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LOS ANGELES (CN) — Hunter Biden sued Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com chief executive who has been an adamant denier of the 2020 presidential election results, claiming that one of Byrne’s posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, implied that the president’s son somehow bore responsibility for the Hamas attacks in Israel last month.
In the complaint, filed Wednesday in a Los Angeles federal court, Biden said Byrne earlier this year published false allegations that the younger Biden had reached out to Iran to help unfreeze $8 billion of that country’s funds in exchange for an $800 million kickback.
On Oct. 8, the day after the Hamas attacks, the GOP megadonor reposted these accusations on X, per Biden’s complaint. The clear implication of Byrne’s posts, Biden said, was that his allegedly criminal and corrupt actions had contributed to the terrorist attacks by Hamas and led to the deaths of more than 1,400 innocent civilians.
“These defamatory statements by Byrne are not merely false and not merely malicious — they are completely outrageous,” Biden said. “Byrne knows his statements are baseless and yet published and republished them anyway, and he continues to propagate his lies to anyone who will listen, including his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.”
An attorney representing Byrne in unrelated litigation didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In September, Hunter Biden was very active IN suing numerous individuals on the far-right of the political spectrum. He filed a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani, accusing Donald Trump’s former lawyer of hacking Biden’s personal devices, leading to a “total annihilation” of his digital privacy.
He also sued the Internal Revenue Service that month, claiming that tax agents illegally disclosed his tax information and failed to protect his private records. And, again in September, he accused a former White House aide to Donald Trump of accessing and tampering with data obtained from hacking Biden’s encrypted iPhone backup.
The 53-year-old Biden has been in the crosshairs of Republican lawmakers and pundits that seek to discredit President Joe Biden’s administration.
The younger Biden faces two misdemeanor tax evasion charges and a separate charge for illegally purchasing a handgun — counts for which he had secured separate plea deals aimed at keeping him out of prison. While he was set to plead guilty to those charges in July, a Trump-appointed judge in the District of Delaware pumped the brakes on the plan, contending that the terms of the plea deal were unclear.
In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Biden expressly denied the allegations Byrne made, among others in a profile article in the Capital Times Magazine and in social media posts.
“Byrne’s defamatory claims that plaintiff engaged in criminal actions with a country whose government is widely considered an enemy of the United States are completely false,” Biden said. “To falsely accuse plaintiff of engaging in these criminal acts is not only reckless and baseless but utterly outrageous and despicable, and it constitutes defamation per se.”
Biden’s lawsuit seeks unspecified general and punitive damages for defamation.
Biden is represented by Paul Salvaty and Abbe David Lowell of Winston & Strawn, and by Bryan Sullivan and Zachary Hansen of Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae.
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