REUTERS/Carlos Barria
- The Gateway Pundit was sued by election workers over its claims that they rigged the 2020 election.
- Creditors grilled its chief Jim Hoft on Tuesday morning about undocumented loans to himself and others.
- Hoft admitted using Gateway Pundit funds to buy himself a Florida condo and a Porsche.
Jim Hoft, the far-right blogger behind the notorious conspiracy theory website The Gateway Pundit, gave a picture of his finances in a bankruptcy hearing Tuesday morning, revealing he purchased a Florida condo in recent years and uses a Porsche SUV as a company car.
Hoft appeared to view the distinction between his personal finances and TGP Communications, the now-bankrupt corporate entity that owns The Gateway Pundit, as little more than a formality.
Both he and his brother, Joe Hoft — a Gateway Pundit cofounder — took loans from the company, he said. He was repeatedly asked about whether the loans were memorialized in writing, what interest rates were being charged, and when the loans were due, and he did not give any clear answers.
"We've never been, uh, you know, enormously profitable," Hoft told creditors.
TGP Communications declared bankruptcy in April while trying to fend off defamation lawsuits from people it had falsely claimed manipulated the results of the 2020 election, including election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss and former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer.
The company had between $100,000 and $500,000 in liabilities, it said in a bankruptcy filing. At the same time, it said it had between $500,000 and $1 million in assets — a figure it later revised to $2.3 million. According to Hoft, the company's litigation insurance policy wouldn't cover all the expenses needed for the defamation cases.
One of the lawyers who spoke at Tuesday's hearing said there was about $1.2 million to $1.3 million left on the policy out of an initial $2 million.
"The insurance policies, as you know, are dwindling down, and so that was a serious reason that I looked at the situation I was in and decided that bankruptcy would be a good option," Hoft said at the hearing.
Some of the creditors suing The Gateway Pundit claim the bankruptcy is a legal maneuver to try to escape from accountability in other courts.
After nearly four years of procedural wrangling, Hoft finally agreed in April to take a deposition in a lawsuit brought by Freeman and Moss, two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of manipulating the ballot count in the 2020 election, which Donald Trump lost. The two previously won a $148 million jury award in damages for a defamation lawsuit against election conspiracy theorist and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, which forced him into bankruptcy as well.
Coomer has also sued Hoft after The Gateway Pundit falsely accused him of being on "a conference call filled with Antifa-sympathizing callers" to rig the election. Hoft has lost a number of procedural challenges to that lawsuit as well, though it hasn't yet gone to trial.
The bankruptcy has stopped both cases from moving forward.
"This case is a pure litigation tactic," lawyers for Moss and Freeman wrote in a recent filing.
Tuesday's bankruptcy hearing shed some light on how Jim Hoft managed the company's finances. He used the company to give himself an $800,000 loan to purchase a condo in 2021 in Jensen Beach, Florida, he said. To date, none of the loan has been repaid, according to a recent filing, which also lists the condo as the company headquarters.
The company also owns a 2021 Porsche Cayenne worth about $54,000, according to a recent filing. Hoft said he has used it as a "company car" when he's in St. Louis, where he is originally from and still spends a portion of the year.
That is all on top of a salary of $17,000 a month that Hoft pays himself, he said at the hearing.
Hoft didn't respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Hoft is the driving force behind The Gateway Pundit, which ascended to prominence during the presidential administration of Trump, who embraced the site and allowed it a seat among the White House press corps.
The site often misidentifies the shooters in mass shooting events and has been the source of numerous hoaxes and false stories regarding the coronavirus, vaccines, and the 2016 and 2020 elections.
At the hearing's end, a lawyer for the US Trustee's Office warned that his office may seek to have the bankruptcy dismissed — exposing the Gateway Pundit to the defamation lawsuits it was trying to avoid — or put someone else in charge of the company.
"Don't be surprised if the US Trustee either makes a motion to convert, dismiss, or appoint a Chapter 11 trustee in this case," the lawyer said.