Hunter Biden is dropping his lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani and the one-time New York City mayor’s former lawyer. The lawsuit had accused the pair of violating the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by allegedly hacking and manipulating data on the First Son’s abandoned laptop.
The younger Biden sued Giuliani and attorney Robert Costello last September, seeking more than $75,000 in damages, plus attorneys’ fees and other penalties. The lawsuit claimed the duo was responsible for a “total annihilation” of Hunter’s “digital privacy.”
On Thursday, Biden lawyer Abbe Lowell filed for a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asking the court to dismiss the suit “without prejudice, with each party bearing its own attorneys’ fees, costs, and expenses.”
All three parties have agreed to the stipulation, according to court documents obtained by the New York Post. Now, the motion to dismiss must be approved by U.S. District Judge Jessica Clarke.
Giuliani attorney Joe Sibley celebrated the filing in a statement to the New York Post and claimed that Biden’s legal team chose to dismiss the suit because “they know they have problems on the merits.”
“This dismissal – along with Hunter Biden’s conviction based on evidence taken from the laptop – is a vindication for Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Costello as well as all of the media outlets who broke the laptop story in 2020 and suffered orchestrated censorship by social media, the leftist mainstream media, and others who engaged in election interference,” Sibley said.
Biden was convicted on three felony counts Tuesday in connection with false statements he made on a federal form while purchasing a Colt Cobra revolver from a Delaware gun shop five years ago.
The indictment accused Hunter of falsely certifying that he was “not an unlawful user of, and addicted to, any stimulant, narcotic drug, and any other controlled substance,” when he filled out a federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) form.
Hunter wrote in his memoir that he was smoking crack nearly every 15 minutes around the time he purchased the gun.
The prosecution in Hunter’s criminal trial introduced the the laptop as evidence during the direct examination of an FBI agent last week. FBI special agent Erica Jensen said law enforcement obtained the laptop’s hard drive in fall 2019 after receiving a tip from a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair store.
The FBI used forensic tools to extract data from the laptop after obtaining a search warrant, Jensen said. Federal investigators verified the laptop data by cross-referencing Biden’s iCloud storage accounts with the computer’s serial number, she testified.
Videos and photos of drug use were recovered from the laptop, along with business communications and videos of sexual acts.
Before turning the hard drive over to the FBI, computer repair shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac made a copy of the hard drive, which he later gave to Costello in 2020.
Giuliani, then a client of Costello’s, turned over the copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, which first reported on the abandoned laptop’s contents in October 2020.