Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Jones lied under oath that he did not have the messages he had been ordered to provide but then accidentally turned them over, which came out quite dramatically in court:

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-62416324

Any time someone tells something is “obviously a massive abuse of the justice system”, ask them for details. Many people lie for political reasons knowing that their followers will not check the facts, but those claims usually fall apart as soon as you do. Lying to a judge or doing something you were ordered not to do is going to get you in trouble no matter what else is going on.

In the case of discovery about Google, note that there were two separate problems:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/alex-jones-and-infowars-were...

The first was that he lied about a spreadsheet not existing, and then the defense got evidence that it did - since that behavior was habitual, a judge is going to punish it more harshly than an isolated mistake which is promptly corrected.

The second problem was that he was trying to use the defense that he didn’t profit from Sandy Hook stories while not providing data which could have been used to test that claim. The judge didn’t jail him for that, but he wasn’t allowed to make an unverified “trust me bro” claim.






Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: