Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden, gave a blunt response when asked to apologize and retract comments linking First Lady Melania Trump to late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
"F**k that. That's not going to happen," Biden said during his third appearance on the YouTube show Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan released on Thursday (August 14).
Callaghan read the letter addressed to Biden demanding he immediately retract the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements" made during his second appearance on the show in which he acknowledged that President Donald Trump's biographer, Michael Wolff, claimed that Epstein had introduced him to his future wife.
"I only can go by what people are saying and I don't know," Biden reiterated at the time of the second interview.
"He didn't make these claims out of nowhere, they come from another journalist named Michael Wolff who is a biographer that actually spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. But now here we are and I've got a billion-dollar document in my hands because Mrs. Trump is seeking $1 billion in damages if we don't take the video down and if Hunter here doesn't issue a formal apology to Mrs. Trump," Callaghan said in Thursday's video before Biden declined to do so.
"What I said was what I have heard and seen reported and written primarily from Michael Wolff but also dating back all the way to 2019," Biden said.
"Sources said Jeffrey Epstein claimed to be the person that introduced Donald Trump to Melania at the time," he added, citing a New York Times article.
"And then it was, I think, excerpted in a book that was published by Vanity Fair and I think it's been repeated by journalists and authors since then. But the primary source was the interviews that Michael Wolff has been conducting in which he has actual tapes of I think hours and hours and hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein directly," Biden continued. "The fact of the matter is is that I don't think these threats of a lawsuit add up to anything other than a designed distraction because it's not about who introduced who to who, I don't know how that, in any way, rises to the level of defamation to begin with.
"But the fact of the matter is this is about hundreds if not over a thousand minors, children, who were raped by Jeffrey Epstein and I don't believe in guilt by association alone but the connections are so glaringly obvious that I think they're trying to use other things to distract."
Last month, the Daily Beast took down its story alleging that Melania Trump had ties to Jeffrey Epstein and issued an apology for suggesting such after being contacted by the first lady's attorneys. Democratic strategist James Carville was also forced to issue a public apology and scrub an episode of his Politics War Room podcast after suggesting she had an "Epstein connection."
“We took a look at what they complained about, and we took down the video and edited out those comments from the episode,” Carville said at the beginning of the following episode. “I also take back these statements and apologize.”
Melania Trump said she met her husband at a September 1998 Fashion Week party at the Kit Kat Klub in New York City in her self-titled memoir published last year.