Both the families and a Justice Department office asked a federal bankruptcy judge in Houston to put off an initial, emergency hearing scheduled for Friday morning to address Chapter 11 filings earlier this week by three entities linked to Jones’ Infowars brand: InfoW, IW Health and Prison Planet TV.

The requests to delay the hearing said that the bankruptcy filings seemed designed to halt long-standing defamation litigation in Texas and Connecticut over Jones’ bizarre claims that the 20 children and six adults killed in the shocking 2012 elementary school shooting had somehow staged their own deaths and that their families were “crisis actors.”

The Justice Department’s Office of the U.S. Trustee told Judge Christopher Lopez the structure of Jones’ filing “may demonstrate these cases are an abuse of the bankruptcy system.” The government submission questioned why Jones had not filed for personal bankruptcy and why another business he controls, Free Speech Systems, was not included in the filings earlier this week.