Hunter Biden has told Fox News that he plans to sue for defamation, according to a demand letter obtained by The Daily Beast.
Upon receiving the notice last week, however, Fox News took no outward steps in response until news outlets made the demands public on Monday—after which the conservative network released a statement while quietly deleting a six-part “mock trial” miniseries specifically targeted in the letter.
Now, Biden’s attorneys are demanding that Fox retract and correct its statement, calling it false, deliberately evasive, and published “in complete disregard for the truth.”
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“Predictably, Fox News has once again doubled down on its efforts to mislead the public. In its statement today, Fox falsely states that Hunter Biden was the subject of an investigation by Congress, which mischaracterizes the plain facts of his litigation, and intentionally avoids telling their audience that their attacks on Hunter were ‘based’ on an informant who lied,” said the statement, which was shared with The Daily Beast and attributed to Biden’s counsel—Mark Geragos, Tina Glandian, and Bryan Freedman, at California firm Geragos & Geragos.
“We demand that Fox immediately retract and correct today’s statement, which is the latest example of its relentless attack on Hunter Biden in complete disregard for the truth,” the statement said.
The original statement from Fox called Hunter Biden “the subject of investigations by both the Department of Justice and Congress,” adding that he had been indicted “by two different US Attorney’s Offices in California and Delaware.”
Hunter Biden has been a central figure in the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry, despite that inquiry being, by definition, aimed at his father, President Joe Biden. The two indictments, according to court dockets, were brought by the Office of Special Counsel David Weiss, with the Delaware case also including one prosecutor from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in that state.
The Fox statement also claimed that the network—whose obsessive coverage has mentioned Hunter Biden more than 13,000 times since January 2023—had “accurately covered” the recent indictment of FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who, the statement said, “was the source of certain claims made about Mr. Biden.”
Those “certain claims,” however, were the focus of hundreds of Fox News articles and broadcasts before Smirnov’s indictment revealed them to be false.
Biden’s demand letter to Fox had specifically highlighted the network’s reliance on Smirnov’s claims, as well as Fox’s “brazen show of no remorse” after his arrest, which Biden’s counsel told The Daily Beast had “exposed the conspiracy of disinformation” that Fox allegedly fueled.
Fox, however, largely ignored the development, even casting Smirnov’s indictment as a conspiratorial warning to potential “whistleblowers.” Biden’s counsel told the network to “take immediate steps” to update its articles and inform viewers that Fox has been “sharing a debunked allegation from a source who has been federally indicted.”
According to the demand letter—a detailed 14-page missive that attorneys for Biden sent to Fox Corporation on April 23—the right-wing network has engaged in a years-long conspiracy to defame the president’s son in the name of profit.
In a statement to The Daily Beast on Monday, Biden’s legal team said that they plan on holding Fox News accountable.
“For the last five years, Fox News has relentlessly attacked Hunter Biden and made him a caricature in order to boost ratings and for its financial gain,” the statement said. “The recent indictment of FBI informant Smirnov has exposed the conspiracy of disinformation that has been fueled by Fox, enabled by their paid agents and monetized by the Fox enterprise. We plan on holding them accountable.”
The notice demands that Fox News take immediate steps to remedy a plethora of coverage over the last five years that Biden’s attorneys say has falsely maligned him.
They specifically mention hundreds of articles and broadcast segments based on Smirnov’s now-debunked bribery allegations, the fictional mock-trial series—which Fox quietly removed on Tuesday—and the promulgation and exploitation of racy images of Biden which, according to the letter, violate laws against “revenge porn.”
“While routinely defaming and disparaging Mr. Biden, FOX has simultaneously sought to profit by the unlawful exploitation of Mr. Biden’s image, name, and likeness for commercial purposes and reprehensible dissemination of salacious photographs depicting Mr. Biden,” the letter states, warning that “FOX’s failure to expeditiously comply with the foregoing removal demands will subject FOX to significant liability for its continued and blatant copyright infringement,” as well as potential damages for defamation.
Attorneys for Biden told The Daily Beast on Monday that they have not heard from the network since the letter was delivered last week and are prepared to file a lawsuit shortly.
The letter comes as Hunter Biden’s lengthy legal and political battles enter new stages. While Justice Department prosecutors move forward with tax evasion and firearms charges, the House GOP’s political case for impeachment has fallen apart, the most spectacular implosive force coming with Smirnov’s February indictment.
Still, the years of salacious and highly complicated allegations made by various figures against Hunter Biden—many of them unfounded, misleading, or outright lies—have generated their own micro-economy in right-wing media circles.
That farrago of information and misinformation has become nearly impossible to sort out, but the impeachment and prosecutorial efforts seem all but certain to play a factor as the 2024 presidential campaign ramps up.
The suit could also land one year after Fox News paid $787 million to settle defamation claims from Dominion Voting Systems related to the network’s role in promoting false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The discovery process in that suit revealed reams of damaging internal information that fueled a months-long parade of embarrassing headlines.
Fox is still fending off a similar lawsuit from another voting systems firm, Smartmatic.
