President Joe Biden talks with his son Hunter Biden as he arrives at Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Del., Tuesday, June 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Patrick Byrne, a wealthy 2020 election denier and conspiracy theorist who formerly served as the CEO of Overstock.com, was ordered to pay Hunter Biden at least $1.7 million in punitive damages for making "highly reprehensible" false claims about an "inherently implausible" Iranian bribery plot.
Law&Crime has chronicled how U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, gave Byrne repeated chances to comply with orders, to show up to court, and to hire attorneys who could help him mount a defense in the face of a defamation suit from former President Joe Biden's son.
Those chances have clearly run out. The problem for Byrne was not so much that he couldn't find lawyers who knew how to defend him, but that there was "ample evidence" he himself "knew" the bribery claim was false, the judge indicated.
"Without further investigation or directly corroborating evidence, the Court found that a reasonable jury could easily find Defendant acted at least recklessly with regard to the truth of the defamatory statements, again, even if Defendant had been told the story by an Iranian government official, as Defendant claimed," Wilson said. "Moreover, the Court further found that ample evidence supported a finding that Defendant knew the story to be false, and much of the narrative describing the covert meeting with an Iranian government official was fabricated."
In the summer of 2025, as trial was set to begin, Byrne suddenly fired his lawyers and tried to add Stefanie Lambert and Peter Ticktin to his team. The attorneys filed documents in each level of the federal court system in an unsuccessful attempt to argue there were no lawyers better suited to represent Byrne. They claimed, in vain, that Wilson's refusal to allow Byrne his "counsel of choice" on the case in a pro hac vice capacity amounted to "a severe violation of his constitutional rights."
While that fight was ongoing, the judge pushed back the trial date instead of immediately issuing a default judgment, noting that resolving cases on the merits is preferred.
Nothing that's happened since that reprieve helped Byrne avoid $1.7 million in punitive damages, however. Wilson explained why on Friday, with additional remarks on the $34,969.20 in sanctions that Byrne owes Biden — a penalty that could increase by $1,000 per day if he does not pay the sum within 14 days of the order.
Patrick Byrne, former CEO of The America Project and former Overstock.com CEO, left, and Joe Flynn, president, The America Project, attend a conference on conspiracy theories about voting machines and discredited claims about the 2020 presidential election at a hotel in West Palm Beach, Fla., Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Jim Rassol).
The judge, slamming Byrne's "open and repeated acts of defiance toward the Court" as "unambiguous attempts to delay proceedings indefinitely," wasn't at all impressed with the self-proclaimed whistleblower's claims.
"Defendant has not been able to provide any documentary evidence to support their veracity, so the only evidence that Plaintiff was involved in a near-billion-dollar bribery scheme is the uncorroborated word of an Iranian government official in a covert meeting, the occurrence of which is only evidenced by the demonstrably uncredible word of Defendant. In fact, even the evidence proffered by Defendant as the basis for Defendant's statements tends to show that the statements were false," the judge concluded, calling Byrne's conduct "highly reprehensible."
If Byrne thinks he'll be able to challenge the punitive damages award, he'll have to think again, Wilson added.
"Defendant has already waived his ability to argue on the matter of damages by flagrantly disobeying the Court's order to allow discovery on that issue," the judge said.
Earlier in the year, Byrne hired Robert Tyler and claimed he, in fact, had "meritorious defenses to the claims against him," his behavior in the case notwithstanding. Tyler went so far as to call Byrne an "American whistleblower in its truest sense."
"His defense here is significant because it implicates serious national security concerns. He presented audio tapes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during President Joseph Biden's administration evidencing the veracity of his assertion Plaintiff Hunter Biden attempted to negotiate an illicit deal during President Bara[c]k Obama's administration to unfreeze millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, of Iranian assets in exchange for receiving millions of dollars in cash from Iranian agents," one filing claimed.
On X, Biden said he was "grateful that the rule of law prevailed" in his lawsuit against Byrne.