Alex Jones intends to turn over nearly 40,000 emails early next week to lawyers representing relatives of victims slain at the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, an attorney for the controversial Infowars publisher told a state Superior Court judge Friday.

Defense lawyer Norm Pattis promised to produce the emails during a hearing scheduled after Mr. Jones missed a third deadline this week to produce documents sought by plaintiffs suing him for defamation, The Hartford Courant reported.

Judge Barbara Bellis scheduled another hearing for Tuesday to determine if Mr. Pattis followed through, deferring for now an order sanctioning Mr. Jones over the setbacks, the newspaper reported.

“I’m struggling to find any good faith on the part of the defendant,” she said during the hearing, according to the report. “Nobody in this room wants to be manipulated. This defendant has blown past court deadlines and still hasn’t produced a single piece of paper for discovery.”

Mr. Jones, a media personality from Austin, Texas, previously referred to the Sandy Hook mass shooting on his Infowars website as a “giant hoax” and “total false flag.” He is being sued for defamation by lawyers representing several of the massacre’s victims over what they called a “years-long campaign of abusive and outrageous false statements.”

Plaintiffs in the civil suits are seeking access to emails, business documents and other relevant materials from Mr. Jones, who said in a sworn deposition Friday that he had instructed another lawyer to previously comply with the requests.

Michael Zimmerman, an information technologist working for Mr. Jones, said in a separate court filing this week that he is searching Infowars computer systems for materials related to the Sandy Hook suit and plans to provide them by April 15.

A search of more than 9 million emails has so far uncovered 80,000 messages potentially relevant to the plaintiffs’ request, Mr. Pattis wrote in a separate motion Thursday. They are being reviewed to see if any are covered by attorney-client privilege, the Courant reported.

“The focus of this litigation should not be on what Mr. Jones said and why he said it,” Mr. Pattis wrote in the motion. “The focus should be on what conditions in American life make the sorts of conspiracy theories he is alleged to have advanced so popular to millions of listeners. The answer is simple: there is a broad crisis of legitimacy afoot in the United States.”

Mr. Jones, 46, interviewed President Trump during the 2016 White House race and frequently collaborates with Roger Stone, Mr. Trump’s indicted former election campaign adviser.

His main channel on YouTube boasted more than 2.4 million subscribers prior to being removed by the Google subsidiary last summer amid internet companies across the board punting Mr. Jones from their platforms.

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