Biden said<\/a>: \u201cUh, fuck that, not going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cWhat I said is what I have heard and seen reported and written primarily from Michael Wolff, but also dating back to 2019.\u201d He cited a number of publications, including the New York Times and Vanity Fair, as sources of his information.<\/p>\n
The first lady\u2019s threats echo a favoured strategy of her husband, who has aggressively used litigation to go after critics. Public figures such as the Trumps face a high bar to succeed in a defamation lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The president also responded to the issue, accusing Biden of fabricating stories to denigrate the first lady. Trump told Fox News Radio host Brian Kilmeade on Thursday morning that he had encouraged her to sue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said go forward. You know, I\u2019ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately \u2026 and Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,\u201d he told Kilmeade.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut they do that to demean, they make up stories. I mean I can tell you exactly how it was and it was another person actually \u2026 but it wasn\u2019t Jeffrey Epstein. \u201cI told her go ahead and do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump indicated he would prefer that the first lady used his lawyers.<\/p>\n
The president and first lady have long said they were introduced by Paolo Zampolli, a modelling agent, at a New York fashion week party in 1998.<\/p>\n
The letter to Biden is dated 6 August and was first reported on Wednesday by Fox News Digital.<\/p>\n
Abbe Lowell, a lawyer who has represented Biden in his criminal cases and to whom Brito\u2019s letter is addressed, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
This article was amended on 14 August 2025. Andrew Callaghan is a US journalist, not British as an earlier version said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melania Trump has demanded that Hunter Biden retract comments linking her to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-69981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}