Former Overstock CEO tells Fox News the Feds wanted him to sleep with Russian spy Maria Butina

Longtime Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne resigned on Thursday after issuing a bizarre press release that caused the company's stock to tank.

Byrne then went on Fox News to claim that federal officials urged him to have a romantic relationship with Russian spy Maria Butina.

He claimed that the government told him they never asked citizens to engage in romantic relationships, but it was "such a national security risk" that the government asked Byrne, then in his fifties, to sleep with Butina, who was at the time in her twenties and half his age.

But Byrne says he only pretended to romance Butina.

"I never laid a finger on her because I knew it would disgrace our country, it would disgrace Maria," he claimed.