This is the legal pretext, which appears about 2/3 of the way through the article:
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.
I don't run auctions but something tells me there's a lot of research behind them that goes into optimizing for this precise thing. It's wild that the judge is disregarding the expertise of the person who was appointed by another judge to run the auction without asserting that the person is not qualified to run it.
It's not only a question of qualifications, they're complaining about a quantity which is not measurable. The auction concluded with a certain maximum bid. Now prove to me there could have been a higher bid. You can't! We measured all the bids, and this one was the highest! EDIT: I'm sorry your honor but the halting problem is undecidable?
The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
What's even more crazy about this ruling is he's told the trustee to come up with an alternative solution, that doesn't involve a new auction... But like no other guidance. That leaves the Trustee in a weird situation where the judge has said "I don't like what you did, fix it somehow, but not in a way that uses a new auction".
Frankly, this judge has just been pretty bad at their job. More than a few rulings have been just weird ramblings from the judge with unclear instructions to the trustee and the other parties.
And all this mainly appears to be because the judge doesn't like the amount that Infowars was sold for.
Out of curiosity, does anyone in this thread who is commenting on the quality of this judge or the sanity of his ruling practice bankruptcy law? I don’t, and I’m having a hard time evaluating these claims.
So he's been doing bankruptcy for five years, which should be enough time for him to understand the intricacies of the statutes and case law. Sometimes you see judges put in specialty courts with no experience in that domain and make some absurd rulings.
if it is indeed true that this judge was appointed by Trump (I haven't looked into it), it is reasonable to believe that it probably wasn't based on merit or understanding of law. This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
> This is because he has a long history of promoting/installing people that he believes (whether or not it turns out to be the case) will obey him above all else.
Is there any evidence of this besides some angry tweets? If this was widely accepted as fact, I don't think the constitutionalists on the right would have supported his re-election, as that doesn't align with separation of powers.
Best evidence would probably the current cabinet picks. Plenty of un and underqualified people are slated for very high positions. Furthermore, the primary thrust of Project 2025 was to install people loyal to trump above all else. The authors of 2025 are on the Trump cabinet.
I can give more details if you like, but I think that's a bit OT from the current discussion for AJ's bankruptcy.
Also, I don't agree with the assessment that Lopez is unqualified or was nefariously picked.
I don't think the trump admin really cared one way or another about a bankruptcy judge.
FWIW, Lopez has the credentials for the job. [1] He was a bankruptcy lawyer and teacher for years before being appointed as a judge.
I say this as someone not a fan of his rulings. I think the "he was a Trump appointee" critiques are misplaced. He's simply isn't good as a judge which, arguably, is a pretty different skillset from being a lawyer.
> The hearings in the last 2 days seemed to have Lopez agreeing with the creditors and not Jone's FUAC. Yet, somewhat seemingly out of the blue, he decided to deny the sale.
This is actualy quite common with judges. Or so i heard from Popehat who is a practicing lawyer. What is going on is that the judge is feeling that one side is making a stronger argument, in their opinion, and they then tend to give more procedural leeway to the other side. In order to be, or appear to be unbiased. Then commentators or sometimes even the plantifs interpret it as the judge signaling that the judge is agreeing with them.
Supposedly this is common enough that lawyers get worried if the judge is too “nice” with their side.
So quite often judges make their decisions based on "feels" and then go out of their way to be nice to the other party so they don't appear biased. You can imagine the poor self representing party that has a strong case but is automatically disliked by the judge for not playing the game properly and basically has no chance.
I think you misunderstood. It is not based on "feel" and the greater procedural leeway they provide the party with the perceived or actual weaker argument is not for appearance sake alone. A judge wants both parties to make their best case and if one party fails to do so, they try to help them along to achieve it.
You might be surprised to discover that federal judges are extremely not shy about bringing up threats to their safety that involve litigants before them.
Wasn't there some famous case in NY where a business man had to be sanctioned ~10 times before he stopped trying to get death threats against the judges family?
I don't really doubt that judges would bring something up to litigants but I do really doubt the bar would actually do something.
The Onion should be investigated for making a false bid for which they never had the money for.
>Jones' attorney Ben Broocks told Lopez at a hearing on Monday that the Onion only put up half as much cash as the $3.5 million offer from First American United Companies but boosted its bid with "smoke and mirrors" calculations.
Yes and Lopez rejected that as an issue. He also accepted the logic of why the Trustee picked the onion.
What Lopez did not like was the dollar amount and how the auction was ran, that's it.
Lopez kept the Trustee on board, though, because he doesn't believe the Trustee did anything wrong (Strangely since the Trustee organized the auction).
It wasn't a false bid, it was a bid that would have relieved Jones of more debt than the bid FAUC put up. Which was accepted by his creditors.
