So Alex Jones accusations on Child Porn are pure B.S.
What a freaking big surprise.
Yep.
Here's the facts of the matter: Jones was compelled by court order to hand over certain contents of his email servers to the lawsuit plaintiffs as part of the discovery process. Initially, Jones' legal team copied the contents of all the relevant emails into PDF documents and handed over the PDF documents; however, plaintiffs pointed out that the metadata from the emails was part of the original materials and needed to be handed over as well. Rather than defendant's counsel going back and retrieving the metadata solely from the relevant emails and sending that, Jones or whoever was doing this work for him apparently just decided to email a raw dump of the ALL of the email metadata on the whole server directly to the plaintiffs' counsel without reviewing it.
The plaintiffs' counsel discovered a child pornography image while reviewing the materials, and immediately contacted the FBI. The FBI instructed the plaintiffs' counsel to hand the entire discovery cache over to them, which was done, and the FBI found much more child pornography among the contents. The child pornography appears in emails that were sent, apparently unsolicited, to Infowars at some unknown point. Minor point, the FBI does not appear to be investigating Alex Jones for possession or anything of the sort.
After Jones was informed of the FBI investigation though, he went on his show and began ranting, with his own attorney sitting next to him, starting out by saying "I'm not saying the Sandy Hook lawyers did this or set this up", but then launching into a spittle-misted screed which heavily implied he did think that to be the case, including repeatedly saying the name of and pounding on a photograph of the plaintiffs' counsel Chris Mattei.
After this episode, the Sandy Hook plaintiffs filed a motion basically asking the court to take judicial notice of the episode, Jones' public accusations that the plaintiffs sent the child porn to him, and a possible personal threat of violence he made against their counsel during the show. Their motion can be read
here - caution, a portion of Jones' rant is transcribed there and it contains foul language.
So the plaintiffs' argument, in summary, is
It is worth noting that if the Jones Defendants had engaged in even minimal due diligence and actually reviewed the materials before production, they would have found the images themselves. Because the Jones Defendants did not do that, they transmitted images to the plaintiffs that if they were knowingly possessed is a serious federal crime. The Jones Defendants put plaintiffs’ counsel and ESI consultants in the appalling position of discovering the first image. Plaintiffs’ ESI consultants then acted exactly as they were compelled to under federal law once they discovered the contraband images; so did plaintiffs’ counsel. But this appears not to have been good enough for Jones.
At the Tuesday hearing, the plaintiffs will request an expedited briefing schedule concerning what orders must issue in connection with Mr. Jones’ on-air statements and Attorney Pattis’ participation in this broadcast. In addition, the plaintiffs may seek interim relief, to span the time during which the briefs are being filed.
The most recent development came today; Jones' attorney Norm Pattis has filed a request that the entire case now be stayed due to a possible conflict of interest on his part, since the plaintiffs have now made a complaint regarding him personally. His motion can be read
here.
