Three years ago I sued @PatrickByrne for lying about me. He claimed that I took a bribe and committed treason. He implied I was in some part responsible for the Hamas attack of October 7th.
His lies caused real damage and endangered my family.
On Friday I was awarded $1.7M in punitive damages by a Reagan-appointed federal judge. The court determined that everything he said about me was a complete fiction.
For those of you who don’t know Patrick Byrne, he is the former Overstock CEO who lost control of his company when it became public he was sleeping with convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. He is the man who was in the Oval Office with Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell leading up to the January 6th insurrection.
He is a clownish footnote in history. But his lies travel far and wide. He is a fraud who did the bidding of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.
This isn’t the first defamation case brought against Byrne, and it won’t be the last. Even after losing, he is still doing it.
He continues to tell his audience he has “three dynamite voicemails” and a former federal agent whose testimony confirms his story. Byrne had three years to bring that evidence to court. He never produced it. The voicemails he did produce, the court found, “do not mention a bribe, implicate contemporaneous involvement in any illegal scheme by Plaintiff, or otherwise independently corroborate Defendant’s story.” The former federal agent Byrne relied on, John Moynihan, gave sworn testimony that contradicted him. The FBI agent Byrne claimed had backed him up denied it under oath.
Those are not my findings. Those are the findings of a federal court. And nothing prevents Byrne from releasing the voicemails he keeps promising his audience. He never has, because the court has already listened to what he produced and found they prove nothing.
Patrick will try not pay this judgment. He didn’t pay the $34,969 the court ordered six months ago either. His strategy is delay. Fire the lawyer. Skip the hearing. File nonsense with courts that have already ruled. Repeat the lie on Alex Jones while the clock runs.
He is not a whistleblower or a spy. He is a man who got played by a Russian intelligence asset, lost his company over it, and has been performing a spy fantasy on the internet ever since.
He is a coward who wouldn’t even show up in court to face me. He is hiding in Dubai, where he fled during my case to avoid being deposed, and told the court a story about a Venezuelan hit squad to explain it.
He will run from this judgment the same way he ran from my trial. Fine. Every defamatory statement is a new lawsuit. I have as much time as he has words.
Over on Substack I’m writing about the last seven years of my life. It’s the first draft of the whole story. All of it.
Below is a short excerpt. I’ll be releasing chapters every few days, along with “Where’s Hunter?” a video series exclusive to Substack.
Check it out. Link is in the replies.
The Laptop
They called it the laptop. I will call it that too, although the name is not accurate, the provenance was never established, and no court or forensic examiner ever certified the chain of custody that would have made it evidence rather than theater. I will call it the laptop because by now the word belongs to something larger than a piece of hardware. It belongs to a story they needed me to confirm, and I am done letting them tell it.
Their origin story begins in a Delaware repair shop, but it does not end there, and it did not begin there either. By the time a legally blind computer repairman named handed a hard drive to Rudy Giuliani’s attorney, men had already been traveling to Kyiv and Vienna and Zurich for more than a year trying to assemble exactly this object. The laptop did not surface and create a scandal. A scandal was constructed, and a laptop was produced to anchor it.
So. The laptop.
Here is what was on it.
Twenty years of my life, or a version of it. Messages sent at hours that don't belong to anyone sober. Photographs I would never have taken in daylight. A record of every way a body can fail its owner when the owner has stopped trying to help. None of it is a single dramatic moment. It is accumulation, the slow daily work of an addict doing the thing that is killing him because the alternative feels like dying faster.
All of that was on it. I am not denying any of it.
That is not a small thing to say. I have spent years in rooms where men and women with far less scrutiny than I have faced tore themselves apart trying to account for what they did in the middle of their disease. The inventory of an addict’s life is never clean. It is not meant to be clean. Recovery does not erase the record. It requires reading it. I have read mine.
What I will not do is accept their lies.
Because a record of what is on it, or more precisely, what was not, exists.
(Read the whole story on Substack)
I am officially nominating Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) for the Nobel Peace Prize.
No President in History has ended the same war so many times.
Our Dear Leader has ended the war with Iran at least 38 times by CNN’s count.
No President has ever done this before.
And he is nowhere near finished ending it.
It’s a record worthy of the Nobel committee’s recognition. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Gratitude isn’t just about the good times. I’ve written a lot over the past seven years. Join me on Substack where I will be sharing those stories and more soon.
Another one of @MirandaDevine’s favorite sources is going to jail.
Miles Guo got 30 years yesterday for a billion-dollar fraud.
He was Steve Bannon’s business partner. Together they built GTV. GTV pushed the doctored photos and smears about me. They built the Laptop from Hell narrative. Devine made it famous. Guo even had a Mar-a-Lago membership.
He joins Alexander Smirnov. Six years for fabricating the Burisma bribery story that drove the impeachment inquiry against my father. Smirnov admitted he made it up.
And Gal Luft. Still a fugitive. Indicted for acting as an unregistered Chinese agent after paying a Trump adviser to push Beijing’s line in public.
All three came after me and my father. All three are liars and frauds. All three served the interests of Donald Trump. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.
Follow me on Substack where I’ll be sharing the whole story soon.
At the end of this clip Hunter Biden is basically admitting on CTV that he wants to rig the election system in the US so someone they don’t like can’t ever be voted in again.
It’s insulting that CTV put this guy on one of their programs thinking we should care about what he has to say.