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 and throw out Hunter Biden‘s defamation lawsuit against him — saying Biden’s recent court filings have been little more than an effort to paint Byrne as “a right-wing nutjob.”
In a 21-page memorandum in support of the motion for summary judgment filed on Tuesday in Central California District Court, Byrne’s attorneys say the presidential son, after recently conceding a key point raised by the defense, largely sidestepped the implications.
Hunter Biden recently “conceded his public figure status” and therefore cannot prove any of the false statements at issue in the case were made with “actual malice,” the defense filing argues.
Actual malice is the highest, most exacting standard in defamation law — and the hardest to prove. The standard becomes operative when the person claiming to be defamed is a public official or public figure.
Once the switch is flipped, the doctrine requires a plaintiff to show the defendant made a false statement “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
In the underlying lawsuit, Biden claims Byrne defamed him during a June 2023 interview — and then again in October 2023.
Biden says Byrne made false claims that he and his family solicited bribes from the Islamic Republic of Iran in exchange for the Biden administration releasing billions of frozen Iranian funds and for adopting a pro-Iranian position during “nuclear talks.”
Here’s how Biden’s lawsuit recounts the basis of the complaint:
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.”
In late October of this year, Byrne filed his motion to dismiss — citing the actual malice argument — and telling the court that Biden’s lawsuit should fail “in its entirety” due to the lack of actual malice.
In early November, Biden filed a motion in opposition arguing that “the lack of any basis or research or fact-checking for Byrne’s totally made-up false charge is the definition of ‘actual malice.””
Biden’s motion offers a list of details to support his claim that Byrne did, in fact, act with actual malice when he uttered, and later when he repeated, the Iran-themed conspiracy theory.
From the plaintiff’s motion, at length:
(i) Byrne performed no reasonable investigation into the statements before making them;
(ii) Byrne relied on random, unauthenticated voicemails from unidentified individuals which, it turns out, from discovery provided by Defendant, did not even mention Biden or any bribe or any information in the statements made by Byrne;
(iii) Byrne has a history of right-wing attacks on President Joe Biden, Plaintiff’s father, and Plaintiff himself, which demonstrates that Byrne has anger or hostility towards Plaintiff and/or attacked Plaintiff to attack his father;
(iv) Byrn’s association and correspondence with other right-wing radicals who also harbor actual malice toward Biden and his family;
(v) Byrne’s desire to increase his profile in the right-wing online community to sell the Capitol Times Magazine article containing his statements, which forms the basis of this lawsuit, his book, and a mini-series about himself and his attacks on President Biden; and
(vi) Byrne’s history of claiming to be a secret government operative that gives him inside secret information for which he claims he cannot provide proof because of the classified nature of those operations, but apparently has no inhibitions about publicly broadcasting and publishing such claims as far and wide as he possibly can.
Byrne says those arguments, however voluminous, simply do not stack up to meet the requisite legal standard.
Rather, Byrne argues, Biden himself is now making “inflammatory allegations that Defendant is, in essence, a right-wing nutjob.”
The arguments offered to show actual malice amount to “inadmissible evidence of [Byrne’s] political beliefs” and “the exercise of [Byrne’s] First Amendment rights to state his political beliefs,” Byrne argues. And, in any event, the list of Byrne’s beliefs “does not constitute clear and convincing evidence of malice,” especially because Hunter Biden “is a political public figure in the arena,” according to Byrne.
Notably, Biden also filed 70 exhibits along with his opposition motion — and the next day he filed a sealed document in support as well.
Byrne is moving to bar the court from considering many of those exhibits — a great deal of which are other statements and publications that reiterate Byrne’s beliefs. But, the defendant says, even if the court were to consider them all, the result should be the same.
“[E]ven if the court were to overrule those objections and consider these exhibits, they are merely political discourse and opinion that is protected by the First Amendment,” Byrne argues. “None of these alleged post defamatory statements contained in [the exhibits] show that Defendant knew his alleged defamatory statements were false when he made them or had serious doubts about the veracity of those statement(s) before they were published.”
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