Hunter Biden won't apologize for linking Melania Trump to Epstein amid lawsuit threat
Aug. 14 (UPI) -- First Lady Melania Trump is demanding Hunter Biden, son of former President Joe Biden, retract statements that he said about how President Donald Trump met her.
A legal notice dated Aug. 6 and written by the first lady's lawyer, Alejandro Brito, demanded Biden "immediately retract the false, defamatory, disparaging and inflammatory statements made about Mrs. Trump" including claims by Hunter Biden that Trump met his wife through convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The comments were made during an interview earlier in the month on the YouTube show Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan.
On Thursday, Biden revisited the show and did not retract his statements.
"They spent an enormous amount of time together," Biden said of the president and Epstein.
"That's how Melania, the first lady and the president met. Yeah, according to Michael Wolff," he said, referring to the author of several biographies of Trump.
Callaghan asked Biden if he would like to apologize to the first lady, and he said, "That's not going to happen."
He cited news reports dating back to 2019 that "reported that sources said that Jeffrey Epstein claimed to be the person to introduce Donald Trump to Melania at that time."
Melania Trump said she will sue for $1 billion.
Attention to the Epstein case has ballooned in recent weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Trump's name is in the Epstein files.
Trump was once close friends with Epstein, who trafficked underage girls to adult men, but has denied visiting Epstein's private islands in the Caribbean. He died by suicide in prison.
Since then, Congress and the Department of Justice have requested files and sent out subpoenas, and Epstein's accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell has recently given testimony about the case.
Hunter Biden called Melania Trump's lawsuit threat a "designed distraction."
"I don't think that these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a designed distraction, because it's not about who introduced whom to who," he said. "I don't know how that's in any way rises to the level of defamation to begin with."
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