Hunter Biden's revenge
Hunter Biden's revenge
Smear campaigns have consequences.
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By Liz Dye
Have you noticed that after years of saturation coverage, Fox News hosts have suddenly cooled it on the Hunter Biden stuff? There’s a reason for that.
Last week, Fox News pulled the six-part series “The Trial of Hunter Biden” off its Fox Nation streaming service. The move was in response to a 14-page letter from Hunter’s legal team announcing his plans to sue the network “imminently” for defamation and invasion of privacy, as well as violation of revenge porn laws which bar the publication of nonconsensual nude photographs.
“By unlawfully publishing images of Mr. Biden depicting an unclothed or exposed intimate part of him and depicting him engaging in sexual conduct in order to harass, annoy, and alarm him, FOX has violated N.Y. Civil Rights section 52-b and Mr. Biden is entitled to not only compensatory and punitive damages and his attorney’s fees, but he is also entitled to injunctive relief, as demanded herein,” his lawyer Tina Glandian of the powerhouse defamation firm Geragos & Geragos wrote.
“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,” Glandian continued, according to the Daily Beast, which broke the story.
Biden’s lawyers demanded the removal of multiple stories as well as corrections on others, warning of “significant liability” should the network fail to comply immediately.
It’s a credible threat from Hunter, who recently filed a spate of lawsuits against the parties who sought to weaponize the theft of his personal data to prevent and then bring down his father’s presidency. And Fox, which last year paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems before resuming its regularly scheduled fact-free programming, seems to have taken it seriously.
The “Laptop from Hell”
After four years in the public consciousness, Hunter Biden’s “laptop” has become a veritable cottage industry. Rightwing grifters like Garrett Zeigler, a former White House aide to Peter Navarro (and a truly nasty character), made an entire career out of flogging it. Fox News has displayed photos of Hunter — naked, high, and cavorting with sex workers — to its millions of viewers. And congressional Republicans made Hunter’s business dealings the centerpiece of their quest to impeach his father.
But as Andrew Rice and Olivia Nuzzi pointed out in their definitive New York Magazine piece, the “laptop” isn’t a laptop at all. It’s images of hard drives containing backups of Hunter’s digital life — bank statements, texts, emails, photos, etc. — which were lifted from various phones and computers that have been floating around in various forms for years.
According to a blind computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac, Biden left three damaged laptops at his Delaware store in April 2019. Biden failed to return within 90 days, and so the abandoned property became Mac Isaac’s to do with it what he wished. And what he did was extract the data onto a hard drive and give it to the FBI in hopes it would derail Joe Biden’s electoral prospects. Mac Isaac then did what a normal repairman would never do — he passed the drive along to Rudy Giuliani and his lawyer Robert Costello, who weaponized it in hopes of keeping Trump in the White House. Hunter Biden sued all three men, and Costello sued Giuliani for failing to pay his legal bills.
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In 2018 and 2019, Hunter Biden was in the throes of addiction and had somewhat less than optimal control over his devices. As Marcy Wheeler points out, its pretty clear that other parties hacked into his digital space — for instance, on August 6, 2018, two iPhones, one in Pasadena and the other in Las Vegas, were simultaneously granted access to his Venmo account.
The “laptop” wasn’t a clean dataset when it fell into Mac Isaac’s hands. But after Giuliani got ahold of it and pushed it out into the world with the help of Steve Bannon, it was copied and accessed and manipulated to the point where it’s as corrupted as a funhouse mirror image. To the extent that the “laptop” was ever reliable as evidence, it certainly isn’t now.
But congressional Republicans, along with their media allies, have taken it as gospel truth in their zeal to find something to pin on Hunter’s father. And, worse yet, the Department of Justice and the IRS have treated it as actionable evidence, both in their investigations and in court.
When they go low …
In retrospect, it was probably a mistake for Hunter Biden to let rightwing slanders go unchallenged for four years. That strategy certainly didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, who largely refused to engage with fantastical allegations about Vince Foster, the Clinton Global Initiative, Uranium One, Seth Rich, and her email server, only to see them become an undifferentiated cloud of implied criminality that dogs her to this day.
Maybe Hunter hoped that, if he just laid low, Republicans’ lies about him would topple under the sheer weight of their own stupidity. After all, Giuliani got caught with his pants down by Borat around the time he was parroting claims from a literal Russian agent that Joe Biden and his son took billions of dollars in bribes from Ukraine.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, Republicans whipped themselves into a frenzy, claiming every other week to have found smoking gun evidence linking the son’s sleazy behavior to his father. They resurrected the roundly debunked claim that Vice President Biden leaned on Ukraine to fire its corrupt prosecutor to benefit Hunter’s business interests.