Judge Lopez was appointed by Trump, so I'd assume that he's acting under instructions. Why would Trump have appointed a judge who wouldn't do favors for him?
I believe the implication isn’t that he’d be fired. Rather that doing the bidding of the far right (as instructed) was the deal he made to get the job. I look at it as payment for services rendered.
There are absolutely social, political, and economic consequences. Those in the political class don’t exist in a separate bubble from each other. There are natural consequences for breaking from the party line, especially on the right, which demands complete fealty.
Natural consequences might be that the judge and their family no longer get to go to the yacht extravagant social gatherings, their kids may no longer have an in at their preferred university, or they may have even have the propaganda machine turned against them - potentially endangering them.
There are so many potential consequences that it’s not even worth trying to mention them all. These are all real threats that keep people in these types of positions aligned with the original intent for putting them there.
Real or hypothetical? Still don't see any evidence. FYI it is this kind of posting that goes nowhere, that helped re-elect Trump. People are tired of it and the gaslighting. Hope this helps.
I think maybe you’re running afoul of the same thing you’re accusing me of, which is being too vague. There are plenty of examples such as the lavish gifts given to SCOTUS justices with the expectation that they’ll behave the “right” way. Are you saying these things will still happen if the justice starts behaving counter to the party?
What I’m describing is not some abstract concept, it’s part of human society and I have no doubt you’ve experienced it yourself.
As I understand it, bankruptcy judges are not appointed by the president but rather by the relevant Court of Appeals. And they do not serve for life (because they aren’t Article III judges).
Shouldn't all of the mechanics of the auction been agreed upon explicitly or at least implicitly with past precedent of bankruptcy auctions? How did the lawyers go ahead of an auction that even had a chance of being thrown out by the judge?
This is something that was brought up in the hearings.
For starters, one issue here is the Judge is just, frankly, bad at giving instructions. He left how the auction should be ran up to the Trustee who ultimately used an auction company which handles these sorts of liquation auctions. He didn't give clear instructions on what he wanted.
FAUC (alex jones's new company) did not raise any issues with the auction until after they found out that they lost. They had multiple communications with the auction house and the trustee right up until the winners were announced. It was only after they lost that they started throwing a stink about how the auction was ran.
Frankly, it's a bad faith argument by FAUC that's just sour grapes over losing. They were always going to challenge the results on a loss, but it does look bad for them that they didn't do that until after the loss.
Lopezes problem with the auction was mainly that he felt like the amounts were too low. He didn't really explain why he felt that and has left everything really ambiguous (not a good judge IMO). He has left the managing of infowars under the care of the Trustee and has basically given them a "fix it" order with really no clear guidelines on how they are supposed to do that (other than don't do another auction).
Appealable, yes, pretty much all orders are appealable.
Everyone has 2 weeks to file an appeal to this ruling and the Judge has given 30 days for the Trustee to figure out how to fix things.
We'll see what happens.
In any event, yes, likely we are going to see this dragged out like crazy. What's wild is IDK what happens when all the infowars funds dry up if this is stuck in litigation. Bankruptcies aren't usually drawn out like this (and it's somewhat designed to be very streamlined).
> The Sealed-Bid auction should generate a price that is greater than or equal to the English Open Cry in all situations.
Not necessarily. In many sealed-bid auctions, bidders hope to win with a lower bid (often much lower) than they would if they were bidding against others in the same room. This is especially true if you have no idea whether anyone else is bidding on the item at all. I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low (and I have won many such items, sometimes because no one else even bid on them).
> I have placed very low bids on items in sealed-bid auctions for things I had no immediate need for, but would happily pay for if the cost was very low
Would you think it would have gone differently in an English Open Cry situation?
You're confused. It's the Vickrey auction which is second-price. English auctions are first-price. First-price sealed-bid auctions are different from Vickrey auctions.
Given how the NYT is describing the entire court case (only a level above shit slinging from Twitter), it sounds like this is less about any rationale and more dragging of the feet to get any kind of "win" out of this whole kerfluffle.
The judge basically says as much in the end:
>“You’ve got to scratch and claw and get everything you can for everyone else,” he said.
Which is a truly bizarre statement for a judge to make given the nature of this entire case. Then again, "good faith errors" certainly shows the bias of this judge here.
Parent commenter's description of the difference between an ascending bid auction and a second price auction (or Vickrey auction) is very confused. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for an introduction to auctions and proofs of the optimality of different auctions for different goals (e.g. the second price auction is proven to maximize social surplus): https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
This is almost entirely wrong in all respects. You can review the first chapter of "Mechanism Design and Approximation" for a good introduction to auction design. https://jasonhartline.com/MDnA/
> Judge Lopez said that the bankruptcy auction failed to maximize the amount of money that the sale of Infowars should provide to Mr. Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families, in part because the bids were submitted in secret.