Fox News pulled its Hunter Biden miniseries after the first son threatened to sue the network for defamation.
“This program was produced in and has been available since 2022,” a Fox News Media spokesperson said in a statement, according to CNN. “We are reviewing the concerns that have just been raised and – out of an abundance of caution in the interim – have taken it down.”
The move follows Hunter Biden threatening to take legal action against Fox News for publishing explicit photos of him. Many of the images came from his laptop that was left at a repair shop.
“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,” lawyer Tina Glandian, a partner at Geragos & Geragos wrote.
Hunter Biden’s legal team said in a statement, “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 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.”
Biden’s lawyers claimed the “intimate images” were “hacked, stolen, and/or manipulated.”
According to a letter sent to Fox News, the since-removed miniseries “unlawfully published” what was described as “intimate images of Mr. Biden depicting him in the nude as well as engaged in sex acts in violation of the majority of states’ laws against the nonconsensual disclosure of sexually explicit images and videos, sometimes referred to as ‘revenge porn’ laws,” ABC News reported.
The letter also called for Fox News to retract “debunked bribery allegations.”
“[D]espite knowing that the source of the bribery allegation was an unverified and uncorroborated claim from a foreign national who was an FBI informant and that the allegation was dubious at best, FOX repeatedly reported that the source of the bribery allegation was ‘highly credible,’” the letter says.
“Then, in a brazen show of no remorse, rather than walk back the story and correct the record, FOX double-downed 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,” it continues.
The Justice Department charged Alexander Smirnov with fabricating the bribery allegations in February. Whether the bribery claims were false will be highlighted in Smirnov’s December 2024 criminal trial.
Smirnov told the FBI in 2020 that executives with Ukrainian energy firm Burisma hired Hunter Biden to “protect” the company, “through his dad, from all kinds of problems.”
Later, Burisma gave $5 million to Joe and Hunter Biden so that Hunter could “take care of all those issues through his dad,” referring to “a criminal investigation being conducted by the then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General into Burisma.”
“In truth and fact, the Defendant had contact with executives from Burisma in 2017, after the end of the Obama-Biden Administration and after the then Ukrainian Prosecutor General had been fired in February 2016, in other words, when Public Official 1 had no ability to influence U.S. policy and when the Prosecutor General was no longer in office,” the indictment claims. “In short, the Defendant transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”
If convicted of making false claims, Smirnov faces a maximum of 25 years in prison.
