Judge pauses the Onion’s takeover of Infowars over auction concerns

A federal bankruptcy judge has paused the Onion’s acquisition of Alex Jones’ Infowars pending a court review of the auction process, after lawyers for Jones and the company affiliated with him complained that the satirical news site had put in a bid of $3.5 million.

The Onion, which planned to relaunch the conspiracy-minded Infowars as a parody website, was named the winner of the bankruptcy auction held in Houston on Thursday. Jones, who also sells dietary supplements, was forced to put Infowars and other assets up for sale after a judge ruled in June that he had to pay roughly $1.5 billion in damages for claiming the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax. A group of Sandy Hook families that filed the defamation lawsuit against Jones agreed to accept a smaller payout to increase the overall value of the Onion’s bid, according to the families’ lawyers.

But Judge Christopher Lopez said Thursday that he had concerns about how the bidding process played out and ordered a hearing for next week to review how the auction was conducted.

At the court hearing Thursday, the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy auction said the Onion did not have the highest bid, but that the Sandy Hook families’ agreement to forgo some of their defamation award to pay off Jones’ other creditors made the Onion’s bid the best overall deal, according to the Associated Press. The trustee, Christopher 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.

Lopez said he had concerns about the process and its transparency. “We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing, and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” he said, according to the AP. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”

During his Infowars show Thursday, Jones called the sealed bidding process “rigged.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, Ben Collins, a former NBC News reporter who is the CEO of 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.”