The younger Biden is also demanding that Fox News remove from its streaming service, Fox Nation, a dramatized trial of the president’s son, presided over by the star of the reality show ‘Judge Joe Brown.’
The younger Biden is also demanding that Fox News remove from its streaming service, Fox Nation, a dramatized trial of the president’s son, presided over by the star of the reality show ‘Judge Joe Brown.’
Hunter Biden is threatening to sue Fox News for “revenge porn” and is demanding that the news network retract all stories containing obscene photographs or references to photographs that were “stolen” from his infamous laptop.
The laptop was abandoned at a repair store in April 2019. After 90 days, it and its contents became the property of the shop’s proprietor, John Paul Mac Isaac, according to Mr. Mac Isaac’s attorney.
In a letter to Fox News and FOX Corporation, Mr. Biden’s defense attorneys argue that all photos — which depict the first son using drugs with and having sex with women who are presumably escorts — taken from the first son’s laptop are being used illegally, in violation of his privacy rights. He also takes issue with the “manipulated” images that blurred his genitalia and those of the various women with him in the photos.
“FOX knows that these private and confidential images were hacked, stolen, and/or manipulated digital material,” the attorneys write, according to a letter obtained by CNN.
To pursue his case, Mr. Biden has hired the law firm of Geragos & Geragos, whose principal partner, Mark Geragos, is famous for representing celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Chris Brown, and Winona Ryder, as well as accused wife-killer Scott Peterson, who is now on death row at San Quentin.
Mr. Biden is also asking Fox News’s streaming service, Fox Nation, to take down a miniseries mockumentary made in 2022 that dives into the question: “What would a Hunter Biden corruption trial look like?”
The six-part miniseries used photos from Mr. Biden’s laptop that showed him smoking crack cocaine and cavorting in high-end hotel rooms with prostitutes.
“My client took all that money and stuck it up his nose or put it into a crack pipe,” attorney Randy Zelin, who portrays Mr. Biden’s defense attorney in the mockumentary, says to the jury at one point.
In an interview with Fox News after the filming of the series — where a celebrity judge, Joe Brown, of the syndicated television program “Judge Joe Brown,” plays the presiding jurist — Mr. Zelin said it was “easy” to defend Mr. Biden from accusations of corruption. “I recognized that this debauchery, this broken, defaulted man didn’t have the wherewithal to do anything else other than” do drugs, Mr. Zelin said. “He’s not a functioning drug addict.”
The mockumentary also features testimony from the computer repair shop owner who first got custody of the laptop after Mr. Biden failed to pick it up from his store in 2020. When Mr. Mac Isaac attempted to turn over the computer to the FBI because he felt it held information about criminal schemes, the bureau declined to take possession. Mr. Mac Isaac later gave the hard drive to Mayor Giuliani.
Mr. Biden’s attorneys argue that the mockumentary violates most states’ “revenge porn” laws, relatively recent statutes that protect people from having their former sexual partners post sexually explicit photos of them online.
Beyond the use of the photos and the mockumentary series, Mr. Biden is also demanding that Fox retract all stories referencing allegations that he and his father each received a $5 million bribe from a Ukrainian businessman, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was the co-founder of Burisma — the natural gas and energy giant that employed the first son for years, paying him, for a time, more than $60,000 a month to sit on its board.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers point out that the bribery allegation came from an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov, who in February was charged with lying about the allegations. After he was indicted, Mr. Smirnov told the FBI that he first heard the bribery allegation from a high-ranking Russian intelligence official.
“In a brazen show of no remorse, rather than walk back the story and correct the record,” Mr. Biden’s attorneys argue, Fox doubled down “on the debunked bribery allegation and used Smirnov’s indictment to claim this is an ‘intimidation tactic’ aimed at silencing ‘whistleblowers,’ to blame the FBI for its credulity, and to suggest an even deeper conspiracy.”
The first son’s attorneys want Fox News to include editor’s notes in all stories related to the bribe that Mr. Smirnov has now been indicted for lying, and that the story has been thoroughly “debunked.”
This threat to Fox News and its parent company is just the latest example of Mr. Biden’s aggressive legal and public relations strategy.
He has already sued Mr. Mac Isaac for invasion of privacy and for illegally disseminating the contents of his hard drive. Mr. Biden’s attorneys also have filed a lawsuit against the former Trump aide who combed through the laptop to create a public website for individuals to view the laptop’s contents, Garrett Ziegler.
Mr. Biden, who is facing 12 criminal charges across two indictments from Special Counsel David Weiss regarding tax evasion and an illegal gun purchase, has also sued the Internal Revenue Service for disclosing his tax records to the public in an attempt to “embarrass” him.
“This assault on Mr. Biden’s rights involved the public disclosure of his confidential tax information during more than 20 nationally televised and non-congressionally sanctioned interviews and numerous public statements,” the IRS lawsuit states. Mr. Biden “has no fewer or lesser rights than any other American citizen, and no government agency or government agent has free rein to violate his rights simply because of who he is,” his lawyers say.
