Extremist Alex Jones Leaks Secret Tapes Of Megyn Kelly's Promises To Him

NEWTOWN, CT —Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones says he was reluctant to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly. He told his followers and the NBC News host herself that he feared his views would be distorted by unscrupulous editing and an unreasonable barrage of questions focused on his baseless claims that the government orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that leading Democrats were running a child sex ring out of a pizzeria in Washington and that the Sandy Hook shooting of 30 children and six educators was an elaborately staged hoax.

Most people know enough to dismiss the claims, all of which have been thoroughly debunked. Jones, though, has built a following of millions of believers who treat his loud, volcanic delivery of fictional stories as unwavering truth. Some of Jones' followers have added action to their ideology. The most extreme among them continue to send death threats or otherwise taunt the "fake" parents of the 6 year olds and 7 year olds killed in the Sandy Hook shootings. Persistent claims that the attack was a hoax land with the cruel message that the children taken so young never really existed.

Kelly has to be wondering whether landing the Jones interview has been worth it.

Her decision initially drew predictable criticism and worthy discussion about whether interviewing extremists helps to normalize them or expose them. More recently, Jones became critical of Kelly, attacking her on his website that she broke promises she made before the interview was taped by attacking him within the first minute of their on-camera discussion, set to air Sunday.

The situation got really bizarre heading into the weekend, when Jones released secret recordings of his pre-interview discussions with Kelly, during which she tries to soothe his concerns that he will not be treated fairly.

So, why would Kelly and NBC grant Jones the gift of an audience of millions of viewers? Why not let him howl far away, heard only by his existing supporters whose inability to examine their own ideology make them unlikely to ever abandon Jones?

Well, there's this: Jones has been shown to have influence with one particularly powerful fan, President Donald Trump. Many of the president's most transparently false claims, such as his insistence that 3 million illegal votes were cast last election, are birthed on Infowars.

Whether to isolate or expose the worst of society is a common question for journalists who have no formula or rules to guide them. When Kelly came under intense fire for deciding to interview Jones, she replied in a statement that she hoped the interview would help explain why millions of people follow him. (His Infowars website attracts about 5 million unique monthly visitors and his radio shows get about another 5 million.)

"I find Alex Jones's suggestion that Sandy Hook was 'a hoax' as personally revolting as every other rational person does," Kelly said in her statement. "It left me, and many other Americans, asking the very question that prompted this interview: how does Jones, who traffics in these outrageous conspiracy theories, have the respect of the president of the United States and a growing audience of millions?"

She continued: "Our goal in sitting down with him was to shine a light — as journalists are supposed to do — on this influential figure, and yes — to discuss the considerable falsehoods he has promoted with near impunity," Kelly said.

Despite the president's words of approval of Infowars and its creator, Jones, is considered a leading voice of fringe conspiracists with little chance of mainstream approval. (An appearance on CNN ended with a purple-faced Jones screaming at host Pierres Morgan. A second attempt at going mainstream, as a guest on BBC, ended with another Jones meltdown as the host told him, “You are the worst person I have ever interviewed,” and added, while twirling his fingers around his ears, that, "We have an idiot on the show today."

The recordings of conversations with Kelly that Jones made public on his web site make it fairly clear that the journey from planning the interview to airing it would not go smoothly.

Jones did not trust Kelly from the start and didn't believe her promises that her interview would be fair.

To document the anticipated deceit, Jones said on his website, he secretly recorded Kelly's efforts to persuade him to agree to the interview. On Thursday, he released the recording on his website, claiming the female voice is Kelly's. (Neither NBC nor Kelly has disputed that.)

In a tone more embracing of Jones than her the more terse statement explaining the interview, the recording captures part of Kelly's pitch. An on-camera interview, she told Jones, could soften his image and humanize him. She assured him that she would not "double-cross" him and that he would be happy with the final product.

"I'm not looking to portray you as some boogie man or do any sort of a gotcha moment. I just want to talk about you," Kelly says in the recording. "I want people to get to know you. The craziest thing of all would be if some of the people who have this insane version of you in their heads walk away saying, 'You know what, I see the dad in him. I see the guy who loves those kids and who is more complex than I'd been led to believe.'"

When he eventually agreed to the interview and later sat with Kelly to tape it on camera, he said, she immediately "attacked" him and fixated on his most outlandish claims. He said he would post the on-camera interview, which he also secretly recorded, before NBC airs it Sunday so that people could hear her promises and watch her break them.

"It was so incredibly sad to see this woman had wedded to whatever anti-human force is in control of our civilization," Jones said in commentary he later inserted in the recording he posted. He added, "Despite the fact that she was delusional and believed she would deceive me and my viewers, at the end of the day she failed."

