to tide us over for a while? Before you know, we get Trump 24/7 news next month.

Of course they did, no good things allowed to happen in this timeline

At the end of a lengthy two-day hearing in a Texas courtroom, Lopez criticized the auction process as flawed and said the outcome “left a lot of money on the table” for families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

“You got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for them,” Lopez said.

…

Lopez cited problems — but no wrongdoing — with the auction process. He said he did not want another auction and left it up to the trustee who oversaw the auction to determine the next steps.

So it hasn’t been undone, I guess?

government must not interfere with capitalism. oh. unless its for our side. then A-OK!

Boo, don’t ruin the funny thing from happening

I’m pretty sure based on the structure of the deal between the Onion and the Connecticut families this basically guarantees that the families (and any other creditors I guess) take home less money. Given the amount of money that they’re owed from the Connecticut judgement those families are basically 95% of the beneficiaries of this sale, and the original deal with the Onion had them giving up a huge chunk of what they could be entitled to in order to make sure that the Texas families (who were victimized in the same way but weren’t part of the same suit and got a much lower reward from a Texas court) got $100,000 more than they would have under the next-best offer. So in order for this to end up being a gain the next-best bid would need to either be so high that giving up $1.5 trillion wouldn’t be enough to exceed what the Texas families would get, or else it gives the other bidder the ability to cut their bid to basically nothing and in turn reduce the amount that the Connecticut families forgo and the amount the Texas families take home by however much they want.

This is all amateur analysis, but short of rejecting the Connecticut/Onion bid outright for some reason I don’t think there’s any way that this doesn’t put the families in a worse spot. Instead whoever is behind the FUAS bid (widely believed to be Jones’s allies) may get to decide how much to screw the families over.

I make it about a paragraph or two on these sites. Ad playing, playing, fucking playing, at the bottom, the top, the side, a fucking interstitial breaking up the text…

So all I gathered is that there is a guy named Lopez who agreed that the process was corrupt.

This is sorta a win win for the onion. They got some good content out of it for little expense.