Jones: ‘I could have done a better job on Sandy Hook’

BRIDGEPORT — After his first day of questioning under oath in the Sandy Hook defamation case, Alex Jones told viewers in a video that he was being demonized for falsely reporting that the worst crime in modern Connecticut history never happened.

“I’ll just admit it — I could have done a better job on Sandy Hook; some of the anomalies that were reported were not accurate, and I admitted it years before I was sued,” Jones said in the video, after he sat for a deposition on Tuesday in Bridgeport with lawyers representing an FBI agent and eight families who won a defamation suit against him in November. “Have I been a little reckless? Sometimes, I admit it. I’ve tried to get better over the years, even before I was sued.”

Jones’ video, which he recorded with his New Haven attorney Norm Pattis, alternated between admissions that Jones had made mistakes and accusations that the families’ lawyers were trying to “shut Alex Jones down.”

“These people want to put us in prison for our speech,” Jones said. “They want to be holier-than-thou, using our emotion to manipulate and control us when they’re total sociopaths.”

Jones’ statements came as he sat for a second full day of questions under oath on Wednesday, as both sides prepare for a trial in August where a jury will award damages.

By flying to Connecticut this week from the Texas headquarters of his “Infowars” internet program, Jones stopped the escalating $25,000 daily fines imposed by a Connecticut judge last week after Jones defied court orders to sit for depositions in March. Jones had already paid a $25,000 fine on Friday and an additional $50,000 fine on Monday, court records show.

Pattis said the questions from the families’ attorneys on Tuesday were “repetitive, sneering and sometimes mocking” and “struck me as a broad wholesale attack on Mr. Jones and his ‘Infowars’ questioning of narratives.”

“I had the impression watching the attack on Mr. Jones that this trial will be about something far greater than what happened at Sandy Hook,” Pattis said on Jones’ video. “This trial is going to be about ordinary people’s ability to say ‘I’m not buying it. I want to raise questions — I want to draw my own conclusions.’ ”

Attorneys representing the families at Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder declined to comment on Wednesday.

Connecticut isn’t the only state where Jones has a defamation trial looming. The first of two trials in Texas to determine damages in defamation cases Jones lost to four other Sandy Hook parents begins April 25.

Jones last week offered $120,000 each to the 15 people who won the defamation case against him in Connecticut and the four people who won the two defamation cases against him in Texas. The Connecticut families rejected the settlement offer. The Texas families are focusing on their trials, their lead attorney said last week.

In Connecticut, Pattis suggested Jones was being singled out because he draws “unpopular conclusions.”

Jones called the 2012 killing of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors.” In court papers, Jones argued that he no longer believes that, and has a right to be wrong.