Several of his own lies are documented on the recording he posted, including this whopper: He has always believed, he told Kelly, that people did die at Sandy Hook, and the statements he has made about the shooting being a hoax were just part of an exercise in which he was examining all possibilities.

In fact, he has repeatedly presented the hoax claims as fact.

He kicked off his Sandy Hook lies shortly after the 20 first graders and six educators were gunned down at the school on Dec. 14, 2012, Jones told his followers that the supposed shooting was merely the latest atrocity committed by the U.S. government. With wounds from the shooting fresh and a community mourning, Jones mocked the parents of the children killed and diminished the deadliest mass school shooting in U.S. history as a fabrication designed to take away the right of Americans to own guns.

"They take [the victims], put them in our face, tell us their names, who they were," Jones said sarcastically in his trademark southern drawl on April 9, 2013. "I heard an ad this morning on the radio, Bloomberg paid for it locally, going, [fake sobbing] 'I dropped Billy off and watched him go around the corner and he never came back all because of the guns. Won’t you just turn your guns in for my son? Why’d you do it to him, gun owners?'"

While the Sandy Hook claims have been the primary focus of Jones' critics, he has also argued that the September 11 attacks, Oklahoma City bombing and Boston Marathon bombings were all inside jobs. For months, he promoted the unfounded story that a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., was hiding child sex slaves in its basement as part of a pedophilia ring supported by top Democratic politicians.

Employees and nearby businesses received hundreds of death threats. One Jones listener who believed the pedophilia tale stormed the business in December while firing a rifle. He had driven from North Carolina to "self-investigate" the claims and search for abused children.

Jones apologized in March for promoting the story, blaming other websites that got it wrong. (The Washington Post reported that had Jones waited one more day to apologize, he would have exposed Infowars to punitive damages in a libel suit.)

NBC News has also faced a last-ditch effort to keep Jones off the network by the families of 12 Sandy Hook victims who have threatened to sue if the network follows through with its plans.

"Surely, we can agree that these families have suffered enough already, and that they will continue to suffer enough to last several lifetimes," the law firm representing the families, Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, said in a letter to NBC. "Which is why we cannot fathom -- from a moral, ethical or legal standpoint -- NBC's decision to amplify the voice of a man who has made a living debasing that suffering and smearing our clients' names."

Airing the interview "implicitly endorses the notion that Mr. Jones' lies are actually 'claims' that are worthy of serious debate and in doing so it exponentially enhances the suffering and distress of our clients," the letter said.

J.P. Morgan pulled its local TV and digital ads from NBC until after the interview airs, objecting to numerous stories and radio segments in which Jones pushed stories with headlines such as "FBI Says No One Killed at Sandy Hook" and "'Dark Knight Rises' Scene Eerily Shows "Sandy Hook" Written on Map." The stories include claims as empty as the headlines to portray the shooting as an elaborate deception.

"Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured," Jones said on January 13, 2015. "I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors."

A woman in Florida pleaded guilty last week to sending death threats to a parent who lost a child at the school. Matthew Mills, a conspiracy theorist with a history of harassment, was arrested in 2015 at a Sandy Hook fundraiser.

Jones seems to have become less certain of his claims in recent months.

In his "Final Statement on Sandy Hook," released in 2016, Jones said that there is some evidence that people died at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, but that he does not know what exactly happened.

The backlash for NBC News began after the network released a a brief portion of the interview, setting the twittersphere ablaze with the hashtags #ShameOnNBC and #ShameOnMegynKelly. Nelba Marquez-Greene, the mother of Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, who was killed in the shooting, immediately took to Twitter to criticize the interview and condemn the network for giving the conspiracy theorist a platform.

Because this is what it looks like when you shine light on #AlexJones - they don't go away. They double down @megynkelly . #SandyHook pic.twitter.com/GjeBVpC6HR — Nelba Márquez-Greene (@Nelba_MG) June 12, 2017

In a Facebook post Sunday, the Vicki Soto memorial fund expressed its disappointment in the interview, stating that Jones and his followers "have done nothing but make our lives a living hell for the last 4 1/2 years."

Sandy Hook Promise dropped Kelly as host for its annual gala in Washington D.C., and the Newtown Action Alliance lauded J.P. Morgan and urged other advertisers to do join the boycott.

Some members of the broadcast news industry came out in defense of Kelly, but questioned NBC's handling of the situation. The Associated Press said CNN chief Jeff Zucker criticized the release of the tease, stating it was unclear if Kelly was going to take Jones to task for his comments.

"If you're going to do this story, the tease needs to be you holding up a picture of the dead kids and saying, 'how dare you?'" Zucker told the Associated Press.

>>> Photo of Alex Jones via Twitter