InfoWars sale to The Onion could be held up in court as Alex Jones rants his sites been hijacked

The sale of InfoWars, Alex Jones’ right-wing conspiracy site, to The Onion could be held up in court after a judge questioned the transparency of the auction process Thursday.The satirical news site placed the winning bid for the site at a bankruptcy auction in an offer backed by families of the Sandy Hook shooting, who are owed more than $1 billion from Jones in defamation judgments.But the judge in Jones’ bankruptcy case said he had misgivings about how the auction was held at an emergency hearing in Houston later in the day and ordered an evidentiary hearing to sort out whether the auction was fair sometime next week.“We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” Judge Christopher Lopez said.“No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.”He did immediately not set a date for the hearing.The only other bidder — First United American Companies which runs ShopAlexJones.com — complained that the bidding method was switched from an open process to a silent auction, in which rivals’ bids weren’t disclosed to other potential buyers, at the last minute.The Onion’s parent company Global Tetrahedron has not disclosed what its winning offer was, but the trustee who ran the auction said the dollar figure it offered was less than First United American’s $3.5 million bid — but a better deal.The trustee Christopher Murray — who is tasked with overseeing the liquidation of Jones’ assets after he declared bankruptcy — said the Sand Hook families’ offer to give up a portion of the sale process to pay Jones’ other creditors was not something he could put a monetary value on but was the best bid. “I’ve never seen this before in any other case, and we did a lot of research, and we’ve never found it,” Murray said, according to Bloomberg.

“But I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors, and under one bid, they’re clearly bet...