A Secret Company Inside Infowars Funneled Ad Money Directly to Alex Jones
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Since the moment Alex Jones and his company Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the people to whom he owes a lot of money have suspected that he’s not being entirely honest. Those people include parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook; Jones was ordered to pay them nearly a billion dollars after two civil trials last year. New filings in the bankruptcy proceedings involving Jones and Infowars have uncovered another weird little scheme, one that seems to have been designed to personally and secretly pay Jones. In a hearing Monday before a bankruptcy judge in Texas, a lawyer for some of the Sandy Hook families called the arrangement “extremely concerning.”
In a court filing on March 24, a lawyer named Melissa Haselden, a trustee appointed to oversee Infowars’ financial processes during the bankruptcy proceedings, revealed that she’d heard “a rumor” about a new entity created by an Infowars employee. The company, Haselden wrote in her filing, is called Mountain Way Marketing LLC, which was created in August 2022. (Although Haselden doesn’t mention this in her filing, business records from the Texas Secretary of State show that Mountain Way’s “registered agent” is a man named John Haarmann, a longtime Infowars employee. The fact that Haarmann works for Infowars was mentioned in a separate filing earlier this month. A representative for Free Speech Systems in the bankruptcy hearing today described Haarmann, without using his name, as an “unsophisticated person” on the “production side” of the business.)
After Mountain Way’s creation, Haselden wrote in her filing, “Mountain Way began marketing ads for the InfoWars broadcast and invoicing the advertisers.” She determined, she added, “that Mountain Way received revenue of $243,742.09 from the referenced advertising. Mountain Way paid a total of $157,272.76 to Jones from these funds. Additional revenue from these ads is expected to be received.”
All of this is extremely interesting, because the only advertisements you can ever expect to hear on any Infowars broadcast are for the company’s own products. Those include supplements, survival gear, and books, hawked at incredible volume and with metronomic regularity by Jones himself. So, the idea that a third-party company was suddenly creating ads for Infowars and “invoicing the advertisers” is bizarre on its face; the fact that the company was created by an Infowars employee made the whole thing stranger still. A cynic might conclude that the company was created to hide money from the Sandy Hook parents and the courts; for their part, lawyers for Free Speech Systems said in court that Haarmann and Jones were both “completely forthcoming” when asked about the arrangement, and were working to return the money.
Content retrieved from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvj8qm/a-secret-company-inside-infowars-funneled-ad-money-directly-to-alex-jones.
