Trump told Melania to ‘go forward’ with legal action against Hunter Biden over Epstein relationship comments
First lady Melania Trump listens as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) delivers remarks during an Independence Day military family picnic on the South Lawn of the White House on July 4 in Washington
By Shania Shelton, Aileen Graef, Betsy Klein, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump confirmed Thursday morning that Melania Trump’s attorneys are threatening legal action against Hunter Biden, saying he told her to “go forward.”
“You know, I’ve done pretty well on these lawsuits lately. And I said, go forward. Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with Melania and I introducing. But they do that. They make up stories,” he told Brian Kilmeade on Fox News radio.
The legal threat centers on a claim Biden made in an interview on YouTube about the Trumps’ relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, according to the journalist who conducted the interview and a copy of the attorney letter obtained by Fox News.
Andrew Callaghan, host of the YouTube series Channel 5, said on his channel that he had received a legal demand from the first lady asking to retract a video from last week, which currently has 1.3 million views. Melania Trump is seeking $1 billion in damages if they don’t take down the video. She also wants a formal apology from Hunter Biden.
“In my hand is a legal demand letter addressed to Mr. Hunter Biden from the first lady of the United States, demanding a retraction of Channel 5’s video called ‘Hunter Biden returns’ in which Mr. Biden here makes some speculative comments about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump and Donald Trump,” Callaghan said at the beginning of a follow-up interview with Biden posted on Thursday.
Fox News also posted a copy of a letter, addressed to Hunter Biden and his lawyer, that asked Biden to “retract the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements made about Mrs. Trump” during the YouTube interview.
“First Lady Melania Trump’s attorneys are actively ensuring immediate retractions and apologies by those who spread malicious, defamatory falsehoods. The true account of how the First Lady met President Trump is in her best-selling book, ‘Melania,’” her spokesperson Nick Clemens said in a statement when asked about the letter.
Hunter had a defiant response to the request for an apology telling Callaghan in another video interview posted on August 14, “F**k that. That’s not gonna happen.”
The legal demands center on an August 5 video of Callaghan’s show, in which Hunter Biden spoke about the Trumps’ relationship with Epstein, citing Michael Wolff.
In Callaghan’s latest interview with Hunter Biden, the two discuss the legal demand from the first lady, and Biden suggests it could result in the president and first lady clarifying their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein in a deposition.
“I have this to say to them: If they want to sit down for a deposition and clarify the nature of the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein — if the president and the first lady want to do that and all the known associates around them at the time, whatever time that they met, I’m more than happy to provide them the platform to be able to do it,” Biden said in the interview released on Thursday.
“Fact of the matter is that, you know, I don’t think that these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a design distraction, because it’s not about who introduced whom to whom. I don’t know how that in any way rises to the level of defamation to begin with,” Biden added.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
