A lawyer for Hunter Biden sent a cease-and-desist letter to Donald Trump’s legal team on Thursday, warning the former president to stop spreading dangerous rhetoric online, ABC News first reported.
In the letter, attorney Abbe Lowell argued that Trump’s posts and language “could lead to [Hunter Biden’s] or his family’s injury”, citing several examples from recent months.
Trump has frequently targeted Hunter Biden — in fact, Lowell claimed in the letter that his name has appeared more than 20 times in Trump’s posts in July alone.
This week, Trump dragged in Hunter Biden’s name amid an investigation of a small baggie of cocaine found this month near a visitor entrance at the White House, suggesting the cocaine might have belonged to Hunter Biden, who is a recovering addict.
“You know, if Mr Trump does not, that Mr. Biden has neither committed nor been accused of the charges that your client is claiming ... and that the Biden family was not at the White House (let alone in the vestibule) in the period when the cocaine was found,” Lowell wrote. The Secret Service concluded the cocaine investigation on Thursday with no suspect found.
A day later, Trump put up a post attacking David Weiss, the federal prosecutor who oversaw Hunter Biden’s tax investigation, according to the letter. Biden reached an agreement in June and will plead guilty to some federal charges. Trump called Weiss a “coward” and asserted that he “gave out a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence”.
“You may respond that this was a mere figure of speech. However, we have seen that what might pass as such a phrase when uttered by [rational] people is heard by too many in this country as some terrible injustice for which they must take physical and violent action,” Lowell wrote in the letter, referring to Trump’s alleged incitement of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Throughout the letter, Lowell continued to cite notable examples of Trump using dangerous rhetoric and language to incite violence. Last month, Trump also posted on his social media site the alleged address of former President Barack Obama’s Washington, DC, residence, NBC News reported. The post was reshared by Capitol riot defendant Taylor Taranto, who was arrested June 29 after approaching Obama’s house while his van was parked nearby with weapons inside.
“This is not a false alarm,” Lowell wrote in the letter. “We are just one such social media message away from another incident, and you should make clear to Mr Trump ― if you have not done so already ― that Mr Trump’s words have caused harm in the past and threaten to do so again if he does not stop.”
Trump has faced legal repercussions for rhetoric he has spread both online and offline, which, as Lowell cautioned in the letter, has the potential to escalate if he doesn’t dial back on it. The attorney encouraged the former president’s legal team to explain to him “how his incitement can further hurt people and cause himself even more legal trouble”.
HuffPost reached out to Trump’s lawyer Joe Tacopina, who declined to comment.