Disinformation expert analyses Alex Jones’ broadcast empire; he appears briefly outside Connecticut court and calls judge “a tyrant”

An expert on foreign disinformation campaigns compared conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ broadcasting businesses to a recruitment campaign by the al-Qaida terror network Tuesday — minutes after Jones called the judge presiding over his defamation trial a “tyrant” for what he claims is trying to force him to lie about what he believes and has said about the Sandy Hook school mass shootings.

“This judge is ordering me to say that I’m guilty and to say that I am a liar,” Jones told a crowd of reporters on the sidewalk outside Superior Court in Waterbury. “None of that is true.”

“I was not wrong about Sandy Hook on purpose,” he said. “I questioned it. Just like Jesse Smollett. Just like WMDs in Iraq. Just like the Gulf of Tonkin. There are a lot of staged events in history, just like WMDs in Iraq and I questioned every major event.”

Jones, who reaches a global audience of millions through his Texas-based broadcast and internet platforms, spent years calling the Newtown shooting a hoax perpetrated by gun control advocates before acknowledging he was wrong. He made his comments criticizing the court proceeding Tuesday morning after arriving by car, stepping into a mob of journalists and departing about five minutes later.

He was criticizing a default ruling last year by Judge Barbara Bellis that settled the question of Jones’ liability in favor of the families, whose suits against him claim they were harassed and threatened by Jones’ audience, which subscribed to his assertions that the parents and their murdered children were actors in the hoax.

Bellis’ ruling was an unusual legal sanction or punishment of Jones for abusing court procedure and failing to participate in reciprocal exchanges of information with the victims. The ruling found for the victims on a central point of their suit — that Jones’ false broadcasts were the cause of the harassment and mental anguish experienced by the victim families.

Jones and Infowars cannot defend themselves under the default finding, but can try to minimize what they have to pay in compensatory and punitive damages.

“So I am being put in an impossible position inside of this courthouse where I am being ordered to say ‘I’m guilty,’ ” Jones said. “Has anyone ever heard of somebody being ordered to say they are guilty? Even in a criminal trial, where they found somebody with dead bodies, if the guilty person wants to get up and say they are innocent, they are allowed to. OK?

“But I’m being told I’m guilty because they already defaulted me and said I’m guilty,” he said. “This is the murder of American justice. This is extremely dangerous. And this is a judicial system on trial. They are using these families for this. They have misrepresented what I have said and done. And they have continued to use my name to fundraise for their gun control organizations. Now they are openly launching an anti-free speech operation.”

As he left the sidewalk outside the courthouse and drove away with his bodyguards before court convened Tuesday, Jones said he would remain in the area to be available if called as a witness.

Inside the courthouse, lawyers for those suing Jones — relatives of the 20 first graders and six educators who were killed, and an FBI agent who was among the first responders — called as a witness a West Point graduate and former FBI terror investigator who studies efforts by foreign governments and terror groups to interfere with elections and manipulate political thought in the U.S.

Clinton Watts testified that Jones’ Texas-based network of broadcast and internet platforms was a hugely successful internet recruitment operation based on “fear, anger and demonization.” He said Jones built a sophisticated cyber infrastructure that reached an audience of tens of millions with the dual purpose of attracting followers to his conspiracy theories and driving them to his retail sales sites.

Watts is a widely known consultant on foreign cyber threats who has briefed Congress and provided training for the military, U.S. intelligence services and police agencies across the country. He said he was paid $158,000 to prepare and testify.

In Jones’ case, Watts said his businesses capitalized on the fears of his audience by demonizing a murky conspiracy of globalists set on enslaving the U.S. population. In the case of Sandy Hook, Jones aired programming for years that the slaughter of first graders was a hoax contrived as a pretext for gun control and the children and parents were actors.

Watts said Jones’ Infowars operation shared some characteristics with malign foreign cyber operations targeting segments of the U.S. population, such as that mounted a decade and a half ago by al-Qaida operative Anwar al-Awlaki to induce American Muslims to launch domestic terror attacks. Al-Awlaki was later killed in Yemen in 2011 by a U.S. drone strike.

For much of his time as a witness Tuesday, Watts reviewed evidence the family lawyers presented to jurors last week showing that traffic to Jones’ internet sites spiked, along with his retail sales, when he broadcast Sandy Hook hoax content. Watts explained that, in his view, Jones attracted his audience by, among other things, featuring guests who reinforced his and their conspiratorial views.

“If there is no rebuttal, there is no way for the truth to creep into that audience,” Watt said told family lawyer Josh Koskoff.

Watts said Jones has a massive audience approaching that of a commercial television network.

Last week, Jones faced the families’ use of his own corporate records that suggest his Sandy Hook hoax broadcasts were a cynical ploy to increase sales of his line of nutritional supplements and other products.

Early in the day, he won a small victory when Bellis said she would permit his lawyer, Norm Pattis, to question family members expected to testify later in the trial about their activities, public statements and views on Jones in an effort to allow jurors to decide whether the claims in their suits are exaggerated or influenced by bias against him.

One area in which the judge said questioning would be proper is gun control.

Jones claimed during his sidewalk interview that lawsuits in Texas and Connecticut were the next step after a $73 million settlement in a suit by the families against Remington, manufacturer of the assault rifle used in the Sandy Hook deaths on Dec. 14, 2012.

“There is a whole industry of lawyers around these families that have sued Remington for $73 million and all these other lawsuits,” Jones said. “And they are now simply just not coming after the second amendment, but the first amendment.”

Jones said he has become the face of the Sandy Hook shootings, rather than the actual gunman, Adam Lanza, a mentally unbalanced 20-year-old. Jones said he admitted he was wrong six years ago and has apologized hundreds of times since.