The Trump family are going after Hunter Biden again - this time over his Epstein comments

The Trump family’s dislike of Hunter Biden has reached new heights this week, as the son of former US president Joe Biden has been threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit from First Lady Melania Trump if he does not retract comments he made linking her to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Hunter Biden has long been targeted by Republicans over a right-wing conspiracy theory about a laptop handed into a Delaware computer shop in 2019, though this was dismissed by most legitimate news organisations at the time.

Epstein has been a difficult subject for Mr Trump, as his administration continues to face criticism over its handling of ‘the Epstein files’ – such as a ‘client list’ belong to the paedophile which attorney general Pam Bondi told Fox News was on her desk to review in February, before a leaked memo in July saw her Department of Justice claim no such client list actually existed.

Mr Trump is currently dealing with his own lawsuit around all of this, as he’s sued The Wall Street Journal over its decision to publish an alleged birthday card from Trump to Epstein reportedly featuring a sketch of a naked woman.

Now, Ms Trump’s lawyer Alejandro Brito has said remarks made by Biden in an interview with British journalist Andrew Callaghan in July – that it was Epstein who first introduced Melania to Trump in the late 1990s – are false, defamatory, “extremely salacious” and have caused the first lady to suffer “overwhelming financial and reputational harm”.

Both Donald and Melania Trump have said they were introduced to each other by modelling agent Paolo Zampolli at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998.

The legal letter calls for Biden to retract the claim and apologise or face a lawsuit for “over $1bn in damages”.

The correspondence from Ms Trump’s legal team is addressed to lawyer Abbe Lowell, who has represented Biden in criminal cases, though he did not immediately respond to a request from The Independent for comment late Wednesday.

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