Alex Jones has only been ordered to pay $4.2 million thanks to a jury of his peers.
“Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones immediately took to the airwaves after the verdict in his defamation trial on Friday - which will see him be forced to pay nearly $50 million in damages to the family of slain six-year-old Jesse Lewis.
Lewis was among the 20 children who were shot dead by crazed gunman Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012. Another six people were killed in the massacre.
For years Jones claimed on his InfoWars platform that the shooting in Newton was a 'false flag' operation perpetrated by the US government to further gun control.
In his Friday broadcast, Jones claimed the trial against him was 'coordinated and run' by billionaire philanthropist George Soros and 'operatives'. He did not identify the other 'operatives' by name.
The host also accused Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of being a 'blue-haired SJW' and insinuated that she was corrupt by saying that she 'altered the record of the trial'. 'SJW' stands for Social Justice Warrior”. -Paul Farrell, Daily Mail
The government-backed media has upped the ante. They’re now going to such extreme lengths to prevent people from even privately texting doubts about the official narrative.
However, this overreach does very little to quell prevailing suspicions as to why buildings involved in such murky events so often need to be torn down afterward and why Connecticut State officials attempted to secretly bury the public records related to the shooting.
“The staffs of the state's top prosecutor and the governor's office have been working in secret with General Assembly leaders on legislation to withhold records related to the police investigation into the Dec. 14 Newtown elementary school massacre — including victims' photos, tapes of 911 calls, and possibly more.
The behind-the-scenes legislative effort came to light Tuesday when The Courant obtained a copy of an email by a top assistant to Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane, Timothy J. Sugrue. Sugrue, an assistant state's attorney, discussed options considered so far, including blocking release of statements ‘made by a minor’.
‘There is complete agreement regarding photos etc., and audio tapes, although the act may allow the disclosure of audio transcripts’, Sugrue wrote to Kane, two other Kane subordinates and to Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky, who is directing the investigation of the killings.
The bill that's being crafted has not been handled under routine legislative procedures — it hasn't gone through the committee process, which includes a public hearing, for example. Sugrue's email Tuesday indicated that a draft of the bill was being worked on by leaders in both the House and Senate, and might be ready as soon as the end of the day.
He wrote: ‘I just received a call from Natalie Wagner’ — a member of the legal counsel's staff in the office of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
‘She believes that draft language will be forthcoming today (the work of both houses) in the form of a special act. ...’ Sugrue wrote that Wagner ‘will send me the draft in confidence when she receives it, and I will immediately forward it’.
However, the legislation proposed by Kane wasn't ready to be acted on in either legislative chamber, said Malloy's director of communications, Andrew Doba. He said he did not know when that might happen.
‘A lot of people, including our office, have heard the concerns expressed by the families of Newtown victims, and are exploring ways to respect the families' right to privacy while also respecting the public's right to information’, gubernatorial chief of staff Mark Ojakian said in a statement released by Doba.
A major question yet to be settled is whether the legislation would apply only to the Newtown case, or to documents from other criminal cases that are now subject to public disclosure. A report on the police investigation into the Newtown shooting is expected to be released in June.
As envisioned by Kane, the bill wouldn't be limited to the Newtown file.
‘We are seeking legislation to protect crime scene photographs protecting victims and certain 911 tapes’, Kane told The Courant. ‘It is something that I have been concerned about for years and years and the situation in Newtown brings it to a head. I don't want family members seeing pictures of their loved ones publicized in a manner in which these are subject to be published’.
He said as he sees the legislation, it would apply to ‘basically crime scene photographs depicting injuries to victims and recordings, 911 recordings displaying the mental anguish of victims. Things like that, of that category. And it seems to me that the intrusion of the privacy of the individuals outweighs any public interest in seeing these’.
Sugrue said in his email that the ‘forthcoming’ language would be ‘in the form of a special act, not an amendment to the [state's Freedom of Information Act]’.
As originally discussed behind the scenes, the proposed legislation would have amended the state's freedom of information law by adding a blanket exemption to disclosure of any ‘criminal investigation photograph, film, videotape, other image or recording or report depicting or describing the victim or victims’.
If the proposed legislation ends up blocking the release of victims' photos and tapes of 911 calls — on which Sugrue said ‘there is complete agreement’ — it wouldn't be a significant departure from normal procedures with regard to photos, but would be a major departure with regard to tapes of emergency calls.
As a matter of long practice, Connecticut police departments do not release grisly photos of victims. These only emerge in public when placed in evidence during criminal trials, and when they do they generally are not published in newspapers or on television.
‘Our concern is the media and the Internet and all the bloggers’, Kane said. ‘If this stuff is FOI-able. ... You've seen these pictures, which are sometimes introduced as exhibits in court at a trial. The print media certainly doesn't print those. And normally the TV doesn't. But this case rose to a whole different level. Subject to FOI, any member of the public can get them’.
Audio tapes of 911 tapes, on the other hand, are routinely released by police under FOI laws in Connecticut and across the country. Law enforcement officials have refused to release the 911 call tapes in the Newtown case so far. Those tapes were released after other recent major crimes, including the 2010 Hartford Distributors shootings in Manchester”. -Jon Lender, Edmund H. Mahony and Dave Altimari, Hartford Courant
If these sorts of events weren’t fake in one way or another, the powers that be wouldn’t require legal muscle to enforce their “truth”.
Also, if a school shooting can reasonably be expected to produce $57 million in construction business revenue, one must seriously reconsider who may have an incentive to bring in the hired patsies.