Left: Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and an ally of former President Donald Trump, takes a break from being questioned by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, in Washington, Friday, July 15, 2022 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Right: FILE – Hunter Biden departs from federal court June 11, 2024, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum).
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne has asked a federal judge to grant summary judgment “in its entirety” tossing out Hunter Biden’s defamation lawsuit or to at least rule President Joe Biden’s son is a public figure who cannot show that claims of “treasonous crimes” involving his father, bribery, Iran, and “nuclear talks” were made with “actual malice.”
The filing dropped Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, where Biden has alleged that Byrne in a 2023 Capitol Times Magazine “interview” falsely accused him of soliciting millions in bribes from Iran so, as his lawsuit put it, his “family” would release to Iran “billions of dollars in frozen funds and ensuring that the United States would ‘go easy’ on Iran during ‘nuclear talks’ between the two countries.”
Biden claimed that Byrne, later in the year and the day after October 7, 2023, “doubled down” although he’d been sent an informal retraction demand, sharing the Capitol Times Magazine story and suggesting that Biden’s “alleged criminal dealings with Iran had contributed to the terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel, [and] had brought about more than 1,400 civilian deaths,” according to the complaint.
The high-profile plaintiff, at one point noting that Byrne also faces a Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, added that the defendant “made, published, and repeated false and defamatory statements […] knowing full well that the statements are false, for the purpose of subjecting Plaintiff to harassment, intimidation, and harm.”
Byrne has now responded that Biden cannot show actual malice, namely that there’s “clear and convincing” proof Byrne knew what he was saying was false or that he made the statements “with reckless disregard” for whether they were true or false. Specifically, Byrne said Biden has no proof that Byrne didn’t go to the Middle East in 2021 and learned “through a mechanism” he did not explain of the claimed nuke-related bribery plot.
“Plaintiff cannot reasonably argue that he is a private figure. Plaintiff has reached such ‘pervasive fame or notoriety,’ one would be hard-pressed to find someone who did not know his name. Therefore, as a public figure, he must prove that Defendant published the statements with actual malice,” the motion said. “Plaintiff testified that he did not know whether or not Defendant traveled to the Middle East in November 2021. Plaintiff had no evidence to demonstrate Defendant did not have any meetings in the Middle East. While Plaintiff would like to shrug his shoulders and claim he has no knowledge of what Defendant thought or believed, Plaintiff bears the burden to prove just that.”
“Plaintiff must prove Defendant, at the very least, harbored some subjective doubts as to the truthfulness of the statements,” Byrne’s filing added. “Plaintiff has admitted he has no such evidence.”
The Biden lawsuit recounted the alleged defamatory statements at issue this way, quoting the Capitol Times interviewer’s follow-up question and Byrne’s response to it:
Interviewer: “Patrick, you are claiming that 18 months ago, the Biden Family was seeking a bribe from Iran to release funds frozen in South Korea, and to go easy in nuclear talks, and that the United States Government has been aware of this since December, 2021?”
Byrne: “100% correct.”
Read Byrne’s motion here.
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