A 13-year veteran of conspiracy website Infowars said in a recent court deposition that he repeatedly attempted to warn staff not to spread obvious lies about the parents of Sandy Hook, only to be met with laughter and ridicule. “I must have been in that room four to five times, at least, and only to be received with laughter and jokes,” Rob Jacobson, who worked at Infowars from 2004 to 2017 doing video production, testified. The deposition, which took place in March but was filed into a Travis County court in Texas on Monday, is part of a lawsuit Sandy Hook parent Scarlett Lewis has levied against Infowars and its host, Alex Jones. Jones is being sued by ninefamily members of loved ones who died in the 2012 shooting after he and his staff spent years falsely claiming that the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut ― which left 20 children and six adults dead ― was a hoax, and that the parents were “crisis actors.” Jacobson testified that Jones and his staff “got a rush” out of chasing baseless conspiracy theories related to Sandy Hook, including the false claim from Jones that CNN’s Anderson Cooper was standing in front of a blue screen and talking to actors “doing the fake crying” after the shooting.

I told [Jones] straight to his face: ‘They’re going to come after you for Sandy Hook. This is really bad.' He just stared at me like a deer in the headlights, he had nothing to say. And we just went on our way. Robert Jacobson

Jacobson warned staff numerous times about the implications of what they were doing, he said. “I would make it my business to go in to the writers and explain to them as clearly as possible that there is journalist ethics; and I tried to demonstrate what those ethics are and why they are violating them and what the damage could possibly be,” Jacobson said. They didn’t care, he said. Jacobson said he was concerned that the only source Jones and his staff seemed to have for their lies about the Sandy Hook parents came from Wolfgang Halbig, an Infowars contributor and notorious harasser of the Sandy Hook parents. Halbig was also recently found to have communicated with a former National Rifle Association official to call into question last year’s shooting in Parkland, Florida, HuffPost reported. “The fact that they took Halbig’s word for it, and that was the article,” Jacobson said about the reporting process at Infowars. “The article was: Whatever came out of Halbig’s mouth was news.”

HuffPost Illustration / Chris McGonigal A whistleblower has testified that Alex Jones and others on staff had no shame in spreading lies about the Sandy Hook parents.

When Jacobson confronted Infowars writer Adan Salazar about Halbig, he said he was again mocked. “Adan Salazar responded with ― and I’m going to quote him because he said it to me many times ― ‘I want to print up a T-shirt that says, “Halbig was right.” I want bumper stickers that say, “Halbig was right,”’ to a laughing room,” Jacobson said. Jones did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with HuffPost, Jacobson said he also confronted Jones directly months before a 2017 interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly. “I told [Jones] straight to his face: ‘They’re going to come after you for Sandy Hook. This is really bad,’” Jacobson said. “He just stared at me like a deer in the headlights, he had nothing to say. And we just went on our way.” The former employee described a culture of celebration when new Sandy Hook lies were published. Infowars news director Rob Dew “was overzealous to receive any type of hint that perhaps this might have been a phony act, a staged act. Any type of whisper that came through to him, he would celebrate,” and on-air contributor Dan Bidondi ― described as being “very emotional” ― also “gloms onto conspiracy kind of situations,” Jacobson said.

Not only did Infowars spread absurd lies about the Sandy Hook shooting for over five years, but they responded to the distress of the victim’s families with laughter and mockery. Mark Bankston, attorney representing multiple Sandy Hook parents