After losing repeated court battles in his fight against those who lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook school shooting, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is using a new legal tactic: blaming Hillary Clinton.
In a Thursday court filing, a lawyer for Jones asked a Connecticut court to begin the process of issuing a subpoena to obtain records and testimony from the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, baselessly arguing that it was she who organized the multiple families now suing Jones for defamation related to the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
“The defendants in this case believe that this suit was filed six years after the
shootings at Sandy Hook as part of a vendetta inspired, orchestrated and directed in whole or in part by Hillary Clinton as part of a vendetta to silence Alex Jones after Ms. Clinton lost the presidential race to Donald J. Trump,” the court filing reads. “The litigation is brought and pursued in bad faith as part of a partisan effort to silence Mr. Jones for reasons wholly independent of the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims.”
The latest motion from Jones’ legal team is part of a defamation case brought against Jones by Erica Lafferty, whose mother was the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and was killed in the 2012 shooting that left 20 children and 6 adults dead. Jones is currently being sued by nine families after he repeatedly used his platform on Infowars to allege the massacre was staged and the parents of the dead children were “crisis actors.” It wasn’t, and they are not.
Attorney Norman Pattis is representing Jones in the case against Lafferty. In the court filing, Pattis argued that Clinton should be deposed because Lafferty spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, where she endorsed Clinton and called for stronger gun control. Pattis said he wants to ask Clinton about her relationship with Lafferty to determine “what role, if any, Ms. Clinton or those working under her direction had in directing the plaintiffs to the same firm in this case.”
While Connecticut law firm Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder is representing several Sandy Hook families leveling lawsuits at Jones, including Lafferty, it is not the only firm doing so. Texas law firm Farrar & Ball is also representing multiple Sandy Hook families suing Jones for defamation, though Pattis did not acknowledge that in the court filing.
Attorney Chris Mattei with Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder said he would be responding to the latest court filing with one of his own.
“We look forward to responding in Court to Mr. Jones’ latest attempted distraction,” Mattei said in a statement to HuffPost.
Houston attorney Mark Bankston with Farrar & Ball, who represents several Sandy Hook parents in Texas, mocked the latest Connecticut filing.
“A lot of people will make fun of this, but it’s just good lawyering,” Bankston joked to HuffPost. “Personally, I have a subpoena lined up for the estate of Elvis Presley and a document request relating to the Bermuda Triangle.”
“Obviously I’m not being serious,” he added. “Nothing about this deserves to be taken seriously.”
Jones hired Pattis in 2019 after dropping his previous lawyer, and it’s been downhill for the conspiracy theorist ever since. Jones has lost multiple court battles with the Sandy Hook families, and in 2020 was ordered to pay nearly $150,000 in legal fees for his failed appeals. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Jones and Pattis.
Prior to representing Jones, Pattis made headlines after he posted a photo on his Facebook page in 2018 depicting three beer cans in white hoods surrounding a brown beer bottle hanging from its neck.
“Ku Klux Coors,” the caption read. He deleted the image, but defended the post by railing against the “P.C. police” that “disgust me.”
While the latest filing may be absurd, Jones’ harassment is hardly surprising. His obsession with Clinton runs deep: He’s called her a “demon” and helped throw fire on the dangerous “Pizzagate” conspiracy that falsely alleged Clinton was running a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. None of it was true, including the claim that the referenced pizza spot had a basement.