AFP

A Texas jury on Thursday ordered far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay more than $4 million in damages to the parents of a child who was killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 

The jury deliberated for one day before deciding on the amount of compensatory damages Jones should pay for falsely claiming that the Sandy Hook shooting was a “hoax.”

Jones claimed for years on his website InfoWars and popular radio show that the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 children dead, was “staged” by gun control activists, but has since acknowledged it was “100 percent real.”

The 48-year-old Jones has been found liable in multiple defamation lawsuits brought by parents of the Sandy Hook victims, and the Texas case was the first to reach the damages phase.

After deciding on $4.1 million in compensatory damages for causing emotional distress, the Austin, Texas, jury will now hear evidence on whether punitive damages are warranted.

The $4.1 million is far less than the $150 million in compensatory damages sought by the plaintiffs in the Texas case, Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of six-year-old son Jesse.

Earlier Thursday, the judge in the case denied Jones’ request for a mistrial after his lawyers mistakenly turned over the conspiracy theorist’s cellphone records to the opposing attorneys.

“I don’t think it’s a mistrial based on this,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told an emergency hearing called to discuss the inadvertent release of the material by Jones’ lawyers.

During the final day of testimony on Wednesday, Mark Bankston, a lawyer for the parents, told Jones while he was on the witness stand that his attorneys had “messed up.”

“They sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cellphone with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years, and when informed did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way,” Bankston said.

– ‘Do you know what perjury is?’ –

Bankston noted that Jones had repeatedly said under oath that a search of his cellphone had not produced any text messages about Sandy Hook, but there were indeed such messages in the records he accidentally received.

“Do you know what perjury is?” Bankston asked Jones.

Arguing for a mistrial, F. Andino Reynal, a lawyer for Jones, said he had followed up the mistaken release of the records with an email saying “Please disregard.”

“‘Please disregard’ creates no legal duty on me whatsoever,” Bankston countered. “None.”

Bankston said “various federal agencies” had asked for the phone records along with the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former president Donald Trump.

Trump appeared frequently on Jones’ radio show during his 2016 White House campaign and the InfoWars founder was in Washington when supporters of the then-president stormed Congress in a bid to prevent certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.

Jones has also testified to the committee behind closed doors.

InfoWars declared bankruptcy in April and another company owned by Jones, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy last week.

Jurors in a San Francisco court on Thursday began mulling the fate of a former Twitter worker accused of taking bribes from Saudi Arabia to help unmask its critics on the platform.

Prosecutors said Ahmad Abouammo sold Twitter user information for cash and an expensive watch some seven years ago, while his defense team contended that he did nothing more than accept gifts from free-spending Saudis for simply doing his client management job.

“The evidence shows that, for a price and thinking no one was watching, the defendant sold his position to an insider of the crown prince,” US prosecutor Colin Sampson said in final remarks to the jury.

Defense attorney Angela Chuang countered that while there certainly appeared to be a conspiracy some 7 years ago to get revealing information about Saudi critics from Twitter, prosecutors failed to prove Abouammo was part of it.

“It’s abundantly clear that the people the government really wants are not here, because they messed up,” Chuang told jurors.

Chuang conceded that Abouammo did violate Twitter employee rules by not telling the San Francisco-based company that he had received $100,000 in cash and a watch valued at more than $40,000 from someone close to the Saudi crown prince.

However, she downplayed the significance of the gift, saying it amounted to “pocket change” in Saudi culture known for generosity and lavish presents.

– Trust traded for cash? –

Abouammo was arrested in Seattle in November of 2019 on a slew of charges including being an illegal agent of a foreign government.

Prosecutors accused Abouammo and fellow Twitter employee Ali Alzabarah of being enlisted by Saudi officials between late 2014 and early the following year to get private information on accounts firing off posts critical of the regime.

The then-Twitter workers could use their credentials to glean email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and other private data to identify people behind anonymous accounts, prosecutors said.

“The evidence you heard is that the defendant, who had a great deal of trust given to him by Twitter, sold his access to officials of Saudi Arabia,” Sampson said.

Abouammo quit Twitter in 2015 and took a job at e-commerce titan Amazon in Seattle, where he lives, according to court documents.

Alzabarah, a Saudi national, is being sought on a charge of failing to register in the United States as an agent of a foreign government as required by United States law, according to an FBI statement.

Chuang told jurors that prosecutors were trying to punish Abouammo for Alzabarah’s actions.

“As much as the government wishes that was Mr. Alzabarah sitting at the table right now, it is not,” Chuang told jurors.

“And that is on them, they let Mr. Alzabarah flee the country while he was under FBI surveillance.”

The head coach of Brittney Griner’s WNBA team said the nine-year sentence handed out to its star player by a Russian court on Thursday was devastating — even though it was no surprise.

