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LOS ANGELES (CN) — Hunter Biden may win his defamation lawsuit against Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and fervent 2020 election denier, by default after Byrne switched attorneys on the day the case was supposed to go to trial.
U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson said Tuesday he would issue an order to show cause why he shouldn’t enter default judgment in favor of Biden, citing Byrne’s violation of court rules and conduct “offensive to the inherent power of the court.”
Wilson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had denied Biden’s request for summary judgment on his defamation claim after Byrne abruptly said he wouldn’t testify in person. Byrne’s former attorney, Michael Murphy, had previously assured the court he would attend the trial.
“I was replaced this morning,” Murphy said at a brief hearing Tuesday afternoon.
The judge set a hearing for Wednesday morning for Byrne’s attorneys to respond to his order.
Biden sued Byrne in November 2024 following a tweet that implied President Joe Biden’s son was somehow to blame for the Hamas attacks in Israel the previous month.
Byrne, who is no stranger to conspiracy theories, has repeatedly claimed that the younger Biden tried to get an $800 million bribe from Iran in exchange for his father’s administration releasing $8 billion in Iranian funds that are frozen in South Korea and for the U.S. to “go easy” in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
“These defamatory statements by Byrne are not merely false and not merely malicious — they are completely outrageous,” Biden said in his complaint. “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.”
Biden is seeking nominal damages for defamation per se claim, which doesn’t require proof of emotional or reputational harm. He also wants to pursue punitive damages if the jury finds Byrne acted with malice.
On Friday, Biden asked the judge to sanction Byrne for “bad-faith conduct,” noting Byrne backed out of testifying just days after his attorney repeatedly assured the court he would attend—assurances that shaped key pretrial rulings.
“The obvious inference is that defendant and his counsel reviewed the court’s rulings at the pretrial conference and decided to disavow representations to the court upon which the court relied in making those rulings, to obtain a tactical advantage in this litigation,” Biden argued in his request.
Specifically, Biden said that Byrne had decided that “the risk that his testimony would provide evidence supporting punitive damages against him outweighed the chance his testimony could prevent an award of punitive damages against him.”
At the July 21 pretrial conference, Biden’s lawyer Richard Harpootlian said they hadn’t conducted discovery into Byrne’s finances—an essential step for seeking punitive damages.
He planned to question Byrne about his wealth at trial, but with Byrne absent, Biden’s team may now rely on public records, such as SEC filings, to demonstrate that he’s wealthy.
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