Alex Jones’s companies are exiting bankruptcy exactly the way they entered it: with maximum histrionics and accusations of bad faith.....

If it wasn’t clear from his prior bad conduct that Jones was simply using the bankruptcy court to evade trials in Connecticut and Texas — without having to put his personal assets and those of his main company Free Speech Systems at risk — his filings made no bones about it. Jones’s lawyers set up a Litigation Settlement Trust to “provide a mechanism for the payment in full of the litigation claims,” promising to fund it with $10 million cash from Jones, provided that the Sandy Hook plaintiffs accepted the money as payment in full and dropped their claims against FSS and him personally.

And in case there was any remaining ambiguity, Jones’s lawyer Norm Pattis flapped his yap to the Wall Street Journal, bragging that, “We’re turning to the bankruptcy courts to compel the plaintiffs to estimate the value of their claims in open court by discernible evidentiary standards. The plaintiffs have turned this litigation into a macabre morality play and have refused to negotiate in good faith. We hope they will show respect to the federal courts.”....

Which brings us to yesterday, where the LLCs made a great show of withdrawing from bankruptcy with the greatest reluctance in the world, protesting loudly about the scurrilous, untrue, not to say hurtful allegations that they had acted in anything less than good faith. The best faith! And they weren’t tapping out because the jig was up — they were being forced out virtually at gunpoint by the mean old Trustee.....

Indeed the motion concedes at multiple points that the primary purpose of the bankruptcy was to resolve the tort litigation: “Perhaps the U.S. Trustee believes that Jones should have been willing to contribute $7.7+ million for nothing, but that is not the way the world works outside of government,” his lawyers snark.