“We knew this was coming, we’ve been prepared for it,” said Vanessa Nygaard, Phoenix Mercury’s head coach, noting the minuscule acquittal rates in Russian courts where Griner was convicted of smuggling drugs into the country.

“We know we weren’t hanging our hopes on the Russian justice system.

“But we were literally getting ready to come out for shoot around today when this was going on,” she said. “Players were watching it.”

She said it made it hard to concentrate on Thursday night’s WNBA game against the Connecticut Sun, in which the Mercury will be trying to bounce back from an 87-63 loss to the Sun on Tuesday.

“The emotions have escalated during the day,” Nygaard said. “We’re going to go out and play this game, but, like, how can we have our focus on this game? It’s such an emotional day for us.”

Not for the first time, Nygaard suggested that if Griner wasn’t a Black, gay woman she wouldn’t still be wrongfully detained in Russia.

“We know that Tom Brady wouldn’t be in Russia, so the comparison that way is tough to see,” Nygaard said, invoking superstar NFL quarterback Tom Brady.

But Nygaard praised the “tremendous” efforts of US President Joe Biden and his administration in seeking Griner’s release and that of other Americans deemed wrongfully detained in Russia.

“What I do know is our government has really put itself behind BG and all other Americans — we’re learning a lot more about international wrongly detained Americans than we ever have,” she said.

“I know there are many other families experiencing this feeling, too.”

Right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said Thursday that “globalists can all go to hell,” as he invited American conservatives to join hands in a worldwide fight against progressives.

The nationalist leader was guest of honor at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, where his tub-thumping speech was greeted with wild applause.

“We have seen what kind of future the globalist ruling class has to offer, but we have a different future in mind. The globalists can all go to hell,” he told a cheering crowd.

“We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movement of our troops because we face the same challenge.”

CPAC, an annual gathering of conservative activists from around the United States, is also expected to hear from former US president Donald Trump, who has spoken admiringly of Orban.

Orban’s authoritarian populism jibes with the crowd at CPAC, but goes down less well at NATO and in Europe, where his support for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin puts him at odds with other leaders.

His appearance Thursday comes after he provoked a storm with a speech European politicians slammed as “openly racist.”

Orban sparked fury after he warned against mixing with “non-Europeans” in Romania’s Transylvania region, home to a Hungarian community.

“We do not want to become peoples of mixed race,” Orban said.

Orban, known for his anti-migrant policy, has made similar remarks in the past but without using the Hungarian term for “race,” according to experts.

Speaking in English in Dallas, he avoided the word, but returned to a familiar theme invoking Europe’s religious heritage.

“If you separate the Western civilization from its Judeo-Christian heritage, the worst things in history happen,” he told the audience.

“The horrors of Nazism and communism happened because some Western states in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values.”

The White House accused Moscow Thursday of preparing to plant fake evidence to make it look like the recent mass killing of Ukrainian prisoners in an attack on a Russian-controlled prison was caused by the Ukraine military.

Kyiv and Moscow have traded blame over the strikes on the prison in Kremlin-controlled Olenivka in eastern Ukraine, which Russia said took place overnight on July 29.

“We expect that Russian officials are planning to falsify evidence in order to attribute the attack on the Olenivka prison on the 29th of July,” said White House spokesman John Kirby.

“We anticipate that Russian officials will try to frame Ukrainian armed forces in anticipation of journalists and potential investigators visiting the site of the attack,” Kirby told reporters.

Kirby cited undisclosed US intelligence reports in making the claim.

But he said the United States expects that Moscow will try to pin the blame on a US-supplied Himars precision-guided missile, using “planted evidence” of fragments of such missiles allegedly found at the site.

Claims to that extent are already appearing in the media, Kirby said.

More than 50 soldiers died in the incident, including troops who had surrendered after weeks of defending the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol. 

Russia has claimed that Ukraine carried out a strike on its own captured fighters, while Ukrainian authorities accuse Russia of covering up a deliberate massacre.

Russian television images showed a charred room crammed with burned bed frames but independent experts are so far unclear on what could have caused the damage visible.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called it “a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war.”

The United Nations has announced a fact-finding mission, though it has not yet received final approval from Kyiv or Moscow.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had requested access to the site immediately after learning of the alleged attack on July 29.

But on Wednesday the ICRC said it had not yet received access to understand the fate of the Ukrainian prisoners of war.

“As of yet, we have not been granted access to the PoWs affected by the attack nor do we have security guarantees to carry out this visit,” the organization said.

“We will keep requesting access to PoWs who are or were held in Olenivka, and any other sites where PoWs are held, guided by our humanitarian commitment and our mandate under the Geneva Conventions.”