They even managed to find not one but two supposed whistleblowers who turned out to be criminals fabricating evidence to frame the Bidens for bribery and feeding it to the FBI. Eventually, Gal Luft and Alexander Smirnov were both indicted, but not before Jamie Comer, Jim Jordan, and Sen. Chuck Grassley had used them to exert enough political pressure to undermine the plea deal Hunter had negotiated with Special Counsel David Weiss’s office.
Perhaps Hunter hoped to protect his father as he hunkered down and quietly negotiated to end to his criminal investigations, even agreeing to waive the statute of limitations as a gesture of good faith.
That period is now over. And after Republican political pressure scuppered his plea deal, Biden reversed course, going on offense against the people who had purveyed lies about him unchecked for four straight years.
All the lies that are fit to air
In September 2023, Hunter Biden sued Zeigler and Giuliani, accusing them of hacking into his iCloud account in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Taking advantage of a wildly improvident defamation suit Mac Isaac filed against him, along with CNN, Politico, the Daily Beast, and Rep. Adam Schiff, Biden countersued, forcing Mac Isaac into discovery that will document just how corrupted the chain of custody for the “laptop” is. And Biden filed a lawsuit against the IRS, alleging that the supposed whistleblowers who testified to Comer’s impeachment committee had violated his statutory privacy laws by discussing his personal financial information on television.
Hunter even sent a cease and desist letter to Donald Trump, warning him that "his incitement can further hurt people and cause himself even more legal trouble."
And it’s not just Hunter Biden marching into court to correct the record and collect damages. A retired Secret Service agent named Robert Savage sued the New York Post and its reporters Miranda Devine and Jon Levine for defamation after they published fake texts supposedly found on the “laptop” and suggested Savage “engaged in significant misconduct in the performance of his official duties by surreptitiously providing assistance to Hunter Biden, the son of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and covering up the alleged misbehavior of Hunter Biden relating to drug abuse and patronizing prostitutes.”
RELATED FROM PN: Hunter Biden hands the hapless James Comer another L
So Biden’s threat was credible enough to get the attention of the higher-ups in Murdochland, who late last month pulled “The Trial of Hunter Biden” off its site.
The mockumentary, which was originally released in October 2022 and billed as “a riveting look at the unresolved legal situation of President Joe Biden’s son,” envisioned a potential prosecution for bribery and violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In reality, Hunter has never been charged with violating FARA, let alone soliciting a bribe, although he will face charges this summer of tax evasion and lying on a handgun permit application. But these procedural nitpicks mattered little to Joe Brown, a former jurist from Shelby County, Tennessee, who spent 15 years as a reality show judge yelling at people on television and in the mockumentary presides over the fake trial of the president’s son.
“Some of the things that are on that laptop are really disturbing," Brown said on Fox, making clear that his role in the miniseries was to cast judgment, not exercise it. Indeed, the nonconsensual nude images stolen from the laptop feature prominently in the program, although their admissibility in any court of law seems highly dubious. The program also featured “testimony” from Mac Isaac and Devine.
"We don't want mob justice, but sometimes the collective needs to bring pressure to at least look at things because from what we were looking at on that laptop, something's way wrong here. Way wrong,” Brown added.
In response to the takedown demands, Fox’s lawyers put out a defiant statement snarking that Biden had “belatedly chosen to publicly attack Fox News’ constitutionally protected coverage” — an implicit reminder that the statute of limitations for defamation is one or two years, and so many claims will likely be time-barred.
“Mr. Biden is a public figure who has been the subject of investigations by both the Department of Justice and Congress, has been indicted by two different US Attorney’s Offices in California and Delaware, and has admitted to multiple incidents of wrongdoing," they went on. “Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered these highly publicized events as well as the subsequent indictment of an FBI informant who was the source of certain claims made about Mr. Biden.”
As of this writing, Hunter has not followed through on his threat to sue Fox. But if Fox execs really are unbothered by potential litigation, they aren’t acting like it. Not only did they pull the mockumentary, but a search of Fox News transcripts indicates that after years of relentless conspiracy-mongering, hosts suddenly stopped talking about Hunter almost entirely around the same time his lawyers sent the letter announcing a lawsuit is imminent.
The damage, however, is done. Not only will Hunter’s reputation forever be sullied by the four-year-long hit job Fox did on him, but evidence-free claims about Joe Biden being corrupt have taken root among voters. And that, of course, was always the point. Mission accomplished.