A federal judge on Friday awarded Hunter Biden $1.7m in punitive damages in a defamation lawsuit he filed against former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
Biden sued Byrne – a Donald Trump ally who denied the results of the 2020 election and funded efforts to overturn them – in 2023, accusing Byrne of lying in an interview that Biden had previously sought a bribe from Iran’s government in the fall of 2021.
Joe Biden, Hunter’s father, was the US president at the time. And Byrne in an interview lied that Hunter Biden – in exchange for an $800m bribe – had offered Iran to go to his father, have him “unfreeze” $8bn in frozen Iranian assets and ensure that the US would “go easy” on Iran during “nuclear talks” between the two countries, according to Hunter Biden’s lawsuit.
